MONTHLY ‘ON CULTURE’ MISSIVE - JUNE 2024

I believe Nathalie Lawhead

Outline

1. Critics all have some level of vanity and this is necessary

   1. If you don’t have a spine why should I bother reading your work?

   2. Games media, reviewers, and critics are not the same

2. Audience Assumption

   1. Why is “not for everyone” so often used?

   2. Too preoccupied with predicting the audience, and the unknown future of a game being reviewed

   3. Cowards to be unable to stand behind your opinion

3. Previews

   1. Nobody wants to say anything critical

   2. Quite a few critical previews have began appearing in post Not-E3 which is great

   3. IGN First retains the softness and nobody asks for an open mind when excited about a future game only when people are critical

4. Time and Money

   1. Price is such an uncertain variable iit should be irrelevant to a review

   2. Halo 3 ODST and Left 4 Dead 2 original reactions surrounding pricing

   3. Reversal is that now people are too quick to recommend a game because its free

   4. Value your time more!

   5. Things are not as dire as I may be prone to give the impression of

   6. Internet makes things really hard to find to cite unless you know the intimate specifics to search for

5. Games exist more as an idea than reality

   1. Majority of coverage comes pre-release

   2. Review as product recommendation

   3. Reviews are a sliding scale of recommendation

   4. Marking dictates the conversation

   5. Nobody wants to follow up on anything

6. Criticism of the critics

   1. Hard Drive: IGN Writer Excited to Start Playing Game He Just Finished Reviewing

   2. Videogamedunkey

   3. Cyberpunk 2077

   4. Adam Sessler

   5. Nathalie Lawhead

This post was created and formatted in Google Docs, there will be some unintended changes copying it below, you can find that original document here. The thoughts gathered here are extensions of ideas and beliefs that have slowly amalgamated together while doing my Games Media in Review series, while doing research for an even longer commentary on 2009 in video games, books I have been reading recently (most notably Sontag’s Against Interpretation and Other Essays), and during my own consumption of games media. It is long but meaningful, I thank you for your time.

A series of musings 

1. A critic’s necessary arrogance

Every critic has some level of arrogance. This is necessary when taking a position of authority over recommendations, judgements, and interpretations. Discernable haughtiness varies from critic to critic, but all of them have some vanity. How else would they go about publishing their opinions to be read by others? They have to in order to take these positions over each subject they write about. How can one individual know so much about even just one medium of art to tell you which is worth experiencing or what one means? Nobody wants to read a critic who refuses to take a stand behind their opinion, to dare to have an opinion and be confident enough to proclaim it to the general public. How often have I read the words and listened to the voices of those who seem to be incapable of making a judgment. What a useless contribution to the greater conversation! What a cowardly act to write an extended criticism only to retreat behind the perennial 7/10 scoring in the end, the only text a majority of the readers will end up paying attention to. This makes some conceit, some assumption of authority, necessary in order for a critic to have bite and usefulness in telling you their opinion.

Not being able to have an opinion, to try and please everyone with your review, is the coward's way. An example being saying this game is not for everyone and only then listing out what you actually think about it. What video game is for everyone? There is none! That is such a useless statement! Using that phrase shows you are incapable of having confidence behind your arguments and seek to please or avoid angering others over having a spine. You lack self-respect. So why should I, as a reader, respect you? People who have teeth when it comes to criticism are more appealing and useful than someone who is simply excited for anything and everything that is coming out.

I should clarify before moving further: “games media”, “reviewers”, and “critics”, are terms that are often prescribed to the same individuals but rarely is this correct. Games media refers to the industry of writers (who are frequently mistitled as editors) who churn out articles to meet internal quotas of posts to keep a website active, updated, and useful to browsers of their homepage and therefore advertisers to sell space to. These same individuals will frequently be the same ones to write a review of a video game once it has been released. When it comes to video games a critic is very rarely the person who is writing a review at the time of release. Due to a multitude of factors, of which we will assuredly dig into later when it comes to games media’s reactions to criticism of its operation, reviews at the time of release are more product recommendations in relation more so to its cost financially than its requirement of your time. This is not to say other established critics do not cite monetary cost. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert did occasionally mention the subject movie’s worth in relation to the price of a ticket in their day ($3, $4, $5, and onwards as time progressed.) However there is a large disparity between Siskel and Ebert’s conversations towards film and the reviews of X-Play’s Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb. Despite many YouTube comments claiming that the latter two were the video game equivalent of the former, that will never be the truth. Critics are, sadly, rarely employed by games media outlets at the larger operations. A reduction in websites covering games, the need for continual churn of content, underpaid and overworked staff, and a history of valuing getting a review out in time for its embargo over its substance means the opportunities for critique are rare if they exist at all. Critics of video games still exist, but you do have to seek them out or happen upon a recommendation on social media or collection such as Critical Distance. The increase in YouTube criticism is a subject for another time.

2. Audience assumption

I believe the frequency of “not for everyone” stems from reviewers too often trying to speak to an assumed audience instead of explaining what their own thoughts were. An overall lack of confidence and preoccupation with worrying over what the prospective audience will think or say in response to their own writing. The game that most often spawned this phrase in recent years was Pentiment from Obsidian¹.

• Pentiment review: A marvelous medieval murder mystery - Dexerto Like their protagonist Andreas, Obsidian has created a masterpiece that not everyone will appreciate, but those who do will remember for years to come.

• Pentiment Review – Medieval Justice Done Justice  Pentiment won’t be for everyone. 

• Pentiment Review - Say Your Prayers Pentiment might not be for everyone, but that’s ok. Not for everyone is sometimes exactly what we need.

• Pentiment review – A clear picture — GAMINGTREND Pentiment might not be for everyone, but for the genre, it's a magnificent and compelling work of art.

• Pentiment (Xbox Series X) Review - CGMagazine It’s methodical pacing and focus on dialogue won’t appeal to everyone, but Pentiment knows what it wants to be and does it exceptionally well.

• Pentiment Review – A Decent Time, But Not Everyone’s Cup of Tea Pentiment's unidimensional gameplay might not appeal to everyone.

• Reseña del Juego Pentiment | LevelUp It is clearly a niche game that probably not everyone will appreciate.

• Pentiment An Illuminating Experience  Pentiment isn’t going to be for everyone, but if you have patience for it and can appreciate what it’s trying to do (and I certainly did), it’s a rewarding and enlightening experience which I’m very glad I’ve had the ability to play and enjoy.

• Pentiment  - Recensione su MondoXbox A fascinating title, mainly thanks to its subject matter, but definitely not for everyone.

• Pentiment An Illumination Experience Pentiment isn’t going to be for everyone, but if you have patience for it and can appreciate what it’s trying to do (and I certainly did), it’s a rewarding and enlightening experience which I’m very glad I’ve had the ability to play and enjoy.

• Pentiment - PC Review Pentiment isn’t going to be to everyone’s taste and will divide its audience.

• PENTIMENT is packed with history, choices that feel weighty and is one of the most surprising games of this year PENTIMENT is the sort of game that I don't expect is going to appeal to everyone, the point and click narrative game from Obsidian Entertainment (THE OUTER WORLDS, PILLARS OF ETERNITY) is very dense and it takes its time unfolding. 

• Pentiment Is NOT For Everyone... | Review 

Why did Pentiment receive such an excess of this qualification? The game was good—not that this is an outlier in any game’s reception—but it was not a third person open world action game with RPG elements, the de facto game that is “for everyone.” Due to this, reviewers are afraid of making the recommendation to anyone reading their text, or more likely viewing the score and maybe even their summary conclusion.

Often critics are too preoccupied with predicting a game’s audience, future success, and additions. Too often is criticism couched in phrases of what could be. Zack Zwiezen of Kotaku on the free to play game XDefiant wrote, “But only time will tell if XDefiant succeeds, or if it joins so many other games that tried and failed to compete with Call of Duty.” Travis Northup on Skull and Bones for IGN, “But here’s hoping some of those shortcomings can be washed away by the waves of content already planned to come in an ambitious live-service roadmap that’s fast approaching. For now, its maiden voyage is a good start.” Northup again for IGN on Payday 3, “Perk Decks allowed you to round out your character with minor boons related to their background, which was a nice additional system on top of the skill trees that gave me another reason to grind. Here’s hoping something like that makes a return down the road.” Simon Cardy for IGN on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, “I hope that future seasons will come with new stories to tell because a battle pass full of emotes and character skins isn’t what I’m looking for here at all. The unsatisfying cliffhanger ending of the campaign does firmly hint at what we’ll be doing in each of the seasons, and I truly hope it does move the story along considerably each time, but I have my doubts. I think it’s far more likely that I’ll wait months down the line to see just how much has been added before revisiting the story, rather than checking in monthly to be fed the next scrap.” As well as Morgan Park for PC Gamer on the same game, “It's a monotonous climb to find momentary flashes of greatness, and that's not an experience I'd drop $70 on. But who knows: maybe this time next year Suicide Squad will be bigger, refined, and an easier sell for four friends on a Friday night.” Mo Mozuch for Kotaku on Skull and Bones, “The looming question now is support. Is Ubisoft’s roadmap for this game going to generate the kinds of quality content and community excitement needed to sustain a player base? Live-service games are a crapshoot at best, but it’s clear there are things in the works. Speculation runs rampant on reddit that we’ll be getting more dynamic PvE events like monster hunts, and that the really cool stuff is coming. But, like so many other good ideas for Skull and Bones, it doesn’t actually exist yet.”

When reading a review I’m looking for a determination on the value of this game now, not what nebulous future it may or may not have. Not that these reviews don’t include evaluations of the game at present, but to couch their criticism in a hope for an unknowable future reveals their lack of confidence. I read Patrick Klepek’s, I Really Like 'God of War,' But Reserve The Right to Change My Mind, and think about how afraid he was of being cast out of some online club of writers who he presumes wouldn’t like it. Is this supposed to be an insurance package so you don’t end up like Arthur Gies giving Bioshock Infinite a 10/10 stamp that goes unaddressed forever? I don’t know how you can read that and not call it cowardly. This is not keeping an open mind, this is a, “If people tell me ‘well, actually this game is problematic’ I can point to this as absolving me for holding the ‘wrong’ opinion.” 

3. Previews

There exists within games media a reticence to ever say anything critical or deliver a poor review score to any game. One might be charitable and claim their response to this tendency is due to websites not going out of their way to review the “bad” games. This presupposes that there exists a pre-ordained canonicity of game quality that exists before playing it. Now, this isn’t to say you can’t smell a stinker from a mile away, we simply have an industry unable to offer any words of criticism in previewing a pre-ordained “bad” game without cowering behind the caveat that “things can change” and “the game isn’t finished yet” and “we hope it comes together!” Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League stands out in recent memory as something we all knew was going to be bad from very early on but continued to play the song and dance preview cycle of hyping it up due to the developer and the money behind it. It really is the money that determines what gets covered. The most expensive games with the largest marketing budget get the largest number of articles. It is a numbers game for both publisher and critic: it’s about serving the greatest number of potential viewers who are potential buyers. It’s not about experiencing a work of art. It’s about posting content so others will repost and amplify your voice. Like, Subscribe, Share is the mantra of our generation.

I will admit, this past month I have been surprised and impressed by the amount of critical previews being published recently after this year’s Not-E3. At GameSpot we have Jordan Ramée writing about Assassin’s Creed Shadows, “Having finally gotten a chance to see 40 minutes of gameplay at Summer Game Fest, I'm left more confused than ever--Shadows does not look like a game that needed two playable heroes.” Ramée again at GameSpot for Star Wars Outlaws, “But after playing through three different sections of Outlaws at Summer Game Fest--each of which was about 15-20 minutes long--I walked away disappointed. Nothing about Outlaws feels bad; hell, bad would have been better than what I played, because then at least it could have been memorable in some way. Instead, Outlaws feels fairly mediocre and unmemorable. What I played feels like an amalgamation of different features and mechanics borrowed from other games that do those things better, all while masquerading as a Star Wars game without actually embodying the themes and storylines of Star Wars.” Then we have Chris Tapsell at Eurogamer, again on Star Wars Outlaws, “Having played Star Wars Outlaws for a good hour or so ahead of the Ubisoft Forward show, however, I've come away with a renewed appreciation for Jedi Fallen Order and Jedi Survivor. In fact no, a bit more than that - in comparison to Outlaws' admittedly early, work-in-progress demo, they stand as singular pieces of revolutionary high art. Outlaws' early gameplay feels positively ancient - not only mechanically but in execution, in its near total lack of character, flair, invention, detail, or style. In trying to describe it, the closest comparison I can draw is with Uncharted: Golden Abyss, which launched in 2011 on the PS Vita.” And lastly, Edwin Evans-Thirlwell at Rock, Paper, Shotgun on, you guessed it, Star Wars Outlaws, “Bland and unwilling as the mechanics can be, they're an adequate delivery mechanism for the setting. I'm just not sure it's possible to recreate the specific energy of Harrison Ford's Han Solo in an open world shooter such as this.” It is truly refreshing to read previews that have some actual critical thinking behind them.

Compare this to previews for the widely panned Redfall during IGN’s “IGN First” promotional campaign that really treads that line between editorial content and marketing the game (it’s the latter). Redfall: The Final Preview, by Miranda Sanchez and narrated by  Ryan McCaffrey is a script that spends more time just describing what occurred in their four hour playtime instead of offering any sort of opinion on them and restating unquestioned claims made by the developer. This was one week before the review, which ultimately gave the game a 4/10. While handled by a separate staff member, Luke Reilly, it is hard to read this as anything other than a softball handling of a developer showing your their game and not wanting to say anything mean. A reticence to ever say anything bad or deliver a poor review score to any game. This is why you have Ralph (aka SkillUp) in their “This Week in Videogames” video from June 19 bemoaning that people were being too critical of Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s recent Gameplay Reveal, “Just like you can’t judge a book after reading its first three pages you can’t judge the quality of the writing of the intro sequence.” Except, to keep to the metaphor used, this is more like when an author picks an excerpt from their novel to publish in order to get people interested in reading the full book. The video shown is not the “first three pages,” of The Veilguard, and asking people to, “keep an open mind,” is regularly employed not when people are excited for something but only when they are critical of pre-release marketing and coverage.

4. Time and money

Critics should not have any real interest in how this $60.00 (and increasingly, $70.00) game’s cost/time ratio bears out. For one, game’s frequently go on sale through Steam, HumbleBundle, GOG, or any of the platform holder storefronts, and get given away for free as part of PlayStation Plus, Epic Games, and through limited time free weekends. A game’s price is much more variable than any other part, and with the advent of many subscription services such as GamePass, so long as you remain subscribed it is only a matter of time before the monetary cost becomes nothing. This angle of critique, in relation to cost, becomes so outdated so quickly. What kind of criticism is useful to someone ten years from now when the game in question is $1 during a Steam sale, or part of Game Pass, or simply abandonware and removed from storefronts entirely? So no, the financial cost of a game is less valuable than ever when it comes to writing up a review.

This focus on financial cost came about due to games being viewed more as products than as art throughout its short history, despite the desperate attempts to form into the latter through imitation of film—a fallacy I’ll take a larger look at through the lens of Erwin Panofsky’s “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” later. As products they existed to be reviewed as a cost divided by hour count formula with no real value given to the time spent. This has existed since the inception of video game reviews starting in magazines of the 70’s and 80’s. Admittedly dated examples to give in 2024 but prominent on my mind due to work on my 2009 in Video Games project has been Halo 3: ODST and Left 4 Dead 2. Both games were sold at $60.00 at the time of their release and criticized by both reviewers and online posters for their price in the context of their release. Halo 3: ODST started out as an expansion for Halo 3 but was spun off into its own retail game. The campaign was 6 hours long and it came with a disc that contained the multiplayer content of Halo 3, including the latest map pack that was released alongside ODST on the marketplace. Left 4 Dead 2 was set to release just one year after Left 4 Dead, which came alongside Valve’s promise of regular content updates, leading some to host online petitions to harm its sales. Of course in 2024, both of these games are dirt cheap (or free as part of a subscription) and highly regarded for their quality. Reviews, from games media and fans alike at the time complaining about a price-tag or length in relation to said price are outdated and less valuable as a piece of criticism. Commendably, there has been a steady movement away from quality being based on monetary price, but I find there is still a lack of consideration for the cost in one’s time.

A surprising reversal has occurred since 2009: nowadays it is the free games that reveal a lack of consideration for the time investment required by games as opposed to a game having a low $/hour ratio at launch. Free-to-play games, or a game being included in a Game Pass subscription, has drastically lowered the requirement bar to earn a recommendation from most reviewers. Crackdown 3 was one of the early major games to be released for free as part of a Game Pass subscription and due to this ended up being recommended despite reservations that the game wasn’t very good, but hey, it’s free! Jeff Gerstmann for Giant Bomb would write in his ⅖ star review, “At the same time, Crackdown 3 fits reasonably well on Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass service. Paying $60 for this thing would be downright foolish. It's short and bland on the campaign end and the two multiplayer modes aren't worth your time. But if you're already a subscriber to Microsoft's service and can play this for no additional charge, it's a passable little bit of junk food that might hold your attention for an afternoon or two.” And my response then and now is, you should value your time more!

Video games exponentially require more of a participant's time than film, and are generally a lesser experience than its more analogous time sucks such as television and novels. Due to this, you would think more focus would be given to whether the subject game really makes the time it requires justifiable. And this is not in a crude, “this game doesn’t respect my time” creed but instead more of an evaluation and understanding that the time we currently live in has given us access to so much more than at any other time. The breadth of previously created works is only increasing exponentially as we continue onwards and more and more works are added onto it, that for any given game to make it worth the time required it must be of high quality. God willing I have maybe 30 or 40 years of life left to live. Most will be spent with my family, but I would also like to experience so much more art. Games butt in and take so much of that away and for what? For the newest Far Cry? Do you really find that valuable? There has been some improvement. I do think there has been a movement to acknowledge that shorter games are accepted and sometimes preferred as compared to a bloated forty hour game. Bethesda’s creative essence has changed little between Fallout 3 and Starfield but see how different the reception abroad has been to the emptiness that makes up most of Starfield. There can be value in empty space, but not in Starfield.

I would like to acknowledge two things: 1.) that the landscape of games media is not quite as dire in terms of giving the impression that nobody at any major outlet is doing any good work. I cited several articles earlier that were critical previews, a breath of fresh air amongst a widely enthusiast press dominated by positivity above all else. And 2.) that the widespread adoption of podcasts, videos, and social media has made it exponentially more difficult to track down specific instances as evidence unless you know the exact term, episode, timecode, or metadata to search for afterwards. The discourse, the collection of all conversations about games, games coverage, games media, envelopes so much that is tough to just search for online. When I was present on Twitter I frequently would recognize the difficulty in finding a specific tweet to reference if I had not liked it or remembered the specific quoted text to search for in order to find it. It was this ephemera of tweets that led me to create the post, Discourse Conversations During E3 2019: “However, like any form of discourse being developed on Twitter and elsewhere, it can be easily lost if you aren’t in the moment, and nearly impossible to find due to some of the best commentary coming indirectly.” Individuals cultivate a personality on Twitter but it can be difficult and time consuming to narrow down a list of examples. I attempted to do just this when listing out the numerous comments that have created Colin Moriarty’s well deserved reputation for toxicity online and I can guarantee you there was many more examples out there both on Twitter (which was my main source) and elsewhere (such as the channel he has now run for more than seven years).

We have slowly been able to more easily transcribe audio from podcasts and videos, thanks to programs such as WhisperX which has been invaluable to some of my own work², but it still does not make the process of finding a quote effortless. I have begun trying to remember to take screenshots of timecodes for videos I am watching when something I think noteworthy is being said, such as the SkillUp video on Dragon Age I quoted earlier. I can spend weeks reading, listening, and watching IGN, GameSpot, Kinda Funny, and other groups in order to write up a profile on what what their vibe, offerings, and shortcomings are when it comes to game coverage, but unless I can remember the specific video in which I gathered an impression that there is no worthwhile content being produced³ it is very difficult to cite sources without trudging through countless worthless twitter posts, nothing podcast episodes, and listening to videos on 2x speed in the background while working my day job.

I mention this because I would like to have a larger argument with more citations but the time required to do so is not something I can give right now. I only have so much time in the day, how much am I going to spend researching for an article I recognize only a few people are going to read in full anyway?

5. Games existing more as an idea than reality

There is a tendency in games media to only ever really care about a game before it's released. Each game has a period of pre-release marketing and the press participates in it with promotions and deals for exclusives and it's all just PR. This is when a majority of coverage of a game happens. On IGN I’ll frequently view a game’s profile and see the list of articles that have been written and they consist of here's a preview, here’s a trailer, here’s a screenshot, here's an interview, here's your review and then once that review hits, the only thing that you get afterwards are it's on sale or here's the latest update, here's the DLC that's going to get released for it, here’s where this specific game got mentioned in a top ten list.

The review is the product recommendation, and after that there is little use for games media to serve as the game is now in the public's hands. There is no continuing critique going on after release. There is no sitting with this game and really turning it over in your hand dwelling on it. When any game gets announced we repeat the process. This game is not out yet and that's why we're going to talk about it because once it comes out, we, and therefore it, loses its value. It becomes something that's real, something that I can play instead of just existing as an idea in my mind. When it is just an idea in my mind, it is an idealized version of itself. It's not real. It's not flawed. I am focusing on the major websites, the most popular and frequently visited and well staffed. Real critique work does exist but only in the margins of these larger outlets that serve the SEO.

I will admit when a game does come out they still talk and love on it. People will still praise and talk about how much they're loving playing it. You only have to look at Starfield which came out last year. At the time I was covering Kinda Funny and what did they have to say about Starfield? What they were saying about Starfield was they loved it. They spent +40 hours in it and couldn't wait to spend more time in it. All these stories of I did this and that and the game did this. Blessing was the only one who was somewhat critical of it and still gave it–at the time they were using a five-point scale–a three out of five, which is still a generally good review score to give. Reviews are less criticism and more recommendations, and given a majority of reviews are 7 and above⁴ it is more a sliding scale of how recommended the game is. On this scale, all games are inherently recommendable⁵. Bad games are labeled bad due to technical issues more than anything else, such as writing. Likely because the standard for game writing is so low that it is easily met by most games.

We allow these games to dictate the direction or angle of coverage. PlayStation makes the “one-take” presentation of God of War into a marketing movement and suddenly it becomes a major topic for coverage of the game going forward. All the power lies in the marketing, they control the ensuing conversation about a video game. PlayStation tells us God of War is a legitimate piece of art because it's presented all as a single shot (just like a movie can be!) so now we have to address this in our criticism because it has become reference material for people who repeat what they’re told. “There are no cutscenes, no load screens, no camera cuts, no fades to black. Despite the fact that game director Cory Barlog told us this back at E3 2016, the wildly-impressive effectiveness of this choice didn’t sink in until we actually went hands-on the game and realized that it was 100% true. I can’t really think of another game of this scope that has utilized this cinematic technique, but it’s an incredible feat. The unwavering immediacy in which we spend our time with Kratos adds even more depth to him and in turn, to his relationship with his son.” -Andrew Goldfarb and Marty Sliva of IGN in a preview for the game. Due to trends such as that, it is hard to read things such as thoughts on Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice and its handling of psychosis as anything other than being submissive to the game’s marketing. 

There is a lack of follow up on claims made during a preview cycle for a game that never came to fruition, from little things like dynamic enemy programming to react to the player’s actions, scenarios dreamed up for a hypothetical playthrough, or features cut entirely prior to release. Marketing for a game will put out so many claims that go unquestioned and mostly ignored once we actually reach the time of release. It's the hype cycle of “Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next product.”

6. Unaccepting of criticism

   1. Videogamedunkey

Before we dive into Videogamedunkey’s comments about game reviews and reviewers I’d like to call attention to the reposting of a 2018 article from Hard-Drive.net, IGN Writer Excited to Start Playing Game He Just Finished Reviewing. This was re-shared on their Twitter account on May 29, 2021 and the replies are a good prelude to this entire section:

Mike Futter @Futterish Nope. You're funny a lot of the time. This isn't one of those times. Besides harassment of journalists, IGN's team stood up for human rights against their own management recently. They don't deserve this ever, but especially now. The guy you're thinking of btw, is Filip Miucin.

Kevin VanOrd - @fiddlecub.bsky.social @fiddlecub This ain't it.

Janet Garcia @Gameonysus This ain't it. At the time it was a very specific dig but bringing this out in 2021 just perpetuates a harmful view of critics and with all the stuff going on at IGN it feels especially inappropriate.

Mary @girlfromcanada This is in poor taste and bad timing. I know this is supposed to be funny but it’s not right now. Game journalists deal with so much hate/harassment and this just propitiates this and the stereotype of “game journalists don’t play games”, “they are paid off”

Zachary Ryan @ZachariusD i realize this is likely just standard weekend re-promo, but the timing is bad and the message is worse. i’m typically a fan of your IGN goofs, but please consider taking this down. this is hurtful to a lot of hardworking folks!

Jay Ingram @JayKingIngram Punching down isn’t funny.

Lucy O'Brien @Luceobrien 🥴

I don’t want to spend too much time on this but the context is that this article first appeared in response to the controversy of everyone discovering Filip Miucin had plagiarized not just the review of Dead Cells 2 from Boomstick Gaming but also enough that IGN began removing nearly every article he was involved in just to be safe. The circumstances of his hiring, that IGN’s pay for a Nintendo Editor were so low they could only entice small YouTubers to seriously consider and accept the job offer, were never questioned. And so Hard Drive, a website largely appreciated by almost all within the games industry for its satire, turned its aim at IGN and proceeded to reshare the same article five more times in subsequent years, the last one being this instance on May 29, 2021, and was the only time it garnered any real substantial reaction: 1.8k replies as compared to a maximum of 41 for all previous reshares. This reaction is due to earlier that month a Palestine charity article on IGN was quietly removed by “senior management.” Subsequently there was a letter signed by a majority of staff protesting the removal, and a lot of online discourse about this, the site, and its staff. Reacting to an old satire article being reshared a week later and linking it to the “harassment of journalists,” “perpetuates a harmful view of critics,” and, “is hurtful to a lot of hardworking folks!” just becomes an example of what we will see is an unwillingness to engage with any kind of pushback when it comes to the profession of games media. The deflection of “right now isn’t the right time,” implies there is a “right time” when games media are not being subjected to hateful twitter eggs, which is never!

Videogamedunkey is a YouTuber who creates humorous videos about video games. In July 2017 he uploaded a video titled, “Game Critics,” which caused a lot of indignation within games media. So what did the video say? That IGN has so many writers there is no centralized “IGN” voice, which means its scoring and text will contradict itself over time as it comes from various individuals. Due to this—and the unmentioned turnover rate within games media due to low pay in comparison to the labor required and conditions worked under—there is no familiarity that can be built between a reader/viewer and an individual critic⁶. He says most reviews are just back of the box facts about the game with a score slapped on the end, a score that always falls between 7 and 10, and this can be blamed on the closeness between games media and marketing/developers. Sound familiar? He also pokes fun at the repeated phrase, “makes you feel like Batman,” in coverage of the Batman Arkham games. This was humorously acknowledged by IGN’s Simon Cardy in their video review script for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 review which ends with, “And you know what? Screw it. It really did make me feel like Spider-Man too.” 

Dunkey sadly propagates the old argument about a reviewer not finishing a game delegitimizing it, in this specific instance it was a remaster of the Crash Bandicoot trilogy. With the introduction of trophy and achievement tracking in terms of percentage of players who have earned a specific trophy/achievement, we have also established that a majority of people don’t finish games anyway. A remaster of a game that has existed for decades and remains unchanged save for its visuals doesn't really need to be seen through to the end to understand what it is and what it is doing today. He also reiterates the traditional “video games have to be fun,” argument—iterated by everyone’s favorite game executive Reggie Fils-Aimé—which is a limiting view to have for an entire art form. Dunkey admits to losing focus on what he was even talking about, which I can sympathize with given the content and breadth of this article. He does provide a nice example of something I was having difficulty tracking down: a review where the text is critical but ends with a higher than expected score, giving examples with Call of Duty: Ghosts and New Super Mario Bros. U. Dunkey does pick a few examples here and in the next video that read more as, reviewer had a few qualms [I will also point out the focus on technical issues in the clips as the main reason a game would ever be considered “bad”] and therefore the score should be lower. As he admits, the video is a mess, and received its own pushback, though for those who were taken aback by his excessive tone I question if they ever really paid attention to his videos before. This video was followed up two years later with Game Critics (Part 2).

In his follow up Dunkey switches targets from people working at IGN, Gamespot, and the like to the only audience that I think could unite both games media and YouTubers in their hate: online commentators. “But with this video, I'm shifting my focus to the stupidest and least consistent voice in the gaming community: The gaming community.” He does take another shot at IGN: that every major release gets a high score, which is a valid trend to point out as hurting criticism overall. However, Dunkey isn’t a staff member at Eurogamer so it becomes something easy to write off as he simply doesn't understand how things work. He does do something that I know people at IGN probably wish they could do, publicly shitting on random commentators who say the dumbest shit. Could you imagine if IGN put out a video clowning on comments like Dunkey does?

Completing the trilogy we have How to be a Good Game Reviewer in 2023 which once again focuses on how online comments are inconsistent, specifically the trend of positive comments for high scores for games and anger towards lower scores (which can be anything below a 8).

Despite the shift in focus from games media to people who leave comments on reviews, has there been any shift in attitude toward Dunkey for his original video? I doubt it. After his first two videos there was a fear, much like Hard Drive republishing a satire piece on IGN, that he would cause harassment to people and outlets in his video. Searching for follow ups by individuals featured in his first frames of Game Critics (Part 2) I could find Dan Stapleton of IGN complaining that comments on IGN videos began parroting the, “it has something for everyone,” line but nothing else. Most of the responses featured were largely uninterested in engaging with anything said, save for one.

Returning to Klepek’s piece on Waypoint after the original video in 2017, Game Criticism Had Problems Long Before Dunkey Made a Video About It, he also agrees with some of the larger points made in the video:

Otherwise, Dunkey's video covers familiar but still unsettled ground, if you've been paying attention to game criticism for the last decade. The searing text in a review doesn't match the score, often falling between the 7-9 range; accepting advertisements from video game companies when you're pretending to be impartial is, at best, a bad look; critics tend to latch onto familiar (and shared) language as an expressive crutch; coverage of new games tends to produce the most traffic, resulting in a rush to write articles without enough time to really understand the experience you're talking about; the question of whether a reviewer needs to finish a game to have an opinion on it; how we determine the term "fun" in regards to quality. I've fallen victim to all of these.

The video, whatever you think of the arguments, is scathing. Dunkey seemingly intended to provoke a reaction from the people he was criticizing, and based on the chatter I saw online, fallout that's continued for days, he got exactly the reaction he was looking for: a defensive one. It helps explain why he retweeted a collection of negative reactions from the circles of people he was aiming at: "I love dunkey's stuff, but I sure do have no interest in his opinions on games critics?" said one critic. "Holy shit, this dunkey video is bad," lamented another.

…

Left unsaid, of course, is the simmering tension between those who make their living writing words about video games and resentment over the meteoric rise of YouTube personalities, as media budgets have tightened and layoffs have become a regular, frightening headline. That rise has come with popularity, influence, money. According to Social Blade, Dunkey's channel, which has roughly 3.6 million subscribers, generates anywhere between $105,300 to $1.68 million per year. Even if that number is inaccurate, the low end is more than double the salaries of most games critics, even those who have been writing about games for years.

I’ve been critical of Klepek for failing to have any authoritative voice as he seems reluctant to say anything definite one way or the other when presenting two opposing arguments, and that remains true here as well. He is correct on this, for a while there has existed a tension and antagonism between the traditional media outlets and the YouTube, Twitch, and now TikTok “influencers.” The platforms and the individuals who rise to popularity on them have their own sets of problems but you are no longer going to influence culture by ignoring these platforms. Here I am writing a long article about the culture of games media, but if I wanted to shift the culture, I’d be better off turning this into a video. The written review no longer holds the cultural prominence it once did. It still has use as a source of a great many views, even if those views are for the numbered score at the bottom of the post. Their power has waned since the advent of the Let’s Play, the Twitch streamer, and nowadays the video essayist. Some have risen up to fill the space with some actual intelligence, but there remains a sort of disinterest and denigration towards most who choose to engage the culture over those platforms as compared to the written word. I still love text, why would I be writing this if I didn’t? I acknowledge it is arbitrary, as arbitrary as purchasing a typewriter in the year 2024, but it is what brings me pleasure. At the same time, I plan on creating rudimentary video versions of past articles, and perhaps even this one when I have adequate time. If Noah Caldwell-Gervais can become one of the kings of YouTube criticism with his very light video edits⁷ I don’t see why I can’t publish light edits instead of incredibly dense and time consuming ones. There was and is still some resistance to adapt to the times and shifts in where attention is being paid to, and to accept the work of those on YouTube and Twitch as legitimate parts of the greater culture. There is a glint of condescension towards “outsiders” such as Dunkey bringing up problems they have with the way games are reviewed, and this condescension is not limited to just people who think IGN hands out positive scores more often than might be healthy for criticism.

2. Cyberpunk 2077

Critics love to talk about criticism, and yet within games media critics are seemingly incapable of accepting criticism of their vocation. The largest and most recent example is when Cyberpunk 2077 came out and all the reviews were super glowing. The major deviation was Kallie Plagge for GameSpot who gave it a 7/10 and was roundly mocked and threatened online due to this. Everyone doing so absolutely had their entire head up their ass and ate their own shit once it was revealed that the game was a mess on anything but the latest and greatest hardware, and even there existed glitches and its ilk. Bad technical performance, that is, low or jumpy framerate, glitches, bugs, things in the game not performing as they should or crashing the game entirely, erasing save data, is the only time people will unify to say, “This game is bad.”⁸ Reviews for Cyberpunk 2077 were based on the PC version, not the console versions, which were so bad Sony infamously pulled the game from its storefront for PlayStation 4 consoles. This was a completely unprecedented move, especially for a game with so much money behind it.

Cecilia D’Anastasio (someone we will be talking about in the immediate future) wrote a useful summary for Wired: How Cyberpunk 2077 Sold a Promise—and Rigged the System.

In November, CD Projekt Red sent nondisclosure agreements to journalists ahead of Cyberpunk 2077’s launch that forbade the inclusion of original gameplay footage in their reviews. They could share screenshots, but the only gameplay footage they could publish had to come from CD Projekt Red. Infringing obligations in the NDA could amount to around $27,000 per violation. (WIRED’s practice is not to sign NDAs from companies we cover.) In Cyberpunk 2077 the video game, the item database characterizes NDAs as “junk ... a standard document that prohibits a lot and offers little in return.”

Reviewers also only received the PC version of the game, keeping the abysmal last-gen console play out of view.

Once reviewers received their games—often mere days ahead of launch—they mainlined the main storyline and as many side quests as they could muster, wrote a couple thousand words, and posted them online on December 7, three days prior to Cyberpunk 2077’s December 10 launch.

One professional reviewer, Kallie Plagge, gave Cyberpunk 2077 a 7/10 on GameSpot—not even a pan—criticizing it for one-dimensional world building, disconnected side quests, and large-scale technical issues. Mass harassment attended the review. Reactionary YouTubers, who did not have access to the game, dedicated long videos to dismantling her critique, dissecting her playtime and playstyle. But just days later, once gamers had finally played Cyberpunk 2077 themselves, many did a 180. “Everyone talked shit about her, but I’m starting to agree with Kelly [sp] Plagge,” read one popular post on /r/cyberpunkgame.

Albert Burneko would be spurred by this situation to write for Defector: At Least Now You Know Which Video Game Reviewers Are Sellout Clowns.

The important thing is, by agreeing to these conditions, reviewers who signed the NDA abandoned any claim to adversarial journalism, as well as any utility they might have had to their readers, and are clowns. More than any particular condition of the NDA, what invalidates the product review of a reviewer who has signed the NDA is what that act represents: a negotiated agreement, between a journalist and the powerful company on whose product they're reporting, to serve the company's interests before the reader's. It might as well be an employment contract.

How could a reader who'd been made aware of that agreement trust that every sentence of the product review did not reflect a careful compromise between the truth and a company's interest in maximizing its sales? How could a reader possibly hope to parse that out? They couldn't. That's the NDA's utility to the company that insisted upon it: It produces a courtier press, and a public ever more vulnerable to marketing.

All reviewers got in exchange for their signature on that NDA, their willing participation in a sales campaign, was the opportunity to publish a few days earlier. Any of them in possession of spines could have simply purchased the game on the day of its release—write it off as a work expense, clowns!—and published their review the following Monday without restrictions, but with a somewhat greater danger that their authentic service to their readers would alienate the scumbag executives of a company willing to ship an incomplete, unusable product in place of an abject apology. An ugly truth that people in ad-supported media often talk their way around concerns what the product is, and who is buying it: To whatever extent the business might be, or might appear to be, selling journalism to readers, it is at least as much the bulk-selling of readers to advertising companies. In the absence of dignity and integrity it can tip all the way over into the latter, where the journalistic mission of informing the public sometimes grinds against the commercial imperative to deliver the largest possible audience to advertisers. Nowhere is this more starkly illustrated than by product reviewers negotiating how much truth they'll agree to withhold in exchange for getting a neutered, dishonest review up on the page a measly few days sooner than a truthful, adversarial one might arrive—weaponizing readers' desire to gather information ahead of a purchase against those very readers for the sake of monetizing their eyeballs.

Cyberpunk 2077 has turned out to be an indictment of every part of the 21st century games industry: its abusive working conditions, its imaginative bankruptcy, the distorting power of its marketing machinery. Add to that list the complicity of so many of the people and publications covering it. In that respect this broken piece-of-shit game has revealed quite a bit more truth than most of what you could read about it prior to last Thursday.

His words were incisive and damning, and the exact kind of criticism that I believed might jolt the gaming press to engage in any kind of self reflection on what decisions were made that would end up creating a situation such as this. Instead they circled the wagons and pretty much stuck their heads in the ground. Notably, Burneko would post a follow up: A Former Video Game Journalist Lays Out The Power Dynamics In The Review Process, a rarity amongst those who post online. More often than not someone will simply ignore any pushback to their articles or rage about it on Twitter. For this, and for the original biting writeup, I have a lot of respect for Burneko. You would think the game press would too, given that Burneko and Defector were created out of the ashes of Deadspin, “the sports website at G/O Media (formerly Gizmodo Media Group, and before that Gawker Media). In October of 2019, new private equity ownership took over and tried to make us “stick to sports''—despite that violating the very spirit of Deadspin—and fired deputy editor Barry Petchesky on the spot. In response, the rest of the editorial staff quit in solidarity.” This solidarity is something games press could certainly use more of⁹, as we will see in their follow up dialogue with Harper Jay¹⁰.

Harper Jay: So I think the reason why I disagreed with some of what you wrote was not because you were incorrect to diagnose a problem. I think you were correct to perceive the existence of a problem, insofar as access journalism just naturally has certain problems.

I'm hard-pressed to think of any embargo condition or request that I received over the course of my work that I found was intrusive. I can think of examples of a game this year where some of the embargo stuff was obtrusive, but I wasn't working at that point. I will say, and again, I want to be careful when speaking about other studios, but to my understanding, there were a lot of embargoes surrounding what you could discuss for The Last of Us Part II in a way that probably limited reviewers’ abilities to tell folks everything they needed to or to really dive into that game satisfactorily.

Most of the time, it's not obtrusive. But—there's the big “but” to that—you are accepting loose guidelines from a corporation, because you just need the continued access. That's where the problems start to form. I bet you can just feel it in your brain, in terms of—but that's economic. And that's where I think the misdiagnosis came, where very few outlets for games coverage these days, that I can think of, have a subscription model, even though many of them used to. So it's all advertisements. The cost of missing out on early coverage is expensive. And that's a gross thing to say, but it is a truth, right?

So this is, for instance, why I sort of disagreed with this idea in your piece that a writer might opt out of an embargo, buy a game, and then write a review very quickly to kind of compete. Because games are big. Games are very large. Playing 60 hours: It doesn't sound like labor. When you say, “Hey, I need to play a game,” it doesn't sound like labor, but it is. Then you have to factor in the writing time on top of that.

I think the biggest issue with embargoes and stuff right now isn’t—I mean, you could say that it's this fact that you accept it, and you abide to it because of implicit retaliation from a publisher, which we know is a thing that happens because Kotaku had been blacklisted from certain outlets for reporting on leaked, or—allegedly, let me say—but also the thing that I want to see change mostly is I want writers to have more time. I think one of the reasons that we see reviews that are so tilted to one end of the extreme or another is that writers just don't have time. They come into their reviews really hot, they have really tight embargo times of maybe a week. If you have more than a week, it's a luxury. Right now, even the biggest games are giving people basically a week. You see review scores or things that feel incongruous—it's because people are not being given the time either by their editors, quite frankly, or by the constraints of a publisher embargo, to really sit and reflect on a game. That's one of the things that's affecting coverage in a way that is unfortunate more than anything else.

I think a lot of the terms of embargoes are tied to hype, because hype is incredibly self-sustaining in the game industry. You have this issue where people are really excited for a game and because people are really excited for a game, well, now an outlet needs to cover it. And because an outlet needs to cover it, then they'll agree to certain terms, regardless of—we can debate whether or not they should have—because they need to get that coverage out, they need to be first, they need to make sure that they can stand on their own two feet. That means that they accept terms that are—embargoes that are short, that lead to people to rush their work, which lead to reviews that perhaps are less considered.

Writers are so economically disadvantaged in this arrangement that they just kind of have to accept the terms that are given. That's where the imbalance is more than anything else.

That's where a lot of the tension and disagreement between writers and certain facets of readers comes in. Readers really, really want consumer reporting. They really, really just want to know if this thing is good. Can I buy it? I understand that. People don't have a lot of money. They want to know what cool world they can escape to and if it's fun.

I might be spinning the wrong yarn here, but it was, I believe—wasn't it the LA Times that was barred from covering Disney or something for a while? They were barred from something, and a lot of other places stood up and said, Well, then we're just not going to cover your stuff. We don't have that in the games industry, because we have had instances where outlets have been blacklisted and other outlets did nothing.

Despite the openness during the follow up conversation, I think there was still a great failure here for games media to self-reflect. Harper’s main point, and the main criticism of the original piece I agree with, is there was a lack of understanding of just how much time goes into creating a review for a game such as Cyberpunk, which currently is listed as 25 hours long to mainline the central narrative and 60 hours to do a mixture of main quests and side activities. Despite this, I think game critics are very quick to blame everything but themselves when it comes to failures such as this. In this situation the excuse was that well, we have zero power in the relationship of pre-release coverage. We have to abide by the publishers' will and demands in order to get review code early in order to get a review out prior or at release in order to get as many eyes as possible on our review compared to someone who would release a review after the game comes out and nobody cares. And so with that line of thinking you can go down the rabbit hole of well then what use is a critic other than giving you a declaration of quality before or at the time of release? Recognizing that you’re getting PC code only and not any codes for the game on console after previews were streamed from the developer’s PC’s to your monitor and overwatched by a developer the entire time, there is a failure to look at that and to make the connection that well, maybe I am just a tool of marketing. Maybe I am agreeing to things that I shouldn't be agreeing to. This is an outlier but I don't think that it's really that much of an outlier. There's simply a lack of self-reflection. People who cover games online, anytime there is a sort of criticism extended towards the way games are covered, towards the way games get written about, everyone who is on Twitter decides that it's time to get defensive, deflective. There's no willingness to engage in criticism. You would think that people who engage in criticism of video games and are basically extending critiques towards video games as an art form would be receptive towards critiques and complaints towards their own work, but they're not. It's largely dismissive. It's largely deflective. It's largely very defensive.

3. Adam Sessler

One of the worst instances of this reaction of deflection above all was Adam Sessler’s Twitter feed, which had degenerated greatly as time had gone on and was finally deleted earlier this year. A clip of a 2006 episode X-Play’s review of Baten Kaitos Origins was shared online in March 2023, with focus on the opening line, ““And we all know who will replace us. India: Billions strong, pro-vegetarian, tech support call taking behemoth of a nation. Or the Chinese. But certainly not Japan. Because they may be technologically advanced and financially powerful, they’re already in decline. You want proof? Here’s Baten Kaitos Origins.” When quoting the original poster, instead of admitting the script was juvenile, Sessler double’s down, "Dude is angry I didn’t like his consumer boner stimulator in 2006. A truer gamer there never was." Others in games media called him out on this lack of self reflection, but this is not the first time Sessler has freaked out towards anyone criticizing his work.¹¹

Sessler is another outlier, obviously we don’t see people like Jeff Gerstmann, Greg Miller, or Ryan McCaffrey doubling down on stupid things they may have said years earlier, as I pointed out when writing about Kinda Funny, Miller has actually been one of the loudest voices in terms of acknowledging past mistakes and wanting to grow from them. You do have instances such as Dan Stapleton claiming there were not more “black and other minority writers,” because they weren’t applying to job postings, which was quickly clowned upon by Blessing Adeoye Jr. on Twitter: "I applied to IGN more times than I can count. If you think not enough black and minority content creators aren't putting themselves out there, you're not looking hard enough. You don’t see Dan apologizing, instead the tweet just gets deleted as the wave of responses and sub-tweets spread outward.

This is why Burneko at Defector and their follow up post was such a surprise¹², you don’t see writers generally willing to engage in that kind of openness to criticism. Instead you ignore it, delete the original offending post, or double down. I am not ignoring the fact that a lot of criticism of games media comes from bad faith. Gamergate was a cover for people who didn’t want their games, or the way games were talked about online, to change, and went after people they didn’t like, mainly minority writers. And this wasn’t exactly anything new. There long existed a tension between those who covered games and those who read that coverage, there is a reason why a perennial piece of advice when writing online is to “never read the comments.” The current trend is about the “censorship” of games such as Stellar Blade, of which Mega64 has had the best response, and obsession with Sweet Baby Inc, a consulting firm that became a scapegoat for everything they perceived as wrong with current games: diversity in developers and on-screen characters, a black Samurai in the new Assassin’s Creed, and that everyone hates white men. Due to this long history, I can understand when receiving pushback online it can be difficult to separate the chaff from the wheat. There is still a responsibility to listen and modify your actions and attitude, nobody enters the world fully formed. This is why the greatest stain on games media was the entire industry’s failure in regards to Nathalie Lawhead.

4. Nathalie Lawhead

Nathalie has thoroughly documented her treatment by the direct actors who violated their trust as well as all those who afterwards condescendingly talked down to them about the situation. [Following text formatted differently from their original post to save space]

On August 26th, 2019, I published a post titled “calling out my rapist” in which I named my rapist and went over some of the abuse I endured while working at two unnamed companies in Vancouver, Canada. My rapist was Jeremy Soule. The first company that I described was Smoking Gun Interactive, and the second was Interdimensional Games. I name them because I don’t think it even matters anymore. I wrote this as my final attempt to be free from something that had been eating me for over ten years.

My story ended up causing what journalists at the time called a “metoo movement in games”. I do not exaggerate. It caused a wave of other’s sharing their bottled up pain. There were countless articles covering the other abuse stories that were levied toward other high profile people in the indie game space… all which came out around that time. Many people said that my story encouraged them to come forward too. A number of journalists reached out to me and asked for interviews. I did my best to answer all of them, despite the frame of mind that I was in. I was terrified. I couldn’t really eat or sleep. One of these journalists was Cecilia D’Anastasio. I initially wrote about my experiences with her here: What it’s like sharing your #metoo with Kotaku (a cautionary tale) – The Candybox Blog. The short summary of this is that she emailed me about an interview. I had the bad sense to agree to one. She also contacted my sister, and wanted to talk to her. She also talked to my mom, for a long time.

I agreed because she had a good reputation, worked for an outlet that (at the time) I had the bad sense to look up to, and (most of all) promised accountability. Her assurance to me was that she wanted to “hold him accountable”. She told me she believed me and that there were other victims of his who she was talking to. I gave the interview. The first phone call was fairly respectful. I talked about my experiences with him, tried not to cry, tried to keep it together, to be as coherent as possible… She later called me again. She asked if I was alone. I went to a quiet space where I could talk alone… and she then told me that I wasn’t very detailed about my assault. My blog post didn’t mention any specifics about how the rape happened. She said that the story was ready to publish, but she just needed me to go over how I was raped, for Kotaku’s lawyers, so that she could publish. I was stupid enough to believe her.

I struggled to speak my recollection… I know all this to be true (no mater how much Kotaku, Totilo, or her have gaslit me and tried to convince me that I wasn’t remembering this right) because this was the very first time I ever talked to anyone about this. I never even shared this with my mom. I shared these details over the second phone call. For Kotaku’s lawyers. So they could publish the article. While I was struggling to recount this, at one point she lost her patience, scoffed, and yelled “Was it penetrative sex?” I was quiet for a long time before answering “Yes.” I can’t remember what she said after that. I was shocked toward the end of the phone call and asked her if they were “planning on publishing this??” She told me that she believed publishing the details of a sexual assault was unnecessary and exploitative. She made it sound like they would not. I was out of it after that. My sister later told me that I was pale and she was worried that I wouldn’t make it. The details of my sexual assault were published nonetheless.

…

Later, after all this died down, I met with the other victim (and source) in person. We talked about our experiences. She eventually opened up about how disappointed she was in the way Cecilia D’Anastasio wrote the article. She shared with me how Cecilia promised accountability. This person had information about his predatory behavior, how he used apps to cover his tracks… a lot of other information that Cecilia promised to act on but never did. She also shared how the way she was portrayed in the article was inaccurate. The Kotaku article depicted her as “flirting” with Soule, but that was not true. She told Cecilia that she would share the text transcripts with Kotaku only under the condition that Kotaku would publish them so people could see that she was not flirting with Soule (so people could see the actual conversation for themselves), and under the condition that Kotaku would make clear that she was not flirting. Cecilia agreed to these conditions. Upon getting the transcripts, the resulting article still framed it as flirting. None of our conditions were honored. The framing was unnecessary. I wrote about the full consequence that the reporting has had on all of us here: An open letter to game journalists: #metoo, fighting with surviving abusive reporting, and the fallout of not caring

The above was my first attempt in bringing this to light. After meeting with this person, I worked up the courage to read the Kotaku article. I was shocked when I saw that Kotaku published the details of my assault. My rape was discourse. How and why it happened was discussed. Lorded over me… I didn’t want the how to be published because I know how people are. My agency over my own story should have been respected. That awful article was one of the first things that showed up when people Googled me. It wouldn’t just go away if I waited long enough.

These journalists (D’Anastasio, Shreier, Totilo…) were people who pretend to be conscientious about abuse. If they truly stand by what they keep advertising, they should have cared to address the way we were treated. They didn’t. Having a basic amount of humanity extended to us was an uphill battle.

The article in question was published on August 28, 2019. It was removed on May 27, 2021. Patricia Hernandez reached out to Lawhead informing them she would be Kotaku’s new Editor in Chief soon, had not yet finished with her current job at Polygon, but had already begun working on removing the article in question, which was Lawhead’s campaign for nearly 16 months. It was removed that same day. I know Lawhead doesn’t want to credit Hernandez entirely but this action by her has earned endless commendations in my mind. The others involved in this, meanwhile, are on the proverbial shitlist. Why did Cecelia D’Anastasio and Stephen Totilo¹³ so utterly fail to perform moral work? Why did Gita Jackson feel the need to insert themselves into the conversation through subtweets, when she doesn’t even like Cecelia anyway!¹⁴ Why is Schreier’s reaction to block anyone who is inconvenient to him?  I find it hard to belive him when he goes on Simon Parkin’s My Perfect Console podcast and mentions not having a career if you burn a source because Cecilia seems to be doing fine after fucking over Nathalie. Why did Dante (@videodante) feel the need to insert themselves into the situation as well? Everyone felt authoritative and somehow required to speak up and explain how things were wrong but you need to be less loud about it online. Such a condescending tone, fuck each and every one of them. Using the same old excuse that these complaints are just feeding fuel to the gamergate crowd, as if any and all criticism and pushback is harmful because it might be picked up by online trolls and assholes so stay quiet!

There was a brief campaign, "I believe nathalie lawhead,” and I definitely respect those who spoke out, but I find it disheartening in how many just ignored this entire situation and stayed silent. Grace addressed the situation head on in her own blog about it, and will always love her for that. Natalie Degraffinried spoke out with their own details working at Kotaku in support of Nathalie. Brendan Vance wrote of their support as well on their own site. Skeleton and No Escape call out the lack of response in their summary of 2020 post.

Then I search IGN, GameSpot, Polygon, The Verge, PCGamer, Eurogamer, Paste (whose only mention of the treatment Lawhead was subjected to comes from Grace), Rock, Paper, Shotgun link to her blog multiple times in their Sunday Papers column but seemingly never the ones calling out the games industry for its problems, PCGamesN, GamesIndustry.biz, VG247, ShackNews, Video Games Chronicle, Gamasutra, and Escapist Magazine. None address the negligence and harassment Lawhead faced for nearly two years. We can conjure up whatever excuses we want, the truth of the matter is that the games media at large are not equipped or really even interested in having to face such a failure within their own. This is why Nathalie speaks at length about the game industry jumping in to protect their own, as if Lawhead is a GamerGater seeking to get someone fired and not a victim who was wronged and lied to by one of the major video game websites, and by someone who has gone on to have a successful career despite the open secret that they are a piece of shit person.

Some of these websites were happy to copy the reporting already done regarding “two women accuse Jeremy Soule of sexual assault/rape/abuse/etc” but of course, as I’ve repeated again and again, failed to do any sort of follow up. Instead they were silent as Lawhead went online day after day asking for the article to be taken down. Nobody wanted to put in the work, work Lawhead already did! There are multiple posts in which Lawhead has archived and screencapped and provided piece after piece of evidence and argument, of both the initial lie of the details not being reported and the subsequent mistreatment by the industry at large. Nobody wanted to acknowledge this failure. Nobody wanted to read the posts and write up how they collectively failed.

The period of time this most reminds me of was the failure of responding to gamergate at its inception. I was paying attention in 2014 and it was easy for anyone else with a brain and spending any time reading the accusations and complaints to understand the entire movement was bullshit. The basis of the entire thing was an accusation from a bitter ex that Zoe Quinn exchanged sexual favors for positive reviews of her game Depression Quest, despite no traditional reviews being published by the journalist in question and what articles did exist from them about Depression Quest had no discernable opinion on its quality. It was never about ethics. They quickly pivoted to simply harassing those they perceived were changing the way games were made and talked about from the previous status quo.

And how did the games media respond to this growing cacophony of voices? Insufficiently. The universal phrase was “we condemn harassment of any kind,” but no real opposition to what was being offerred. IGN posted a On The Problem of Harassment which said, “Not surprisingly, the issue has proven just as contentious outside of our walls as within. Some in the industry have praised our reluctance to devote editorial space to this issue; others at the opposite side have called us cowards and worse [I would agree with those]. In the hopes that we can elevate the way we all talk about games and gamers, we want both to reiterate our commitment to our community guidelines and to strongly advocate for their extension into all our interactions with each other.” GameSpot published An important message to our users regarding online harassment which ended with, “We are not planning further comment on this, but note that we will continue to reinforce our site’s zero tolerance policy for anything constituting harassment of our users, our staff, or indeed, anyone else, for doing nothing more than sharing an opinion or being different.” Giant Bomb published a Letter from the Editor that I found better than the nothing statements of most major sites, with Gerstmann saying, “So when ‘GamerGate’ rose up to cover over a campaign of harassment with a veneer of concern for the ethics of games journalism, it more or less set off every single disgust alarm I have. Though I'm sure some good people have been roped into this mess under this guise, the ethical concern portion of all this is largely a farce, a fallacy.” Brendan Sinclair for GameIndustry.biz broke it down best in 2022 with Gamergate was a test and the industry failed.

I do believe many people throughout the industry have seen what happened with Gamergate and tried to do better, and I believe many of them are no happier about the state of things today than anyone else.

But what I still haven't seen is any apology for the people we let down in the first place, the people who were run out of this industry by a screaming mob as so many watched and did nothing. And I still haven't seen any significant public acknowledgement about the mistakes that were made, no post-mortem from which we could pull lessons on how to deal with harassment campaigns in the future.

It has already been eight years since Gamergate, in an industry where the average career might not even be that long.

The next time a concentrated industry-wide harassment campaign comes, we cannot rely on there being enough people who were here in 2014 still around to guide a proper and coordinated response.

I really truly believe Nathalie Lawhead’s treatment by the games press was a test the industry horrendously failed as well. This was an example of reporting done wrong, of an industry that claims to believe the victim but becomes silent when that victim accuses a journalist of lying to them. And it is because nobody wanted to do the hard work in 2014, and they don’t want to do the hard work now, and I don’t believe they ever will. Nick Robinson gets a quiet exit from Polygon and continues to run a successful YouTube channel. Phil Kollar gets put on leave, returns to hit up freelancers, and only resigns after people rightfully call out Polygon for allowing him to continue working with nobody ever talking about it again. Former IGN writer Mitch Dyer comes out to detail a history of abuse by Tal Blevins and Steve Butts, including being forced to publish the story of Amy Henig’s removal from Naughty Dog being a hostile takeover. How much more don’t we know about and how much does the game industry refuse to acknowledge under the excuse of not wanting to feed the trolls? There will never be an, “apology for the people we let down in the first place,” there will never be, “significant public acknowledgement about the mistakes that were made, no post-mortem from which we could pull lessons on how to deal with [failing victims] in the future.”

If there is one thing I would like whoever is reading this to take away is that the game industry is very much worth criticizing, and also very much reluctant to engage in any sort of self reflection when it comes to their failure. Of doing right by Lawhead, and who knows how many others whose stories go untold, who experienced abuse, harassment, neglect, and mistreatment by those lauded within games media. Until games media at large can prove they are willing to reckon with failures such as this it will never be a worthwhile profession.¹⁵

1.  You can find even more examples I found here: It's not for everyone, but

2.  Including the videogamedunky videos I cite from later on.

3. Such as this one, Six Days in Fallujah Developers Want to Make a 'Playable Documentary' - IGN Unfiltered #56 in which Ryan McCaffrey refuses to do anything other than let the developers cry about how their game was unjustly canceled and offers no opposition based on the many, many pieces of criticism about the game, some of which was published by IGN itself before this video was published!

4.  This graph is based on going through IGN’s Video Game Reviews page and counting how many of each score has been given as far back as the page loaded: November 2023.

5.  This has been noticed previously, such as in 2007 at Destructoid: Why video game reviews suck: part one. And yes I see who the author is but I think the point they are making stands. Red vs. Blue also made fun of this trend long ago.

6.  This is partly something I’m working on myself with a “who writes reviews nowadays anyway?” in which I’ve picked 10 of the most prolific reviewers of the current year and have begun reading every review they have written in order to profile them and see if there are any unique voices in the game review space because I have to admit, I’ve been paying attention for a long time now and couldn’t tell you many names or anything about the tastes of the individual writers at IGN, GameSpot, Polygon, and similar websites these days.

7.  This is in no way a complaint or dig at Noah, I genuinely find his work to be some of the greatest that currently exists on the platform.

8.  This reinforces the “review as product recommendation,” as the “worst” games are usually labeled so more often because they have glitches and low frame rate. Like I said, bad games are labeled bad due to technical issues more than anything else.

9. Deadspin’s successful resignation-to-spinoff was recreated most recently with Second Wind, which formed after the entire video team at The Escapist quit in protest of the firing of Editor in Chief Nick Calandra by its parent company Gamurs and formed what is currently the 48th most successful Patreon.

10. I mistakenly used the name that was being used at the time of Defector’s piece and have updated to use the name they currently use.

11.  The example I wanted to cite here but is lost to deletion was of David Shimomura pointing out to Sessler that was still following Nick Robinson who quietly departed Polygon after it was revealed he tried to use his position to prey on women throughout the games industry, to which Sessler threw a massive tantrum claiming he was currently in the hospital due to some sick relative as if that was relevant.

12.  I first noticed this lack of following up on statements and mistakes when covering NoClip for my Games Media in Review series, of which this article acts as a kind of culmination and progression from that series. Giant Bomb East and Kinda Funny were both the earliest adopters I know of the “what we got wrong” segment in which they accept and acknowledge all kinds of mistakes made during a podcast or other content.

13.  Why was Stephen Totilo praised by Austin Walker [in a now deleted tweet] who previously spoke out in support of Lawhead!?

14.  It appears the tweet has been deleted but Discord saved the text when it was originally linked: “listen i'm sorry, cecilia d'anastasio doesn't get to say she's an ally to people of color. the first day she met me she told me she knew more about indian food because she went to india once, and her racism never improved.”

15.  Thank you for your time reading through this. I wanted this to be a culmination of my current thoughts on the games industry/media/criticism because like I said, there is nothing games media types like more than talking about games industry/media/criticism. In August it will have been a year since I have started to go through my Game Biz list of video game channels to do a profile/review on them, starting with IGN and most recently doing NoClip, and as part of that, as well as my reading/listening/watching of content from 2009 for yet another major project draft, I’ve had a lot on my mind in regards to the state of things. Next time: Erwin Panofsky’s “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” and how it aptly applies to video games as well.