Press-tige

Yellow Game Journalism

Looking beyond previews and reviews, more questions arise. For instance, a few titles receive highly disproportionate amounts of space while others are barely visible. I'm not suggesting all games deserve equal exposure. However, neither am I completely happy with the current overall balance. For an example I see daily, consider the free-to-play MMOG sector. It's huge, with hundreds of titles in service, and may even be the industry's primary engine of growth at this time. But that would be difficult to discern from reading most game publications.

I'd also like to see more articles of any kind that stand out, that are so insightful, interesting, humorous or otherwise special they make me wish I had thought of and written them. Unfortunately, this happens no more than a few times per year. Neither do I see much where the writing is clearly superior, where precise wording and phrasing produce prose that flows effortlessly. These concerns are very disappointing because I think there are game writers with the knowledge and talent to produce a higher level of journalism. What I see, however, is lots of solid, workmanlike pieces, but few that are truly memorable.

Is this because we, as a profession, don't set our standards high enough? Are we guilty of aiming at the lowest common denominator? It's easy to sit back and say we give our readers what they want. Regrettably, that's a generalization, which means it doesn't always apply. I also wonder if it's not a convenient excuse to avoid the tougher task of conceiving and writing pieces that fully showcase our knowledge, talent, individuality and personal perspectives.

I also don't know how well journalistic practices like checking facts and corroborating information sources are followed. How consistently do we do our research? Do we even aim to write enough articles that require it? Perhaps we too easily allow ourselves to remain stuck in a rut, catering to the masses by doing the same formulaic things year after year. I'm not against giving people what many of them want. However, this does mean we under-serve smaller segments of our audience who want something different.

More than a century has passed since the New York World fought its bitter circulation war against William Randolph Heart's New York Journal. Both engaged in yellow journalism; some even consider them its co-creators. What's less clear is whether the two publications' readers benefited from this style. I'd like to think contemporary game journalism hasn't fallen to the level they did, and that my profession has higher aspirations than are readily apparent. I wish I could say with confidence that if Joseph Pulitzer were still with us today, he'd be looking for potential prizewinners, not potential writing staff for his newspaper. Is that too much to ask?

Richard Aihoshi has been writing about games since 1996, concentrating almost exclusively on the MMOG and RPG genres. Currently working as a part-time contract editor, a freelance writer and a consultant in the area of strategic market culturalization, he has never referred to himself as a journalist.