An Oasis in the Desert

I have just finished listening to the first half of the day-one E3 podcast. I didn’t get the chance to follow it live as it starts at 4am UK time but jumped in as soon as the feed went up, and while listening browsed through some of the comments on Giant Bomb. Obviously having not listened live I didn’t see the chat, which I understand from Gary Whitta’s comment on the show and looking at some of the posts on here was rather displeased with what they heard.

  I have to say this makes me very sad. What I heard in this section was an hour and a half of excellent games journalism with the regulars we love and then some interesting, intelligent guests from different ends of the industry who could provide some differing viewpoints and debate. It was very enlightening for me, and I thought would be for most people, to hear about the problems of getting games published, what it is like to work for a big publisher/organisation, and the general insides of the gaming industry.

 However it appears some people on this site think differently. These complaints seemed to boil down to two main points. The first being we want to hear about the games, and the second we don’t want Suits on our Podcast.

   The former is easily dealt with: You will hear about games, just be patient and you will get hours upon hours of Podcasting with the crew joking about E3 and all it holds, however some of us are actually interested in the industry and we would like Giant Bomb to have a small chance to educate us.

 The second point is more interesting and it goes to the heart of the current malaise in games journalism. I can understand why people don’t want to listen to corporate suits, they are like politicians, toeing the party line, afraid to admit mistakes or fault and generally would rather you remained stupid and handed over the cash than engage in intelligent debate. And yes, if you look at the rest of gaming press this is what happens when the Suits turn up. Watch Game Trailers, or Spike, or go to IGN and see the awful softball questions that get thrown at execs and VP’s.

   “Oh you have a great new game coming out, tell me, just how great is it?”

   “You must be very excited to have implemented Kinect in everything?”

   “Tell me just how good will Moronic Shooter 5 be?”

You get the picture.

Games journalism for the vast majority of the time is not worthy of the name, it is just PR dressed up as news, and I think why the majority of people don’t want suits on the Bombcast is they are afraid this is what they are going to get.

 However if you listen to the actual programme no PR puffery was allowed. What it most reminded me of was a good, highbrow news programme (with added swearing and fart jokes) where they get 2 people of opposing views (Jonathan Blow and the Microsoft guys –2vs1 unfair I know, but maybe it takes 2 suits to make a real thinking human) and let them debate an issue of the day.

 All I heard on here was the Microsoft guys being challenged over and again about Kinect, Advertising, Cert and other issues. No softballing here. If you really listen to the programme what we got was an hour and a half of intelligent debate about interesting topics. REAL JOURNALISM FOLKS! That is a rare thing in the gaming industry and I salute Giant Bomb for having the gumption and brains to do it. 

If you want jokes about games, you’ll get them I’m sure. I haven’t listened to the second half of the Podcast but I imagine there was some degree of foolishness about video games. If you are worried about a corporate influence, I understand, but what we got was more interesting because there was some corporate influence to challenge.    However if it is just that you don’t like intelligent debate: Fuck Off. The rest of the internet will have you covered.