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I remember telling my friends I had a phone interview.
"With who?" my roommate asked.
"David Thomas," I replied, and before I could offer any more explanation--
"You mean the guy from Wendy's?"
No, David Thomas, is not the guy from Wendy's. But he did help create and write the Videogame Styleguide, which, although it didn't quite start a revolution, is definitely a cool and worthwhile effort to unite the videogame journalism industry under one professional, grammatical flag. David has been writing about games as a weekly columnist for about 12 years and currently writes for Crispy Gamer, Examiner.com, and also writes a weekly syndicated column for King Features that is published in more than a few papers. He also co-founded the International Game Journalists Association. You can find out more about him and his current work at his blog.
What I learned:
- David was among the first of my interviews and he told me, “Every journalist you talk to is going to tell you some strange random set of events or facts that got them into the business.” Since our interview, I have found this to be very true. Sort of makes me wonder what will happen to someone actively trying to break into the business...
- While David acknowledges a lot of the information he’s telling me is “purely observational,” he’s still got some very interesting thoughts and ideas. For instance, I enjoyed his rough recount of videogame journalism’s history and how the enthusiast press seems to travel in cycles. The thought that games journalism could serve as a model for the future of journalism, while seemingly a little farfetched, is interesting too.
- David and I seem to share the same contempt for “industry analysts.” This is the first discussion I’ve had that involved a lot of talk about business reporting in videogames. He lists business reporting as being one of game journalism’s major weak points. The other weakness he cites is weak criticism and too much focus on consumer-based reviewing.
David: You know, in a certain sense, what are the credentials? I mean, doubt that more than 10 percent of people who write about videogames get paid for it without any journalism preparation. None of them probably even have one journalism class. So you know, I don’t have any journalism. I worked for the school newspaper, I mean, I’ve never taken a journalism class in my life. But that doesn’t mean I consider myself to be a professional journalist. So there really isn’t a professional preparation for it. It’s not like, if you want to be a news reporter, you probably will go to J-school, which is sort of the way it is.Videogame Journalism: [Commenting on how to break into games writing, and how many writers have found their way in through a random chain of events] Do you think that still happens a lot nowadays or is it more of that you need credentials?
Now, to that end, it’s a little less of a wild west just because a lot of places are professional in editing a little bit more. But still, to this day, it’s just like the best way to get into the videogame journalism quote-unquote “business” is to just write, you know, and it’s like write for who will let you, write as much as you can and kind of you know, eat your way up the food chain. And I’ve known lots of people who have done that.
[...]
{After me bringing up Ben Croshaw's (also known as Yahtzee, author of the bitingly hilarious Zero Punctuation reviews) success with his reviews and getting picked up by The Escapist after he posted his work as YouTube videos}
David: You know, Yahtzee, I don’t know what his story is, but you know it’s kind of a funny thing, he found his niche, he found something he’s really good at. He keeps telling everybody he’s a videogame developer, right?
And The Escapist just picks [Yahtzee's reviews] up. If you go to The Escapist, they publish their editorial calendar publicly and open solicitations, and I mean, anyone could potentially write for The Escapist if they had something that the magazine was interested in. And that’s just sort of weird if you think about it in the sense of it’s not like a very, very closed system.
In the other sense, it’s absolutely a closed system. I mean, look at Crispy Gamer. Crispy Gamer is built entirely on the idea that they’re recruiting kind of like experience and known names from games journalism. You know, so how do you crack into Crispy Gamer? Well, you know, unless you’ve somehow established a reputation somewhere else, but beyond that I’ll tell you, I know a lot of people that have got hired on at blogs like Kotaku or Joystiq or other blogs that were like working on their own personal blogs or they were working for something really small, and met somebody or got picked up because someone saw them and they liked their writing. So, you know… there’s just a certain sense that if you’re good, you get your name out there, and there’s still a job.
The last thing I want to say on that point is the arena and why it’s still so funky is most people that write about games for pay, don’t do it for a living. I have no idea, I would just guess that it is less than 10 percent, maybe 5 percent of people that actually write about games on any kind of regular basis make anywhere near what you might consider a living. Like I don’t. I got a regular job, so…
David: There’s been this kind of set of cycles because first there was only enthusiast magazines. And that was it—anything else didn’t really matter. That’s where all the attention was focused. And then, there was an intense interest, for a period of time in the mainstream newspapers primarily and somewhat magazines. You saw places like Playboy or Maxim, or kind of these men’s magazines that just pick up regular game stuff for a while. USA Today Magazine had a column, and so then there was like kind of this feeling that the mainstream was interested in videogames and you had this run-up of places that actually would—a lot of people had regular columnists, a few had full-time videogame people, almost no one could though, very few. But a lot of people, like I said, had someone on staff who could write about videogames. Well then blogs came about, and now it’s basically everything has changed. Newspapers are abandoning videogame coverage because they’re, you know, under so much duress, it just seems trivial to them. I mean, enthusiast magazines are under tremendous pressure, I mean, they’re downsizing in terms of the number of pieces and advertising, and all of a sudden, all of the attention of blogs. So, I mean, you know, you look at something like—you look at Joystiq and you look at Kotaku and you look at Crispy Gamer. And it’s these kinds of outlets, that are actually starting to take up the advertising dollars that were left behind so. Five years ago, writing a blog was sort of considered this kind of clever way to break into the business, or even more likely considered a clever way to get in to E3 for free. These days, I swear to you, you will watch a blogger get put in front of the New York Times in terms of access. Because, you know, they matter. The way to think about blogs is I think there’s a sense that those are enthusiasts but that maybe they’re catching other people. I don’t know that that’s true, I mean, it’s been a few years ago, but GameSpy, I think it was GameSpy, I can’t remember told me they were doing 25 million unique views per month, which is a ton. I mean, just enormous, think about that. That’s bigger than the circulation of any newspaper. But still when you, at the same time, you’ve got Sony saying, you know, we sold a 100 million Playstations. You’re like whoa. So they’re still not even hitting most of the people with the biggest systems. So there’s a ton of people out there that are under-served, but I suspect that the Internet sort of solves that you know. If you want to know about Grand Theft Auto, you don’t have to pick up EGM. You can just type in “Grand Theft Auto,” and a million things will come up.Videogame enthusiast publications, of course, are going to be more oriented towards that hardcore audience, but other than that do you notice any distinct differences in the videogame enthusiast publications and the mainstream media coverage of videogames?
David: Now, I kind of have a nuanced answer for you to that because the first thing is mainstream media ain’t what it used to be. I mean, if you look at like… there’s a friend of mine who runs a site called themodernjournalist.com. But the basics of what’s happening here is that traditional mainstream media is declining, especially newspapers. I mean, you know, I think someone said that in the last 10 years more newspaper jobs have been lost than have been replaced. Newspapaers are getting smaller, page sizes are getting smaller, the size of newspapers are shrinking. And attention is going online. And nobody has quite figured out the model. So this is happening across everything, right? It’s not just videogames, it’s happening across everything. So, you say, is there a place for games journalism in the mainstream media, the first complicating factor is, well, what does that mean? I mean, where is the mainstream media? Because, as I’ve said, most newspapers are cutting coverage of things like videogames. They’re cutting their book sections, they’re cutting back from their travel sections, I mean they’re doing all these things because they feel like they don’t know what to do to stay in business. So what happens to videogame coverage? Well, I think the good news is this: Videogames, as kind of a popular, mass media, they’re pretty new. I mean games have been around for forty years. But this idea of games in the media, the mass media and sort of the thing where Halo 3 is actually news or Grand Theft Auto 4 is actually news and sort of people who don’t even play are interested in it. It’s like, my mom might be interested in what Grand Theft Auto 4 is just because she’s heard of it, not because she wants to play it. That’s really the definition of mass media, it’s not that you care it’s that you’ve heard of it. I mean, lost is mass media because even if you don’t watch it, you know what it is. So, here’s games, they’ve sort of come of age, and games journalism specifically has come of age in the middle of this gigantic turnover of popular media. So my thesis is, this is me talking, everything else here is purely observational, is that games in a certain sense, or games journalism in a certain sense, represents a model for the future of journalism. And there are people who argue with me about that. But I like saying, listen, game journalism is basically growing up in this crazy time, and as a result, it doesn’t think it's a crazy time. You know, game journalism hasn’t had to go through this process of losing its core readership or losing its primary outlets. It kind of doesn’t care. It’s just like, oh, so now blogs are the thing, so we’ll move to blogs. Oh, you know, review scores aren’t what people want, people want criticism. Oh, they want hard-hitting news and it just kind of keeps adapting and changing, and they want some more comics of games, you know, on and on and on. You get things like GameFAQs, where there’s sort of this amazing treasure trove of information about games. There’s no parallel. I mean, GameFAQs is so much more deep than IMDB is for example. It has put it to shame. And so, you say, wow games journalism is a model for the future of journalism so I would say, it’s confusing and the future is very, very unclear. The opportunities are enormous, so that’s my little screed on that.So do you think there’s a place for videogames in the mainstream media? Will they eventually have as much coverage maybe as movies and television or are games kind of too inaccessible to, let’s say, the non-gamer?
[…]
David: Well, if you look up the biggest newspaper and find that it’s 10 or 20 million and then go look at some sweet blog like Kotaku. And I don’t know what their numbers are up to, but they’re probably up to like you know, six, seven, eight, or nine million hits mark. You need hits. So you’re like going, okay, here’s a group of a dozen people who have the same imprint as the New York Times in terms of readership. How many people work for the New York Times? You know, 800? I don’t know. It’s kinda like “game over” for newspapers because of the way that they are set up. They don’t have control over their users anymore, and the only thing that they’ve got left is that like everybody doesn’t have good access to easy-to-use digital technology for consuming information. That’s changing. I mean, in ten years from now, everyone will have—everyone from the United States will have effectively something like an iPhone or a Kindle or something. It won’t be weird to look up information on a portable device.
What’s the main reason that games journalism isn’t taken too seriously?
David: Well, I mean, the main reason it hasn’t been taken seriously is because it’s amateurish. It’s poorly written. And it’s crap. And that’s why it hasn’t been taken seriously. It’s starting to become taken seriously for the exact opposite reasons, which is that it’s starting to be focused on accuracy, starting to be focused on relevance, starting to be really focused around—you know, insight and sharing information. And in my opinion, again, this is just me watching over the last few years, I think one of the single biggest forces for that has been Kotaku. And it’s not coincidental or not incidental. [Brian Crescente, managing editor of Kotaku] comes from a journalism tradition. He was a cops reporter for years and years. He was sort of steeped in the ideas, sort of the graphic notions of reporting and what it means, not just to be quick, but to be accurate.
But at the same time he’s a really smart guy around new media, he understands, you know, voice and humor and how absolutely important speed can be. And he also understands that… things around… trying to be clear this it’s rumor, but we’re still going to report it, whereas unlike newspapers where they don't have the space to print rumor or innuendo.
Daivd: I think that most of that is getting better? I mean, if you would have asked me this question a few years ago I would have said that I think that it’s too fanboy-based. You know, it’s about rooting for things rather than trying to examine them, and I think that’s gotten better. I think that the things—and again some of this is probably accurate but it’s probably just as much as my opinion—there’s certain areas which I still think really need to improve. Off the top of my head, the two I can think of are business reporting in the videogame business is terrible. Flat-out terrible. There are few bright, shining examples that are the exception, but for the most part, you know, business reporting is like any other reporting where it involves getting behind the smokescreen, finding out the facts, understanding the facts. What passes for business reporting in the videogame business today is listening to these idiot industry analysts. Like [Michael] Pachter. I don’t know the guy. I don’t have any gripe with him personally, but his job is to do something completely opposite of journalism. And his job is to be some sort of market guru. It’s sort of to shape the development of the market in favor of the people who listen to him and buy that company’s financial products. A good business reporter should be able to look at this stuff and start to make sense of it.What do you think games journalism’s greatest flaw is? Does that go back to the amateurism and the basic inexperience, but kind of getting better?
And to give you quick examples, like back when everyone was saying “oh, Nintendo’s going forward with the Wii. Nintendo’s going to go out of business.” Right? “They screwed up, they left the fans behind, they don't know what they’re talking about.” I get really frustrated by this because it’s something really, really simple. Well, I’m not a business reporter, but it was still, like the first thing you do as a business reporter. I went and pulled the public financial reports for these companies. And what I found out was that the bottom, the whole, the bottom of Nintendo wallowing and nobody loves us at the top of the Playstation and the Playstation could do no wrong. Nintendo’s bottom line revenue was within a whisker of all of Sony’s. In other words, Nintendo was making so goddamn much money that they could afford to coast for 10 more years, I mean it was just—it wasn’t that you had to sit there and crunch the numbers. It was staggering.
You know, Jack Wells used to make, uh, you know, write books because he would do a 25% gross margin and 25% is crazy huge. Nintendo’s gross margin was 24%. I mean, it was just insane how successful the company was. But nobody would report that because they didn’t know how to do the research. They weren’t even willing to do the research—it didn’t fit into the fan model. I think there’s indications of it getting better, and again, just look at Kotaku because they’ve done a little bit of business reporting. You know, someone’s got to step up and do some real hardcore business reporting, and really start to look at, you know, trends and business models and financials and markets and start to really understand this stuff.
[…]
But the other thing besides business reporting that game journalism needs to work on is criticism. And we still struggle with what that means. And criticism is, you know, in a certain sense the business of doing movie reviews thumbs up, thumbs down. We’re still trying to develop serious critical voices in videogame criticism. I don’t mean reviewing. Reviewing is consumer-based. Just, is it worth buying or not? But criticism is always just “what does it mean”. And we’re getting better at it, but we still are very shy about it but that’s the other category of things we need to improve on.
