Gaming journalism

This weeks assignment had us watch a podcast about technology and write about it. I chose a podcast from Inside Gaming. The title was about buying reboot games but the first topic, gaming journalism, is what I'm going to focus on.

I have been playing a games for a long time. In the beginning I decided what games I should buy by the cover in the Blockbuster video and what I could afford. Back then I made my money selling chicken eggs which adds up surprisingly quickly. When I got older and found other friends that played games I relayed on their referrals. After high school my friends moved out of state so I tried magazines to find good games. I quickly stopped using magazines because I had bought too many games on their referrals only to be disappointed. From then on I relayed on forums of people who played the game showing what the game was like. This eventually grew into watching Let's Plays and game play video's to make my decisions on. I stopped trusting paid video game reviewers a long time ago.

A while ago a event started called "Gamergate." It all started when a female game developer supposedly slept with five male game reviewers to give the game high ratings. After that it exploded to something about females being discriminated in video games. I'm not sure how that leap happened. I'm going to focus on the woman sleeping with five guys to increase game ratings. I thought the whole thing was ridiculous that anyone would resort to that because I along with a majority of the gaming community have long since stopped using game reviews as a source. We gamers have always known of paid reviews. As far as I know the female game developer was not forced into doing what she did. In my mind all of it was for nothing.

Game developer DoubleFine did a study and showed that let's plays boosted sales more than metacritic, a common review site. This only makes sense to me because having been involved for along time. I know that you just stop trusting the people paid to give reviews. Even if I disagree with what the guy playing the let's play says, I can at-least see the actual game for myself before I buy it.

I guess in the end I was just amazed that people found this shocking.