I am reminded of a time I played Sunset Riders with a friend in the arcade. We killed the first boss – the guy who says “bury me with my money” – and my friend exclaimed “I grabbed that guy’s money!” I said I didn’t notice and didn’t know you could do that, so he proceeded to explain: “Yeah, you know, you don’t actually bury him with this money.”
And now whenever I see Sunset Riders I think of this quick visual I had of a loose film adaptation where Steve, Billy, Bob, and Cormano go on a spiritual journey to honor the last wishes of Simon Greedwell. In my head it’s a neo-western indie with one of those trailers that flashes a bunch of awards with wreathes around them.
For all the people who say Gerstmann/Giant Bomb didn’t do enough for games journalism, Schreier’s like the polar opposite extreme… career-focused to a fault!
yeah i mean i respect what Schrier does but his insights are always more or less obvious things about the industry and lacking a lot of perspective outside of his very particular lane. he’s not like a grand warrior for what’s good and what’s right as much as just the boring reporter du jour who gets to break new stories. which he does a perfectly acceptable job doing.
Yeah, I’m not even looking for him to be any sort of warrior for what is right so much as just… I dunno… having a pulse? Some sign of life inside him that indicates a real person is present rather than just… “newsman”. I know I’m probably being grossly uncharitable here… I can’t read the guy’s mind, just something about how he moves feels very calculated and opportunistic in a way that makes my skin crawl…
i think people in that profession really place an importance on access and the at least appearance of neutrality. and the fact that he has a lot of access to industry circles is pretty central to his whole thing. he could not be the reporter du jour without it. there is also a kind of smugness and self-importance that goes with that obviously. he is obviously calculated, because that goes with being in the position he’s in.
it goes back to that Chris Crawford quote about game people being sensitive about the sordid reputation of games - but so many games people in the professional realm have this major mix of insecurity about the ridiculousness of the field they’re in mixed with a sort of “i’m on the cutting edge of culture” smugness. so many cases of that going on there.
i feel like game industry turmoil is just grist for Schreier’s books so it’s hard for me to like the guy. The one GDC talk I attended where he interviewed a union organizer (who was talking about a lot of stuff I experienced firsthand) kept getting asked borderline gotcha questions and I was like “is this really the time?”
I think a lot of people dislike Dave Weigel for similar reasons bc if you’re not really sharp and on the ball, striving that hard for objectivity looks like bad faith
the combined powers of jason schreier and ian bogost together may yet be enough to provide an arts grant for a single ios deckbuilder about fighting plastic waste on the beach. or something to that effect
I’ll never like Jason Schreier because of his shitpost clickbait article about Dragon’s Crown that he was able to milk into weeks of content from the controversy
he needs a fancy twitter graphic like sports “‘insiders’”, who get paid millions to do literally nothing but take a phone call and tweet about it 13 nanoseconds before the competition. maybe he could wear sunglasses indoors like shams charania, what a hero
for the record I like Schreier and I think it’s good people are out there doing that kind of dry-ass rigorously checked journalism even if he went on the record as a boobophobe
Just to clarify as well, haven’t any issue with Schreier’s writing style. Just sometimes feels like he picks his subjects more for what would look good on his resume/bring in the most traffic instead of what he feels personally connected to. This is all very hunch-based, I have no evidence that this is actually the case, so I’ll leave it at that so as to not be too annoying…
Also, thank you for alerting me to the concept of a boobophobe
Just blows my mind that this guy saw a trailer of a game with the best 2D game animation in the world and the only thought in his empty head was, “this character looks like a teenager designed it, post article”
i am sorry but vanillaware games are some of the ugliest games known to man and george kamitani probably deserves to be insulted more. he is probably a bad man.
