If you’ve been visiting the site lately (and there have been quite a few more than usual lately, so welcome and thanks to our new and recurring visitors), it’s probably becoming clear that we have aren’t just interested in what games are coming out, what games are delayed, and what’s selling; we love Gaming as a hobby and as a culture, and we care about it. We hope that in some way, we can contribute to the evolution of our sub-culture forward into a more relevant, or at least valued place than it perhaps sits in now. This is why we’ve been posting stories so heavy on commentary lately, and it’s going to continue, because it’s what interests us.

This is going somewhere, I promise.

Anyway, there has been an increasing trend for the last few months for the gaming blogs like Joystiq and Kotaku, as well as the lesser known sites, to publish stories that seem increasingly tangential and fluff based, and less motivated by any sort of interesting news development. First, I understand some of the reasons behind this: both of those blogs are ventures that depend on traffic for monetary returns, and this year signals a first for the gaming blogs: March leading all the way through May was typically a snowballing news cycle leading up to E3, the biggest news extravaganza of the year, where there would be enough reveals and announcements to come through for the duration of the spring and summer release droughts until the big games dropped starting in September, and continuing through to January. You could tell that things were different in the aftermath of E3’s essential dissolution when every gaming news site has been focusing on every show that involves the video games industry as a possible “next E3″, and paying much more attention to events that used to be good for a day or two of news at most in previous years. These sites are desperate for a replacement to fill their news schedules in the way that pre-E3 and post-E3 coverage used to, and unfortunately, it would seem they’re going the tabloid route to do it.

Indignation and outrage are the orders of the day more and more often lately; when there isn’t real news about game releases or the lead-up to console releases to cover (as has been the case since early 2005), NPD numbers have already been released and discussed to death, and there have been no asinine Sony executives talking to the press saying something foolish, the easiest thing to do is to find small things and blow them completely out of proportion. The only thing that seems to drive traffic more than solid news stories are flame wars in the comments sections of the blogs, and looking at the comments on Joystiq and especially Kotaku of late, the number of comments on stories have sharply increased. It would be nice to think that this is because the audience for both sites is expanding an drawing in greater audiences, but unfortunately, that would seem unlikely when you look at the stories that get all of those comments:

Ken Kutaragi steps down at Playstation
XBL Marketplace Downloads reach new low
Gears of War COG tag videos are the new horse armor

Ken Kutaragi stepping down is news. It’s important news within the context of the console “war”, as Kutaragi is the architect of the entire Playstation family, and has been it’s most quotable proponent.

A video Gears of War strategy guide isn’t really news, which is why no one reported on it until there were a few message board threads about it feigning outrage, and once Kotaku posted an overblown demand for content like this to stop, Joystiq followed suit (because neither can go without content the other has, even if it’s meaningless tripe). Because it’s not news, as strategy guides have been around for decades (and there have been strategy videos on the Live Marketplace for about a year now with little serious uproar), a spin has to be put on it to make it interesting, and nothing attracts coverage like instigation. Knowing full well that there’s still some outrage floating around from the Guitar Hero II downloadable content debacle from a few weeks ago, publishing stories like this is a tabloid move that signals how hard up for things to post about these sites’ contributors are, apparently. If this is where gaming journalism is supposed to be, then we have problems.

I understand the realities of the internet and enthusiast news online, and the lightning speed at which it moves, but that doesn’t get these sites off the hook for blowing things out of proportion, as well as making baseless accusations (as it was neither Microsoft nor Epic, the developers of Gears of War, that created this content; it was Bradygames, a company known for its strategy guides). Stories like this are taking advantage of us as gamers by playing off of our fears of the over monetization of content. This is a valid fear, no doubt; I went on record saying that Activision was making a mistake pricing their content so high, regardless of their costs, and I’ve refused to buy much of the downloadable content that Bethesda has created and offered on the Marketplace for Oblivion because I don’t feel that its worth it. I feel that EAs charging to unlock content in games early, or essentially charging for cheat codes that were free on other platforms, is troubling and irritating. But that doesn’t excuse Joystiq and Kotaku for disingenously stoking outrage to compensate for the lack of news to cover. It’s unprofessional, and it threatens credibility, and while Joystiq has essentially lost most of its credibility after repeatedly posting stories phrased to incite flame wars in an attempt to attract traffic, I expect more from Kotaku, whose Editor in Chief Brian Crecente is a respected news writer with extensive experience in the newspaper industry. Kotaku has been publishing more and more good editorial content that goes beyond press releases and release dates, and for that, I applaud them. But when they go this route because they’re desperate for a few grafs on a slow week, they’re pissing that goodwill away.