I went to kotaku.com recently for the first time in, oh, a decade, and I was shocked at how fucking awful that site is. it was like one guy posting memes and ads, with a contextless tim video auto playing somewhere off center. half of the shit wasn’t even tangentially related to video games
ah, but now that games are personality, they exist as lifestyle brands independent of the underlying collection of logic & art
a vast dreamscape to touch and consume in an infinite torus
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oh and
don’t go to Polygon
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somehow I go to polygon all the time, out of some weird fascination with idiocy. I get endless small enjoyment out of the way they label things “culture.” also I was permanently banned from their comments section for insinuating that EA payed them for a damage control Anthem article that, in truth, EA probably didn’t pay them for – because the truth was worse than that
anyway, what I saw on kotaku was worse than polygon
yeah idk how much i could really get into but i think what’s publicly available is that the Kotaku parent company doesn’t understand what a videogame website is.
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I would actually be curious if I could blame GMG for the reasons I don’t like kotaku, I think in kotaku’s case (as opposed to deadspin) it’s more just gross-videogame-lifestyle-brand stuff
no shade to chris and tim naturally
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imagine having the peak of your “lifestyle” be playing the new Gears of War every time one comes out. thats the REAL cyberpunk if you ask me!!
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well, they definitely had some writers who were hired to not do that stuff, but
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Given that every other mainstream website has abandoned traditional criticism through reviews and made similar pushed into cosplay, cartoons, movies, toys, and streamers, I think it’s the Way Things Are. IGN was early and became a lifestyle brand a decade ago. Kotaku has been running their Japan lifestyle stuff since they coined their name. Polygon entered a dramatic shift away from faux-highbrow two years ago into pure YouTube third-hand reaction.
I’m most sad that a tradition of review as criticism faltered after a brief sprouting about seven years ago. Nobody uses them for purchasing decisions (as our review thread attests) but we still ought to have a field of mainstream analysis, not have it subsumed in parasocial hangout shows.
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Alice O’Connor still works for RPS but seems increasingly conspicuously adrift
and bennett was just tweeting about how reviews have lost all primacy
it is very strange that, as you say, there’s not even any mainstream analysis to point toward anymore, given how games are still getting better and better, just that dialogue doesn’t seem to be happening in public at all
She’s stuck on news but I found her longform articles stuck in the modern press-release-rephraser voice: affect substituting for information or insight because there’s nothing meaningful underneath.
As a game plan, “give the site to young people” sounds ok but I haven’t seen any of their new writers develop in interesting ways in the past three years. These days I read them most through cleaning up from my RSS feed.
there was that one year where KillScreen was not bad and also paid its writers, but
gamers want to know gamer shit and criticism is anathema to them and so here we are in 2020 and i can’t really name any writers who do analysis or criticism any more (there was a good one on Sekiro last year?)
so anyway, when are we ressurecting TGQ, folks?
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ugh fuck there would actually be a need for it again is the worst thing to realize
I wanted our youthful indiscretions to remain behind us
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I recently did a quick browse of RPS reviews and they had such sparkling insights as “david cage games are fun to control and the only problem is the writing” and “why play halo when destiny 2 exists?”
I didn’t realize RPS could actually get worse than when I stopped reading them
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Would gladly work on games writing if it felt like it went anywhere, but that is a fleeting dream at best.
yeah none of us have to think this is gonna get us a job anymore
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yeah i mean i think the only way that kind of writing can happen these days is with the expectation that it’s for “fun” or whatever and that there must be some kind of audience out there that would read it.
i guess an alternative is like a Youtube network or something.
but also we all have jobs/lives/whatever and are adults now and time is a valuable resource
God, not YouTube.
I should probably write more for Hinge Problems anyhow, though.
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The reason behind why the post-Gerstmann games writing world sucks is pretty clear
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now i know what to call my youtube channel
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