A dream that I’ve had for most of my life has been to get paid to either 1) write for a video game company or 2) write about video games. It combines two of the great loves of my life, which should be obvious from the career choices and their similarities. As such, I always find it fascinating to see behind the curtain a little bit for either career.
In this case, the peek happens to be the life of a video games journalist. Over at Kill Screen, writer Joseph Bernstein recently put up a piece titled Intern Affairs: Behind Closed Doors, which happens to be a series about the time he spent as an intern at GamesRadar. This particular entry covers the world of previews and handshakes between developers and journalists, and it’s actually kind of fascinating to see how the sausage is made, so to speak.
Bernstein basically shows the way previews are handled in some cases, and the gang mentality that occurs because of that as developers try to win you over. In the end, Bernstein even posts the preview he wrote as the result of this encounter, which happened to be for the game MX vs. ATV: Untamed for the Wii. I don’t think it necessarily exposes anything shady or surprising, I just find it interesting.
So what do you guys think after reading this? Does it jade you a little to what goes on behind the scenes at some video game sites? Go!
Source – Kill Screen, Image Source – PlatformNation
Im not too terribly surprised at this. The skill required to make the games is high, even if the game is bad it usually is still made by talented people. Im not surprised at times that people have to push something they know to be subpar, just because their higher ups made them. Someone had to sell Cooking Mama as an amazing game. It has to be done at times.
Interesting read. I didn’t look at the preview he wrote, but it’s nice to get an inside look. It sounds like the videogame preview is just another kind of advertisement almost, which I’ve always kind of taken it to be. In such a short time, of course developers only focus on the good. And why wouldn’t a gaming site want to sound excited about every game that was coming out? I mean, if gaming sites were in the business of shooting down a game they spent twenty minutes watching someone else play, imagine how they would be treated. They’d never get an exclusive, among other things.
It’s a little disturbing that the preview was already written, and I wonder how often they get changed…my guess is not often. As long as the reviews remain opinionated, though, there’s not too much shadiness about this.
I’ve been calling video games “journalism” nothing more than Consumer Reports for sometime now and honestly, I hate being proven right. I wish it were something more than that.
But it’s not.
This is the kind of thing that’s discouraging me from going into video game “journalism”. I cannot stand playing pretend and giving out 9.8’s. I want to produce some actual valuable work and not told how to act when in reality I want to take to developers and see what they actually did to improve their game. Video game design or bust.
[quote comment=”16035″]This is the kind of thing that’s discouraging me from going into video game “journalism”. I cannot stand playing pretend and giving out 9.8’s. I want to produce some actual valuable work and not told how to act when in reality I want to take to developers and see what they actually did to improve their game. Video game design or bust.[/quote]
He’s not talking about reviews. The developer didn’t give him a review scored 9.8 that he could pretend he wrote. He’s talking about PREviews…much different.