So the most notable recent gaming news is that there’s going to be a whole lot less gaming news going forward. Which to most of you is probably a massive win. See, IGN announced that they’ve bought roundabout half of the remaining industry that isn’t IGN, and with online news also dying a slow death due to the approaching new wave of journalism called “fuck all”, I can’t imagine IGN and its newly acquired subsidiaries are long for this world.

Not too long ago, I was studying some magazines for my Alan Wake development history categorization project (please don’t ask), and reading the articles in these magazines led me to a startling realisation: Holy shit! This piece of gaming news media doesn’t make me want to kill myself out of second hand embarrassment!

Many of the magazines of yesteryear typically went with the approach of “spend weeks and sometimes months researching the article, and write as concise a section as you can with the contents”. Every magazine contains at least 2 big several-page spreads of some fledgeling investigative journalist talking to a bunch of basement-dwelling nerd developers and explaining their existence to the virginal minds of the general public.

Contrast this to modern journalism which goes something like:

1. Pick subject

2. Write title

3. ???

4. Publish

Using this handy guide, let’s construct an article for, oh I dunno, let’s say Kotaku.

First we pick a subject. Let’s see… a game that’s coming out in the not too distant future…Let’s go within Super Monkey Ball: Banana Rumble. Now we invent a reason to talk about it. Generally this’d be a twitter post by someone with 2 followers or something. I’ll search for the series and pick the newest tweet.

Perfect. Finally we need an entirely unrelated game series that has way more clout to attach to the title… What else features platforming and a ball form… Oh, wait. I have the perfect candidate! Thus we have our title:

Sonic-like Super Monkey Ball: Banana Rumble rumoured to have a gay protagonist

What? The contents of the article? Who cares! With the invention of this newfangled concept called “social media”, 90% of the users are content with just whining about the imagined contents of the article based on the title alone. The remaining 10% who did actually click on the article for real can be turned away by just covering the site in popups about newsletters, cookies, login prompts and AI chatbots until  they get tired of clicking the X buttons. This way, we can avoid writing anything in the content field, and leave it entirely filled with lorem ipsum.

Somewhere along the way from the 2000s to now, we essentially dropped 99% of the “media” out of newsmedia. News now is basically a really shit title and nothing more. Back in the day, when newscycles were slower, most articles could feature long interviews with the developers, showing more than just shiny screenshots, but also developer intentions, hopes, backgrounds and more.

Newsmedia is the tongues that connects the audience and the developers in the great french kiss of marketing video games. Marketing departments generally hold up the flashiest part of the game up for people to gawk at, but that also tells the audience very little about the game in the end, other than some sparse gameplay details. It was the job of the journalist to bring that information across to the slightly more perceptive core audiences. Now with the backing of media gone, a very crucial part of the game development process is entirely missing.

It’s easier to appreciate things when they’re gone I suppose. But at the same time, since gaming journalism is slowly dying from strangling itself while also blaming everything around it for that, there is a sizable gap in the market for newer, more visceral newshounds. So who knows, maybe someone of the few people reading my blogs could make the next big internet gaming ‘zine? Because I’m pretty sure anyone here capable of stringing more than two sentences together is a more adept writer than anyone at Kotaku right now.