\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\ni cannot imagine caring about corruption in game reviews
\nThe global video game industry was valued at around $65 billion in 2011, and has likely grown since then. I don\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019t really see what the difference is besides the fact that sports and video games are \u201clow culture\u201d and there\u2019s a certain social cachet involved in trumpeting one\u2019s lack of interest in such.
\n(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\u2019s received even if they were true.)
\nThe more obvious comparison is to movie and music reviews, where both the \u201ccorruption\u201d 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\u2019t like their attitude) have been present since the start, without this being a scandal per se.
\nHave you never heard someone decide a film must be crap because the \u201cwork of genius five stars\u201d quotes on the poster are from minor (and thus more easily pressured)\u00a0publications, or because the producers have limited previews to soft critics (Harry Knowles was particularly infamous for this). Have you never heard a critic\u00a0referred\u00a0to as \u201crentaquote\u201d. Wouldn\u2019t you think the world had gone a little crazy if a scandal started over this well existence of these phenomenon?\u00a0
\n
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 \u201cNew Hollywood\u201d, 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\u2019t 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\u2019s a clear precedent here for a shift to Let\u2019s Plays and YouTube reviews.