I’m not going to link to any of the handwringing articles over this because I don’t want to bore my readers to death. For those of you who are already following the situation, here is my take:
(1) No one who is talking actually knows why Gerstmann is no longer working at Gamespot.
(2) Everyone who is talking is speculating.
(3) All of the various posts people are citing that ‘confirm’ the rumors, don’t.
(4) In 2 or 3 weeks, everyone claiming that they are boycotting Gamespot because CNET eats babies and rapes puppies will be happily reading it again, and bitching that their new favorite Zelda game didn’t get a high enough numeric score. Every so often someone will ask “Hey, remember Jeff Gerstmann?” and someone else will reply “No?”
But hey, for the sake of argument let’s assume the most scurrilous, scandalous rumors were true, and the guy was fired for a single bad review based on an angry phone call from a cigar-chewing fat guy at Eidos. The bigger issue here is that everyone knows that nearly all “enthusiast” coverage of gaming is awful. All “enthusiast” coverage of everything is awful, whether the topic is stereos, photos, knitting, or what have you. So what’s with the Captain Renault act all of a sudden? “I’m shocked, shocked to discover that there is a feedback loop between publicists promoting games and writers looking for things to write about.”
If Jeff Gerstmann hadn’t been fired, would you think that Gamespot’s ass-kissing coverage and laudatory reviews of terrible games were any more accurate? They — and every other gaming magazine that gives numeric scores — have been doing this for years. If you really think this represents some sort of sea change in the magazine industry, what desert island have you been living on? The tragedy of this kerfuffle is that it prolongs the polite fiction that, were it not for Evil Publishers, game magazines would somehow be bastions of integrity. But as any freelance writer will tell you, you don’t need any sort of formal system of rewards and punishments to learn that biting the hand that feeds you is an activity best left to other, more unemployed writers.
Look: in the long run, readers get the sort of writing they deserve. Gamespot’s reviews are twaddle not because CNET hypothetically sacrificed one heroic editor before the altar of some shambling corporate presence, but because that’s the sort of review the site’s readers want.
I’ve read Gamespot for years, not because I love every review, but because I have never found a better site that reviews every game for the platforms I care about (PC, Xbox, Wii, DS at the moment). With respect to the “scandal”, all the main game review sites are in the same boat as far as I can tell — they’re big sites with lots of ads from publishers. It could have happened to any of them, presumably.
As a corollary, I’d love to hear about a better site that systematically reviews games (or aggregates reviews from blogs like this one!), even if I’d need several sites to get the coverage I want — it just means a couple more feeds to add to Google Reader!
You think the typical Gamespot reader, who googles for a game and clicks on the link, is making a conscious decision to read corrupt reviews? I don’t think the question of corruption crosses the reader’s mind. Everyone knows about grade inflation, and they know “90″ doesn’t mean better than 90% of all games. They click the top-N list and look at the distribution.
Watershed changes in the white collar world of journalism don’t come about by people complaining about the status quo while tacitly supporting it. We need these kinds of things to rally around if we hope to make a real difference. I think this particular brouhaha may fizzle, but the next one will be stronger for it.
Someday we’ll get the kind of independence that automobile reviewers enjoy.
The set of people who google for a game and click on the Gamespot link is 100% disjoint from the set of people shouting “Remember Gerstmann! ¡Viva La Revoluçion!”
And no, I really don’t think the people in that first set understand that “90″ means “this game is a pretty bad, but I don’t want to get yelled at by rabid fans.”
The way to change the culture is not to spread rumors and rally around non-events, but to produce more and better writing, and to consume better writing in preference to crap writing when you see it.
Thanks peterb. I stopped reading Gamespot years ago and frankly have a hard time figuring out why anyone would. Their reviews are only useful at the margins: over nine or under seven. Pretty much anyone who reads reviews and plays games has figured that out. Tleaves reviews, on the other hand, are very useful.
Also, what’s the deal with screenshots? Why do people like looking at screenshots so much?