Beating Up Games PR, Press
There’s an entire aesthetic of games marketing and discourse that, frankly, deserves to die. The games press, both consumer and industry facing, has struggled with some very tricky questions for years now, largely around the relationships between publisher and reviewer, and reviewers and fans.
It’s easy to spot something is wrong, even enumerate the sector’s faults one by one, but all of them are awkward questions centred on situations with entrenched actors and agendas. Shawn Elliot’s symposium (part 1, part 2) got some well known games journalists to write at length on aspects of this, and one of the conclusions I drew from it was that there is probably no systemic tweak that will fix what’s there; the system needs completely new parts to be built rather than mere revisions.
What will work, a little bit at a time, is criticism, and people are really putting the boot in at the moment. Leigh Alexander talks about developer PR at Gamasutra, Insult Swordfighting takes an hilarious swipe at more or less every game press release ever constructed, Iroquois Pliskin writes about Hamlet as if it were being reviewed by a videogame reviewer, and finally, at the crasser end of the scale, UK:R gives Gamer Grub a well deserved drubbing.
The more of this there is and the further it gets spread about, the more it will combat idle assumptions of games and gamers. Improving journalistic skills, encouraging criticism, these are not easy tasks, but taking a pop at the worst of what’s there at least creates a voice of dissent and a rallying point for everyone concerned.
