Video game previews have always seemed primarily a marketing tool. I remember complaining about IGN previews in the aughts when the site, clearly a detached arm of publishers, would post sometimes a dozen preview articles on a big upcoming game. (Correction, I complained about a bunch of sites.)
Old issues of Electronic Gaming Monthly had previews of games that range in tone from neutral to PR. The previews that read like marketing are interesting when contrasted with the constant bloviating the magazine did about being the only true, tell it like it is, in your face, no holds barred, Carlos-Mencia-style magazine on the market. If you’re over the age of 15 AND are not a fucking moron, you know that when people tell your their traits directly, they’re lying. The more EGM claimed to be objective, the more apparent their rave reviews of Bubsy were paid for. I know this because I am both smart and funny.
Come with me on a political tangent with no jokes and also opinions you don’t agree with that applies grandiose theories to video game magazines. There are two types of conservatives: the money kind and the race kind. The foot soldiers of the right tend to be the latter (and in a minority of cases, their core focus can be sex with or instead of race). The latter also may be open to questioning capitalism – see right wing populism and assholes like Tucker Carlson, who is a money conservative complaining about Wall Street and big business to appeal to the rank and file. The money conservative generally uses the race conservative, often publicly embraces similar ideas and positions, and usually has a higher IQ. The latter type has a code of sorts that can be violated, the former does not. The former has one goal only: opportunism. If waving a flag is beneficial today, do it. If claiming to be the only magazine that tells it like it is will be beneficial tomorrow, do that. If taking money for reviews is beneficial next week, fucking do it. Any and all things are on the table and are justifiable if it furthers your goals, which generally all focus on making more money. These are the Reagan and Trump conservatives of the world. It’s impossible to be a hypocrite or sell out for these people because the only point was always self interest. The higher you go in society, the fewer race conservatives you find. Steven Miller is legitimately terrifying to people because he seems compelled by racism much more than personal enrichment. Though that sort of person isn’t necessarily more damaging to society, we can all at least intuitively understand wanting more money; people driven purely by hate are scary and incomprehensible to people who aren’t bad. They also sort of violate a leftist’s understanding of how the world works.
The racists, for all their flaws and Nazism, try to avoid hypocrisy. The assholes on Storm Front complain about politicians selling out to work with the globalists (Jews). They’re generally too stupid to understand they’re a wedge used to sow division in society so the money people can maintain better control, but at least they have (evil, ignorant, hateful) values. And I guess that’s good?
I don’t remember where I was going with this but I was probably going to accuse the main EGM guy of being a traditional, opportunist conservative. The kind of guy who can’t stop talking himself up and claiming to be the most honest person you’ve ever met (no one’s more honest) all while taking payments to talk up games.
This post is littered with images of previews of terrible games that EGM decided to not approach with a neutral tone. Many much better games were written up more objectively and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that either the magazine was on the take or written by people with bad taste. I’m tired of never assigning to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. That’s the way we keep our eyes closed and excuse constant corruption and the erosion of society. Maybe bad things happen because of bad actors and not because everyone in power is simply stupid. Or, in the case of modern politics, both.
It’s become something of a running joke by reviewers on mainstream websites to joke about taking payments for reviews. These chuckleheads are generally well meaning people who don’t understand that a) things were often much more subtle and b) they’re not the reviewers of old and are generally irrelevant. There were likely few examples of bags of money being directly presented to rank and file game reviewers, even in the old days. Press would be flown to see games, sent lavish packages, etc.. Publishers would buy more or less advertising space, and call to yell at the higher ups of magazines if games reviewed poorly. Reviewers would be nudged towards higher scores, and maybe even shown the door if they didn’t comply. “lol no one ever wrote me a check for a review,” is an infantile understanding of how the world works and isn’t that distant from politicians and the Supreme Court claiming that if there isn’t an explicit quid pro quo then money has nothing to do with any of their work.
The second point, that these reviewers don’t really matter any more to publishers, is perhaps more germane. Do you know who gets free products and payments from companies to do advertisements that look like they’re not? And do you know who actually is relevant now? Ask your kid’s kids and they’ll tell you – it’s the damn streamers. Of course some random IGN reviewer isn’t getting bags of money from publishers, the game audience is mostly watching streamers and even more modern technology I am too old to understand like super video, and the streamers are not on the up and up. They’re probably more clearly corrupt than EGM could have ever been.
There has always been a germ of a legitimate idea at the center of the reprehensible Gamer Gate movement. The call for “ethics in journalism,” was not entirely misguided. Unfortunately, it was, for that movement, a thin veneer to cover their actual problem which seemed to be the fact that women exist. Stripped of the sexist bullshit, and refocused away from indie devs and the people they date and on large publishers and media who actually had power, a movement for “ethics in journalism,” made some sense. The time to challenge the economically symbiotic relationship between press and publisher has passed though, and now we are left only with obnoxious streamers, influencers, and the fallout of the Gamer Gate movement.