Opinion: Video Game Journalism: Pet Peeves

Video game journalism reminds us of the Wild West, where a bunch of outlaws make their own rules. “Real journalists” look down on it because the powers that be don’t necessarily adhere to a universal code, while angry gamers unmercifully bash it to pieces because they can’t stand the aggressive (and oftentimes sarcastic) tone. At the same time, writers receive threats for daring to criticize it, especially from peers wanting to know “who the f*ck is this guy?” or “what makes him or her an expert on the subject?” The bottom line is it’s a hot button issue that demands attention as hundreds (perhaps thousands) of websites compete for traffic, often at the expense of readers, who must suffer through multi-page galleries, typos and conspiracy theories.

That said, as much as we love writing about games and the creative freedom, our fellow journalists continue to commit errors and fall back on bad habits. With that, here are some personal pet peeves:

Transforming games into living beings

Oftentimes, we’ll read sentences that link a performed action to a video game. “God of War redefined the action genre”, or “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 dominated sales charts.” Games cannot redefine or dominate anything. Creators and publishers enjoy these achievements. Technically, you should write, “Sony redefined the action genre with God of War.” Yes, it takes additional words to write that sentence, and it doesn’t sound as flashy, but it’s better than treating video games like people or companies.

Watermarking everything

Stop watermarking. If you didn’t take the screenshot or shoot the video, you shouldn’t disgrace it with your website’s ugly logo. The same goes for YouTube users who obsessively put pop-ups in their videos. That doesn’t improve the user experience.

Enough with the sarcasm

Look, we get it. Everyone competes to be the Internet’s biggest douche. We also know it’s easy to act tough behind a monitor. But that doesn’t mean you should bash video games all day in the desperate hope for traffic (like this writer has for years). Whatever happened to playing games for fun, and then enthusiastically praising them? Instead, we get “top five reasons why Halo sucks.” It’s old.

Abusing Facebook and Twitter

Every journalist has the privilege of linking stories on social networking sites, but they often fail to provide context behind these updates. We don’t give a damn about “Read our Darksiders review” unless you put some emotion behind it. Give us reason to click. Instead, write something like “Who picked up Darksiders this week? Surprisingly average for a lot of reasons.” Then throw the link in there. Otherwise, you miss out on separating your “tweets” from everyone else’s.

Fix all typos

Making a typo is like accidentally farting in public or getting spinach stuck in your teeth. It happens. Own up to the mistake and correct it. For that matter, spellcheck everything before submitting an article, and pay close attention to a company/console/game’s spelling (it’s BioWare, not Bioware).

Get rid of .4s, .8s and .7s

We’ll let journalists slide for giving games 9.5s or 3.5s, but enough of this 4.8/3.2/2.7 nonsense. What does that mean? A weak attempt at signifying a 48 out of 100, or a 27 out of 100? Seeing a 7.3 out of 10 tells us that you probably should’ve given the game in question a 7, but didn’t have the you know what to actually go through with it.

Video snobs

Look, we know you desperately need to capture footage at an event, but we were here first and you have to wait.* Stop bumping people off consoles because you need to hook up a camera. 

*Most people in this industry ask politely and we applaud them for it. As for the small percentage that don’t, we’ll make you wait longer.

Overuse of the words amazing, fantastic and phenomenal

When we think of the word “amazing,” the work that went into building Egypt’s pyramids or scenes of a pilot landing a plane in the Hudson River come to mind. Games? Not so much. Cut down on using overblown words for things that fall short. Continuously calling something “phenomenal” when it was programmed to perform the simplest action calls your vocabulary into question.

A resistance to originality

There are a ton of creative journalists out there, but we rarely see imaginative ideas. Almost everyone falls back on recycling the same topics every few months, so that the Internet can once again argue about the greatest video game weapon of all time, or who the worst sidekick is. We crave original content.