Drama isn't easy: r/games fights over how much proficiency is required to be a gaming journalist

[u/SS_Downboat]

Context:

VenturesBeat, a tech website, uploaded a controversial video of journalist Dean Takashi playing ineptly through the tutorial and the first level of the videogame Cuphead. The video, which includes Takashi failing to follow basic instructions in the tutorial portion, was uploaded in jest, with the original description calling it "shameful". The video is accompanied by an article written by Takahi himself on the game's difficulty

Nonetheless, the video went viral, drawing ire from the gaming community and from well-known GamerGate journalists, drawing similarities to when a similar incident happened with Polygon, in which a journalist that did not review the game played (very poorly) and recorded footage of DOOM.

Takashi has since written an article explaining the context of the video: he was the only person from VenturesBeat who had attended GamesCom and was available to play it, despite being terrible at platformers in general. After recording the gameplay footage, he told his editor that the footage was unusable, but VenturesBeat decided to upload it anyway for humor.

George Weidman, a popular gaming critic on Youtube (also known as Super Bunnyhop), wrote his own piece defending Takashi, outlining differences between games journalism and games criticism. Weidman pointed out that despite Takashi's lack of skill, Takahi has written multiple well-researched pieces covering the business side of the gaming industry.

Drama:

• "Imagine being mad about this. Man alive. Gamers are fucking children. You don't need to be good at games to understand them, same goes for a million other pastimes and hobbies. This nonsense drama has more to do with gamer entitlement, immaturity and some odd sense of superiority."

• "Because the job doesn't always involve previewing and reviewing things. Holy shit! How can you be so intentionally dense he covers this in the article even! Did you even read it!"

• "The unavoidable fact is that anyone, at any level, is fully allowed to write whatever they want about any game at all. You're free to find that coverage useless, in which case your option is to simply ignore it. And that's pretty much where the story would end, for normal people."

• "In the world they've created in their minds, game journalists are the enemy. They're just interlopers who have no real interest in the hobby and use it to push their personal beliefs. So when a video comes out of a journalist playing a game poorly, they have to latch on to it and post it as often as possible, because they see this as proof that many journalists aren't really gamers."

• "You obviously did not read the article. Half of it is lamenting how people conflate games journalism with reviews."

Full Thread

[u/Jiketi]

As the popularity grew, you suddenly became bombarded with media friendly faces who are actually posers

There's also a lot of people who are accused of being poseurs who aren't actually such.

[u/polite-1]

Didn't we have a thread on this? It's pretty insane. The guys crime was being bad at a video game. It's not like he's even trying to hide it - it's literally in the title of the game and the focal point of his article.

[u/reelect_rob4d → u/polite-1]

Takashi reviewed an RPG and gave it a bad score because he didn't realize you could level up. Genres are less distinct than they used to be, but fucking leveling up is like half of what makes a game an RPG.

There's unskilled and then there's gross incompetence.

[u/[deleted]]

Maybe it's good to have people with different abilities play the game, since gamers of different abilities will play the game, so I can figure out if the game is good for me based on my own amount of dirty casualness?

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Unless you've never picked up a controller before, I doubt that video's gonna help you much

[u/Kingofburgerz]

This is the dumbest outrage in the gaming community in a while, and that's saying something. However, I do think that the debate about whether critics need to be good at games or not is interesting.

[u/CuckMulligan → u/Kingofburgerz]

So it's stupid and interesting at the same time?

[u/captainersatz → u/Kingofburgerz]

One of those things that's interesting but incredibly difficult to have a discussion about online because so many people are coming at it in bad faith. Kind of hate how "ethics in gaming journalism" became a punchline because it is a legitimate topic worth discussing for anyone with interest in gaming media, and now any attempt to even start conversation about it is hamstrung from the beginning.

[u/reelect_rob4d → u/Kingofburgerz]

If Dean Takashi reviewed VHS releases of movies in the 90s, he would watch them frame-by-frame and complain about the wiggly distortion and fucked up sound and ask why the opening credits for Lawrence of Arabia are on the second tape.

There's a difference between being good and being competent.

[u/[deleted] → u/Kingofburgerz]

idk I think the outrage over the Pride Month quest in Runescape was way dumber and worse