i cannot imagine caring about corruption in game reviews
i cannot imagine caring about corruption in game reviews
The global video game industry was valued at around $65 billion in 2011, and has likely grown since then. I don’t have figures on exactly how much reviews change sales figures, but it seems prima facie that they would make a non-trivial difference. If that assumption is true, a pattern of consistent corruption in reviews could easily change sales figures by hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of a well-known reviewer’s career. Entirely aside from feelings about the video games themselves, that seems significant from a purely economic standpoint? I can easily imagine myself caring about, say, publishing fraud, misappropriation of government funds, or cheating in sports, and I can’t really see what the difference is besides the fact that sports and video games are “low culture” and there’s a certain social cachet involved in trumpeting one’s lack of interest in such.
(None of this is meant to defend the accusations of review-related corruption various segments of the internet have made against Zoe Quinn, which as far as I can tell are wholly trumped up, and would not merit the firestorm of abuse she’s received even if they were true.)
The more obvious comparison is to movie and music reviews, where both the “corruption” that gamer gaters complain about (reviewers making political judgements) and the actual corruption (publishers forming closer relationships with journalists, buttering them up and withdrawing access if they don’t like their attitude) have been present since the start, without this being a scandal per se.
Have you never heard someone decide a film must be crap because the “work of genius five stars” quotes on the poster are from minor (and thus more easily pressured) publications, or because the producers have limited previews to soft critics (Harry Knowles was particularly infamous for this). Have you never heard a critic referred to as “rentaquote”. Wouldn’t you think the world had gone a little crazy if a scandal started over this well existence of these phenomenon?
The two major ethics-in-entertainment hoohas of the late 1950s, over radio payola and rigged TV quiz shows, were subjects of widely covered Congressional investigations, with honest-to-god laws passed in response.
A better parallel to the whole #GamerGate thing might be film criticism. The 1960s saw a crop of high-profile critics working in a distinctly literary style - Sontag, Kael, Sarris, and their imitators.
On the one hand they elevated the field, introducing auteur theory and promoting the creatively visionary “New Hollywood”, and the best critical pieces of the era were and still are worth reading in their own right.
On the other hand a lot of that New Hollywood stuff they were boosters for was indulgent crap, and under their influence film reviews started following book reviews in treating the work at hand as a jumping-off point for whatever tangential, often political, subject the critic felt like writing an essay about.
The subsequent rise of Siskel and Ebert and their consumer-oriented reviewing (reducible to a simple thumb-based watch/don’t watch binary) can be read as a backlash against these trends. Roll in their format change (from print to TV) and the ability this granted them to augment their reviews with excerpts from the work, and there’s a clear precedent here for a shift to Let’s Plays and YouTube reviews.