{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "The thing with Polygon and Kotaku renouncing review embargos, and going in on Ubisoft over AC:Unity, and retroactively...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/102580056373/", "html": "

The thing with Polygon and Kotaku renouncing review embargos, and going in on Ubisoft over AC:Unity, and retroactively downgrading Destiny\u2026 that\u2019s brilliant, and I bet most people don\u2019t even make the connection to hashtag Gamergate.

They finally did what they should\u2019ve, took a step back from the fray to calm down and plot how to turn the whole thing to their advantage. And if they pull it off they could actually come out stronger from the whole thing. They\u2019ve already earned the indie devs\u2019 loyalty from acting as their champion, and their media compatriots for championing their prerogatives against the unwashed masses (I expected Salon to jump onside because obviously, but seeing the fucking London Review of Books do it first and harder was an eyeopener). Now by actually jiujitsuing \u201cethics in game journalism\u201d to reposition themselves as champions of their alienated audience, and using it as a club to extract concessions from the AAA studios - well, if they pull it off that\u2019s pretty much running the table right there.

They\u2019ll cool down on the SJW \u201cmuh intersectionality in vidya\u201d beat, you mark my words. Maybe poke the hornets\u2019 nest for attention every now and then, but the free ride is over and now they know that costs them more than it pays off. They\u2019ll just quietly commission less and less of that stuff. They\u2019ll never make a public show of contrition, that was never in the cards, that\u2019s not how Gawker and its bastard children roll, that\u2019s never been how they roll.

Nick Denton\u2019s brilliant stroke, going all the way back to Gawker\u2019s origins as Gawker Stalker, was to not even make pretense to the American tradition of Sulzbergerian evenhanded postwar monopoly journalism, but to go the British competitive no holds barred venomous one, all taking shots at each other, stirring up witch hunts to boost circulation. It\u2019s been like that for a long time, where multiple outlets are in competition for the same national readership - that\u2019s where 1984\u2019s \u201cprolefeed\u201d and \u201cTwo Minutes Hate\u201d come from. That\u2019s why Milo Yiannopoulos, from the British system himself, was the one landing all the hardest blows on the other side of this fight.

I mean, it\u2019s interesting. It\u2019s interesting, and I like living in interesting times, but there\u2019s a reason that phrase comes from a backhanded blessing - as a way to run a culture it\u2019s fucking dangerous, it leads to pillarisation. The Dutch model - Protestant/Catholic/secular social democrat - is safe enough with the European confessional wars well behind us, but the 19th and early 20th century models, where the pillars could be \u201cmonarchist\u201d or \u201ccommunist\u201d or \u201cfascist\u201d, (or even the pre-20th century American party-affiliated yellow press), that was fucking dangerous. Journalists talked their countries into war, into revolution, to boost their numbers and make their names. There\u2019s a reason British libel law is so strict, and that\u2019s to create some leverage to tamp things down when they start stepping on toes that matter.

I mean hell, we\u2019re on course for a full-blown constitutional crisis in a decade or two in no small part because Murdoch imported the British model.

"}