Kristin Kalning

Finally, the fourth installment of People Who Actually Know What They’re Talking About! I cannot tell you how long this transcript has been lying dormant on my hard drive. (That's probably something I should not be owing up to.)

Out of all the news outlets that I consider the big network news outlets (i.e. CNN, Fox, ABC, CBS), MSNBC's gaming section is one that stands out. For starters, I can actually find the gaming section easily, as opposed to searching and searching on sites like ABC and CNN. It has a very simplistic presentation of information, which is both good (you can see all the recent stories at a glance) and bad (all stories are lumped together and uncategorized). Like CBS's Gamecore, MSNBC updates a few times a week with original material, but also pulls a few stories from the wires. But before I dive into anymore comparisons, I would like to introduce Kristin Kalning, the games editor of MSNBC.com, who gave me a more behind-the-scenes look at MSNBC's game section.

Kristin has been an MSNBC editor for two years. She has been writing professionally on and off for about 15 years, being an editor at weekly magazine MacWeek, then an editor for Ziff-Davis, AOL, the Washington Post, a book publishing company and then coming to MSNBC. Also at MSNBC, she has a weekly column called On the Level.

What I learned:

• What factors go into choosing games stories at MSNBC. In addition to what’s listed in the interview below, Kristin also gave examples of basic online news judgment. For example, she saw an interesting story came across the wires at 6pm PST, but knowing it was 9 p.m. EST, she held off on posting it and decided to wait until next morning, when there were “more eyeballs.” This seems like a really simple idea, but with the Internet being the “24-hour news desk” of immediacy, I hadn’t considered holding on to a story as an option.
• Readers don’t really visit MSNBC’s game section for game reviews. I never really considered that before, but it makes sense because if you’re a gamer you probably already have your enthusiast publication(s) of choice that you go to for this.
• Kristin thinks one of the main differences between main-stream media games reporting and enthusiast games reporting is the MSM has a more trained, professional journalism.
• Kristin has a strict “no-swag” policy. She says most game developers are wary to speak with MSNBC because they don’t have control over coverage (although this is an issue in other businesses, too).
• Always, always, ALWAYS make sure you double-check to see if it’s OK to post a full transcript. I transcribed the whole 20-minute interview only to have a member of the MSBNC PR staff to tell me that they don’t allow full transcriptions of interviews being posted. Boo.

Interview

How did you become games editor at MSNBC?

Kristin: I became interested in games because I married a guy who works in the industry and he would come home and tell me about his job, and I thought it was really fascinating. And the more of his friends that I met, the more I realized these guys were from very diverse backgrounds. A lot of them had gone to architecture school, had gone to art school, some of them like my husband had been science majors. They come from really diverse backgrounds and they were really passionate about what they did. They really seemed to love what they did and work really hard.

So, I just started kind of thinking that their stories were fascinating and when I was at the book publisher—because it was a technical book company—I got them to do a couple of books on how you do level design and so forth. But I got really into it, so when I interviewed here to be editor in the technology and science section, the games stuff was part of that section and my boss just thought wow that would just be great if there was somebody who knows about games, who could kind of resurrect our coverage. I guess it was kind of a bonus that I’m female because there may be other women covering games in the mainstream press, like I think there’s a woman at the BBC, but there’s not very many of us, so I think he thought that would be kind of cool and novel and so, that’s the story.

How do you decide what game-related stories news-worthy enough to take to the more mainstream audience?

Kristin: Is that in terms of coverage or what we write about? Because we take a lot of stuff off the wires. We, like most news sites out there, like Yahoo or whatever, we’re an aggregator and we take stuff off of the AP wire and the Reuters wire. Also, we’re half-owned by NBC, so we have access to a lot of their news-reporting and stuff.
[…]
In terms of coverage that I would assign or cover myself, we’re moving away from doing game reviews because I’m finding that I don’t know that gamers necessarily are coming to us for game reviews.
[…]
So, we’re scaling back on our reviews or we’re doing Mario Kart, and we did Grand Theft Auto, of course. But I’m still trying to figure out what people are coming to us for and based on what I see in the feedback that I get from the people who write to me directly, um, I’m getting a lot of younger gamers, but I’m also getting a lot of people who grew up playing videogames like me and who have kids or they have jobs and they miss gaming and they like to game and they wish that they could game more. They’re kind of torn or they want to game but they have kids and family and all that stuff and so a lot of those themes are the ones that I’m focused on.
[…]
We’re trying to stay away from, like, every week a study comes out that says that games make you violent or whatever, so I try to stay away from those unless there’s something very substantive and there’s a really large sample size. Little interesting things, like I just got a press release about a conference taking place in I believe it’s Washington DC next week called Games for Health. there are games that are being specifically designed to get kids interested in eating healthy, there’s games that teach inner-city kids how to avoid getting sexual-transmitted diseases. And so I think that’s interesting. I think that those sorts of things are really interesting. Now, I don’t know if the hardcore gamer is going to read that, but I know that my mom would and so, you know, our audience, it really runs the gamut. I get grandmothers reading my stories, I get kids reading my stories, so our coverage of videogames usually appeals to one audience or the other, so I have to write the column that appeals to both.
[…]
So, anything interesting, anything kind of off the beaten path, like I’m not interested in… it seems like a lot of the blog sites, most of which I read myself and some of the guys that I know, they’re just throwing out press releases and they’re not bothering to source and they’re not bothering to do any additional reporting and that’s not at all what we do. You know, if we’re going to write a story—we’re journalists and so if I write a story myself I’m going to do research and reporting and verify and fact-check and what-not, so that, is the difference I guess. And also, a lot of my readers could care less about a lot of the incremental stuff that gets covered on the blogs. So, in terms of what we cover, that’s how we determine it, and that’s how I determine it.
[…]
I try to have something original for the section at least three times a week, like meaning my column and then we do Talkback Games and then maybe a review or an original piece at least three times a week. There aren’t a lot of people out there that write about games or that know games really well that are trained journalists. I’ve tried and, you know, it’s difficult.

Of course, game enthusiast publications (EGM, Game Informer, Gamespot, IGN) will be more oriented toward a more hardcore audience, but do you notice any distinct differences in game trade publications and how games are covered at mainstream outlets?

Kristin: Oh, um, well if you’re talking about the enthusiast press the differences in how they cover it and we cover it—let’s see, how do I put this—um, we’re trained writers. We’re trained journalists, and the stuff that we write goes through rigorous editing. Just the kind of questions that are asked—I’ve read a lot of Q&As and it’s pretty obvious that the people—I mean, they’re enthusiasts, right—they’re enthusiasts, it’s obvious that they’re fans of the game, fans of the person they’re talking to and so they’re not necessarily going to ask uncomfortable questions. And just that you’re seeing that IGN gave Grand Theft Auto 4 like a 10 out of 10, well, they got that game really early and they’re all fans of it. Whereas, here, we got the game the weekend before and we didn't have to play it in front of anybody from Rockstar or Take Two. We played on our own terms. I’ve heard that PR people will call the enthusiast press and threaten them, and that would just never, ever in a million years happen.

VJ: Wow.

Kristin: Oh never, we would never in a million years. And they know that. And so as a result a lot of the game developers are reluctant to talk to us. I mean, they will eventually, but even people from my husband’s company [Valve]—I mean, the PR guy, won’t—I couldn’t report on it anyway—but he won’t return calls from my free-lancers because they can’t control the coverage. They can’t control the coverage at all, and that makes them uncomfortable. So, and that’s actually a lot of businesses, not just games.

I think the game industry is very leery of talking to the mainstream press because unfortunately the coverage up to this point has been kind of drive-by coverage. It’s like there’s a shooting, Jack Thompson blames videogames and the press picks up on it. But, you know, it’s evolving. I mean, mainstream coverage is evolving because there’s more people like me who actually play and that write about games and have a journalism background. And so it’s changing, but I think that the games industry is, like I said, very leery about allowing sort of the mainstream press into their club. Not that we’d want to be in it anyway.

But also, we don’t accept any swag. Like when we were reviewing Halo 3 my reviewer got like a duffle bag filled with easily like $500 worth of swag, and I made him send it back. And you know, that just doesn’t happen. I’ve been offered to—they’ve offered to fly me places. I had this one guy who wanted to write for me, and it turned out that he had been going on junkets that were paid for by Sony and I had to cut him loose because that’s just not something that we do. And, so that’s the difference. Whether it’s good, bad—you know, do the enthusiast press get better access? Possibly. But I don’t know if their coverage is better. From my opinion, it’s not. It’s not better. It doesn’t serve the reader. So that is, in my opinion, the big difference.

VJ: Yeah, I’ve heard those kinds of stories before where the enthusiast press has to pretty much sell their soul to get access to these games, and I’m kind of hoping that’s something that is going to change.

Kristin: I think so. I think that once the game developers see… well, once they grow up—I mean, there’s so much consolidation, and a company like EA will talk to me. They’re a big company and they know that “press is press.” And it’s their experience that you can’t always control the message, and I think as these companies start to mature they’re going to understand that. But, you can try to control the message, but “coverage is coverage” and it’s not that big of a deal.

Does MSNBC’s gaming section do a lot of business-related game stories? [Thinking back to what David Thomas had talked about with business reporting]

Kristin: I mean a lot of what I’m writing about has a business element. I mean, obviously the fact that games—I wrote a story recently about whether the games industry was recession-proof. And so that has a strong business aspect. The fact that the industry is growing as much as it is, and the fact that the Wii has sold as much as it has, and sort of the battle between the consoles has a strong business-consumer aspect to it. And that typically is owned by our business department, but they let me you know state that’s my area. So, there’s a little bit of a cross-over there. I don’t think you could have—the fact that it has grown in importance and why people pay more attention to it and why the mainstream press is paying more attention to it is because it’s become a big industry form a financial standpoint. So, I mean, the two sort of go hand-in-hand.

excuses, excuses, excuses

Ok, so, it might have seemed like I just fell of the face of the earth for this last month-and-a-half. (I didn't but I came pretty close to it!) Here are some excus--I mean, I'm exciting things that have happened in my life over the summer:

• Finished two summer courses on Aug. 1: psychology and a web design class that focused on HTML and CSS. Combined total of: 17 quizzes, 6 exams, 1 paper and 7 or so web design projects.
• Averaging 35 hours at work per week. That's a lot of lifeguarding, but also a lot of dollars.
  
• Participated in the annual Lifeguard Olympics. Yeah, it's about as cool as it sounds.
  
• Found a new puppy after a few weeks of searching. He's a pure Beagle named Copper who we rescued from Love-A-Stray. He's sitting in the chair across from me at the kitchen table right now. We're still teaching him about people furniture and dog furniture.
• Was planning on going to Windsor for a weekend with friends, but that fell through, so I went to Chicago with my dad. It was my first time there. Although the Bean and Sears Tower are cool, the magnificent Chicago Tribune building still sticks out in my mind the most.
• Writing some more stuff for MyGamer.
• Preparing for my 6-month trip to Japan.
  
• Trying to cram some last-minute Japanese and kanji into my head. This sometime takes the form of playing through the Japanese version of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. I can understand some of PW: AA without help, and that's a pretty good feeling.
  
• Went to an Indians game in the most fanciful of all the suites, which we later discovered had an average cost of $8,000-$10,000. Thanks, Travis!
• Hmmm... what other things have I been doing/working on? I know there has been more... ah, well, this list will do.

So, if you are one of my sources and were thinking I simply absconded with hundreds of minutes of interviews, the answer is I haven't. I plan to finish this all up this month, so hopefully you'll be hearing from me soon.

David Thomas

Finally, I present the third installment of the "People Who Actually Know What They're Talking About" with David Thomas. David was actually my first interviewee, but because we talked over the phone, rather than instant message as I did in the first few interviews, the interview took longer to transcribe and put together (and, trust me, the cruddy audio quality from my cell phone's speaker mode did not help).
________________________________________

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.

Interview:

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?

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.

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…

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: 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.

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: 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.
[…]
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.

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?

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.

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.

one-week hiatus. boo.

Even though I wanted to add many more interviews before this quarter was over, I have to take a quick break in order to dispatch the necessary evil of finals (hence the simplistic Shadow of the Colossus picture analogy). After Japanese, journalism and Buddhism finals and cleaning/moving out of the icky dorm, I will resume by June 16, and no later.
Thanks for your patience!

Margaret Robertson

It was around the time I was starting to lose faith in gaming magazines in the US. I couldn't go two pages without seeing the word "badass," previews were hyper "rah-rah," and the magazine had the overall tone of a 13-year-old boy. I stopped my regular visits to the games magazine section of the bookstore altogether. Dark times, indeed.

Skip forward a bit to my freshman year of college. I found my Journalism 101 prof was into games, and it didn't take me long to start a discussion about games journalism. After I whined about the current state of game mags, he pointed me towards Edge, a gaming magazine from the UK.

From then on, I was sold (Aaand, this is where my media bias starts to show—this magazine really is a favorite). Edge covered games with an even-keeled, intelligent maturity that I hadn't witnessed in the gaming enthusiast press before. The letters from the readers were all... insightful. Sure, the grammar and spelling from across the pond seemed a tick funny at first, but it's well worth the $10 I pay the local bookstore.

So, after three paragraphs of gushing introduction, you can bet I was excited when I got to speak with a former editor-in-chief of Edge.

Margaret Robertson, former writer and editor of Edge, is now primarily a consultant for game developers and publishers, but still does opinion pieces and features for the BBC and international newspapers. You can see more of her work at her blog. Read the interview below.

What I learned:

• This is how Margaret Robertson broke into the business: EDGE magazine forum reader/participant > mod > writer > editor. You… you can do that??
  
• Emphasized yet again that the flaws of games journalism aren’t just tied to the games enthusiast press, but expand to other enthusiast areas like travel writing. Yeesh, I need to get out more x_x
• Writing for the enthusiast publications isn't too different from writing for mainstream publications
  
• How aggressive the games industry is sometimes in chasing the elusive 10/10 review score. Competition is a good thing, but some practices can be destructive to the industry. For instance, Margaret gave some good examples of what kind of effects MetaCritic, GameRankings and Gamespot's Trax have on publishers, retailers, games journalism and the rest of the industry.
• The answer to the last question really gave me a bit of hope in seeing that enthusiast publications, who are so dependent on good relationships with publishers that will provide them with information and game demos, can have a good working relationship with developers and publishers, even if review scores aren’t favorable.

Interview:

How did you come to start working at Edge?

VideogameJournalism: So how did you come to start working at Edge?

Margaret: Actually, it was really from being involved in their forums. I'd read the magazine for years, and loved it, and in those days the forum was quite small and really articulate. I started writing a lot on the forum, and got some good feedback on what I was doing. I started moderating and got to know some of the staff a bit, and they were very encouraging when the staff writer position came up and I was thinking of applying. So I really did go from reader to forum mod to writer to editor.

Do you think the articles you've written for the BBC differ from what you wrote at Edge?

VideogameJournalism: So now that you're a games consultant, what kind of gaming articles do you mostly focus on? I've seen you have a good number of articles on the BBC site. Do you think those differ from what you used to write at Edge?

Margaret: Actually, a lot of my work now isn't writing - it's internal reports and consultancy advice for publishers and developers, but I still do some opinion pieces and features for the BBC and international newspapers. I don't do much for the specialist press any more - I wrote hundreds of pages of that when I was at Edge and was ready for a change.

It definitely differs, because you can't assume the same depth of interest or knowledge on behalf of your readership.

In some respects, though, it isn't as different as you might think. I was always very intolerant as an editor of writing that was too impenetrable-- too full of acronyms, or made too many assumptions that readers would know or remember about old or obscure games. Good writing should be as transparent as possible, even for non-specialists reading specialist publications.

And, on the other hand, I think mainstream publications often underestimate the knowledge and enthusiasm that their readers have for games, so when I'm writing for sites like the BBC I err on the side of assuming an informed readership than an uninformed one.

There's a lot of lazy shorthands in games writing ("It's GTA crossed with Sam and Max!" sort of thing) which is meaningless unless you happen to know both games.

VJ: I see... and that stems mostly from the differences in audiences?

Margaret: Well, you find that kind of thing in both mainstream and specialist writing, but I think quite a lot of the differences that are there stem from the writers not from the readers. Often in a mainstream publication like a local newspaper or a lad's mag (do you call them lad's mags? Maxim or FHM or the like) the games coverage will just be written by someone on the team who happened to volunteer for it first. So, they won't necessarily know a lot about the industry, or understand how games are made, or care about the fact that some hot new game isn't really a new idea, because there was a thing a bit like it on the PC Engine years ago that no-one remembers

Now, some people argue that makes them *better* game writers, because they're approaching it from a mindset more like the one the majority of gamers are likely to have, but I don't agree. I think the ideal writer is someone who knows all the background, but is skilled enough and knows their audience well enough, to only present what's relevant.

Do you think games journalism taken seriously? Also, some very interesting stuff on MetaCritic, GameRankings and GameTrax...

Margaret: I don't think it is taken seriously, but then again I don't think much specialist journalism is. Certainly the pay is too low to retain talented or experienced journalists (in most cases), and that's a very big problem for improving standards. I'm not sure it's prejudice that's stopping it, though—I think there's very little game writing that's deserving of the respect shown to the best travel or sport writing, say.

I'd also say that my experience is that the mountains of free swag isn't actually a problem. Most game swag is awful cheap tat that just gets thrown away, and bribes of any kind are pretty rare at an individual level. The big questions of propriety in game journalism are at a corporate level, where you have to look at the level of influence a big advertiser will have with a publication

VJ: Right... like there was that incident where Eidos, publishers of Kane and Lynch, paid Gamespot tons of money for a huge Kane and Lynch advertising campaign. Then the Gamespot reviewer [Jeff Gerstmann] gave the game a 6/10 and was fired a couple weeks later [see the bottom of this post for more on "Gerstmanngate"]. That was really upsetting to see. Do you see any solution to this kind of problem?
[*Note: While Jeff was fired from Gamespot, it is only rumor that it was because of his "controversial" review ratings. Anonymous sources hint that this was the case, but no one outside of this incident really knows what happened. And it will probably stay that way.]

Margaret: Well, I'm sure Gamespot management would tell you there wasn't a problem :)

VJ: Haha, yes, they did try. The other problem with those situations is that no one outside of the main characters of the incident ever find out what really happened :/

Margaret: I think the big problem is that the only people who can really police this are the readers. Good, responsible journalists are more likely to quit than whistleblow, which just exacerbates the problem, because it's the people with the stronger stomachs for unethical behaviour that stay on and gradually get promoted.

And it's hard to whistleblow, because a journalist is very unlikely to have any hard evidence that anything unethical has happened, as you say. A lot of the pressure can be unspoken, or be delivered by quiet informal chats, so it's hard to construct proof that anything untoward has happened. And since review scores will always be subjective, it's always possible, if not plausible, for a publisher to say 'well, we really did think that was a 2/10 game, or a 10/10 game.

I think the games industry is being shortsighted in how aggressively it chases scores, and how much weight it puts behind aggregators like MetaCritic and GameRankings. I also think there aren't enough questions asked about whether or not it's ethically sound for both of those sights to be run by CNet, which also runs GameSpot.

Certainly, I know that many publishers and retailers judge the success and likely popularity of a game purely on the basis of its Metacritic score, which I think is an incredibly crude and poorly understood metric, and one where we don't know enough about the methodology behind it.

So, for instance, Metacritic weights scores from different publications differently, but doesn't disclose how, so on Edge we would find that a 'low' score from Edge - say a 6, which wasn't a low score from us at all - would have a big impact on an average based on websites that really only score games from 70% upwards.
[...]
I think it's also worth thinking about the ethics behind things like GameSpot's GameTrax system, which is a service retailers can buy to help them gauge enthusiasm about a game. So, GameSpot tracks how many people read the previews and features about a particular game on its site, and then lets retail know how that compares to the level of interest in other games.

But, of course, the amount of traffic that an individual game will get depends heavily on the amount of advertising and access the publisher gives GameSpot. So, without any actually unethical activity--no brown envelopes of cash, or bribes, or phone calls to get people fired--GameSpot has created a system where publishers can feel pressures to give more access and advertising money to GameSpot, to protect their GameTrax rating, to ensure retailers buy into their game. It's a very clever system, but one that makes me uncomfortable, even though there's no reason for it not to be totally above board.

When you were editor-in-chief of Edge, what kind of policies did you have to ensure quality, professional and mature writing, and avoid these pitfalls to games journalism we've been talking about?

Videogame Journalism: And finally, this is also a very broad question: when you were editor-in-chief of Edge, what kind of policies did you have to ensure quality, professional and mature writing, and avoid these pitfalls to games journalism we've been talking about? To what do you credit Edge's reputation of maturity and professionalism?

Margaret: To the maturity and professionalism of its staff, pure and simple.

I only hired or commissioned people who I knew had the talent and maturity to produce work I would be proud to publish, and then everything was scrutinised and discussed very carefully. I didn't ever feel under any pressure to do anything that I had any ethical qualms about, but I also made it very clear to everyone involved that any pressure of that nature wouldn't have been successful.

You are up against very serious commercial pressures--you have to make a commercially viable product, which means you have to be sensitive to what the market wants and to the need to attract and retain advertisers, but I always found there were creative and professional ways to do it

Sometimes game publishers would be upset about a score and ring you to express their displeasure, but we'd just have a conversation where I'd explain our reasoning behind the score and it would always be resolved amicably

VJ: Oh, I see. But, would the game publishers continue to work with you in a favorable manner, even after they receive what they think is a less than favorable score?

Margaret: Because they hope the next game will do better.

They understand that not every game will be brilliant, and that if they want the buzz and commercial success that a 10/10 score can bring a game, then it has to be offset against other games getting low scores.

"Gerstmanngate"—The Internet's Reaction
When this rumor/story first appeared, gamers and readers were pissed. They got mad. Forums exploded and Gamespot had to temporarily disable comments on the Kane and Lynch review. Here's a roundup of interesting reactionary stuff that should leave you with a simple message: Gamers are a passionate, crafty crowd. They're generally good-natured, sometimes a little brash, yet generally good people. But anger them and you will pay.

• Penny Arcade comic on Gerstmann's firing
• Someone hacked the poll at GameFAQs another site owned by CNet
• Forums at Gamespot and NeoGaf
  
• the EGM/Ziff Davis staff rallies!
• A Youtube video of a fake trailer for the fictional movie satrizing "Gerstmanngate"
  

Kyle Orland - Interview

For the first in a series of interviews I like to call "People Who Actually Know What They're Talking About" (don't even try to make an acronym out of that), I spoke with Kyle Orland. He's a free-lance games journalist who has been writing about games since he started fansite Super Mario Bros. HQ in 1997. Since then he's written for several gaming publications and now primarily Joystiq, Gamespot, and Crispy Gamer.

What I learned?:

• Games journalism is still relatively young, just as videogames is still a young media. At this point in movies, there still hadn't been "Gone With the Wind" or "The Wizard of Oz."
• Newspapers are cutting a lot of their media critics. Being a journalism major, I really feel like I should have heard about this before.
  
• In enthusiast gaming publications, there tends to be a lot of coverage of triple-A titles (most recently Grand Theft Auto 4) and not a lot of focus on independent, or indie, developers. This can make it difficult for indie developers to break into the industry successfully.
• And digging around on his blog, I found a link to the Videogame Journos Network, aptly subtitled "because the world needs another social network." The Game Journos Network doesn't look like it has quite the social buzz levels of Facebook or Myspace, but being connected in this circle of contacts couldn't hurt the aspiring games journalist.
  

Interview (lite version):
See full, raw instant messenger version here.

Differences in videogame enthusiast publications and mainstream media coverage?

VideogameJournalism: of course, videogame trade publications will be more oriented towards that "hardcore" audience, but do you notice any distinct differences in videogame trade publications and mainstream media coverage?

Kyle: Yeah, and most of them spring from that difference in audience. The mainstream coverage tends to have to explain things more and focuses on the new and exciting stuff. Where the specialist publications will talk about anything and everything.

But we're starting to see a middle ground develop, I think, at outlets like Newsweek and MTV. Their online coverage has been well-informed but still accessible and interesting to people who don't live and breath this stuff, I think.
…
VJ: Do you see any one of those three levels gaining more ground or growing more than the others in the near future? Or do you think they'll all develop at a fairly even pace?
…
Kyle: Well, I feel like mainstream game coverage is a victim of bad timing in a way. Newspapers are cutting book, theater and movie critics left and right, going freelance or simply neglecting to cover those areas. In such an environment, it's hard to pitch game coverage, especially to older editors who might not play games or know anything about them.
The specialist press is getting kind of saturated too. I mean, how many outlets do you need running the same screenshots and trailers? You need a really unique angle or voice to break through the noise. The middle ground is probably the way with the most potential (as usual).
…
I think as the gaming audience gets older, and as those who didn't grow up with games start to leave the positions of editorial power, you'll see games joining TV, movies and other entertainment as a pillar of entertainment reporting.

Why isn't games journalism taken seriously?

VideogameJournalism: So, in your opinion, what do you think is the main reason that games journalism isn't taken seriously?

Kyle: There's a loaded question =)

VJ: haha, sorry.

Kyle: I think it's mainly because games journalism, like video games, is a young medium. At this point in the history of film (about 40 years in) we hadn't had "Gone With the Wind," "Lawrence of Arabia" or "The Wizard of Oz."

So, the subject itself isn't really mature enough, though that's starting to change. In the journalism specifically, a lot of journalists got their start because they liked games and could kind of string together a few sentences. In the early '90s, the people writing game magazines by and large didn't have journalism degrees or advanced training in writing... they just knew games. Standards are increasing these days, but there are a lot of ethical and institutional problems still out there.

Game journalism's ethical and institutional problems? (aka, swag)

VideogameJournalism: I see... could you maybe touch on what you think are the greatest among these ethical and institutional problems?

Kyle: The standards for what is and isn't acceptable to accept from a game company are all over the place. Outlets will constantly trade credibility for early access and that "exclusive first review." Or go to lavish junkets to get access to a hot new game... along with a trip on a Zero G flight, or a week at a Hawaiian beach house (with the developer), or attendance at aparties that fill up Dodger stadium (like Sony's at E3).
It's no different from the rest of entertainment reporting, really, but I think the games press is so young that they're more succeptible to be swayed by this stuff
...
But more than the influence of schwag, I think the games press is too quick to jump on the heavily hyped games. Look at all the coverage Grand Theft Auto 4 is getting. There are plenty of other games out there that could use a fraction of that attention. But if they don't have the marketing budget or the big name behind them... it's tough to break through.

Now Grand Theft Auto 4 deserves a lot of coverage... people are interested in it. But it seems a bit disproportionate sometimes. New franchises and new companies have a really tough time getting attention.

Videogames may not have reached the maturity of film,
but that's definitely changing.

introductions

Hello and welcome to the videogame journalism blog. This will be home to my inquiries and exploits in the ever-evolving field of videogames journalism. I would like this to eventually be a resource for other aspiring game journalists. It's a highly competitive field, and, in such a field, any information you can get helps. And, my oh my, do I have so many ideas for this site. So, a precursor list of what (hopefully) is to come from this:

• First, evaluate the differences between how trade publications and mainstream media report on and package their games reporting.
• Because I'm taking an online journalism class this quarter, I'd like to evaluate some of the gaming sections of online websites from mainstream media and the online versions of trade publications.
  
• I would also like to look back at other media (comics, movies, television) and check the archives from mainstream sources to see what kind of reporting was being done on these media as they debuted. Look for similarities/differences in games journalism. I don't think this will be too ground-breaking, but I think it would be interesting to look at.
• Accrue and aggregate different articles on breaking into games journalism, writing tips, other interesting things, etc. This aspect will be pretty similar to what Video Game Media Watch already does.
• Develop my own little videogame styleguide along the way.
  
• more later...

I hope this gives a good idea of what I want to accomplish here. Feel free to send suggestions, comments and criticisms at any time. I love that stuff.

=Meghan