Why We Edit
We recently pubished an article on our website called “Let’s Edit: Jonathan Holmes’s ‘Dragon Quest X to be revealed later this month (updated)‘”. “Let’s Edit” is going to be a regular series based on a blog post from last summer (“Let’s Edit: Jim Sterling’s ’60% of GameFaqs users don’t have girlfriends’“) [In the interest of full disclosure, we've made some extremely minor structural changes from the original blog post in order to bring it in line with the format that the series will take; no content has been changed.]
We created the Let’s Edit series in order to address just how bad videogame journalism is. Regular listeners of the podcast know that this issue has been one of our bugaboos going back almost to the beginning of the show; Kotaku Strikes Again, where we highlight a particularly bad piece of videogame “reporting”, was one of our first segments. Most of what you read on videogame news sites is poorly written and lazily researched (if it’s researched at all). Perhaps worst of all, egregious cut-and-paste jobs of industry press releases are commonplace, lending the entire endeavor an air of complete and total hackery. Most game writers will attempt to avoid criticism of these issues by claiming to not be journalists at all. They seem to want it both ways–to have the status and reputation (and industry access) that the press enjoys but with the lack-of-responsibility and frivolity of a fansite. By positioning themselves on this fence, they not only do themselves a disservice, they also do major harm to videogame culture as a whole. Destructoid’s immature and unfunny scatology, Kotaku’s obsession with breasts and schoolgirls, and Joystiq’s incoherent writing only bolsters the impression of gamers as illiterate, creepy manchildren. Humor is fine. Sex is fine. And no one is expecting knifelike prose. But all of these seem to overshadow the pretense of journalism that these sites legitimately have. The writers come off as overgrown fratboys doing a gross parody of a newsroom.
Sites such as Ben Paddon’s “Games Journalists are Incompetent Fuckwits” have gone the first step–Paddon has gained no small amount of notoriety for rubbing many writers’ faces in their own writing and calling them out on their inappropriate and unseemly behavior. However, it’s our opinion that merely calling out behavior is not enough to change it.
Let’s Edit is intended to be a series of line-by-line responses to articles that we feel are particularly egregious. Instead of simply making fun, we’re going to point out exactly where a writer is misinformed, has not done proper research, has misinterpreted statistics, or has otherwise delivered a poor article. We won’t generally be addressing these pieces on a sentence level, because that wouldn’t fix bad reportage, although we will be calling out particularly poorly-written sentences or spelling errors.
We take this approach because we have more of an issue with the seeming lack of editorial control rampant throughout the gaming “press”. Many of the stories that appear on videogame blogs should not have been written, let alone published. If someone was responsible for the editorial content and voice, there would be an overall higher quality of articles–at the very least, someone would notice typos. It’s unclear whether the absent editor is due to the large number of posts (Destructoid proudly boasts that it publishes 40-60 posts per day, as if this is a bragging point) which makes it difficult for an editor to do his job, or whether the sites don’t care.
So really, that’s what Let’s Edit is: Since no one seems to be doing the job of the editor, it seems that falls to us.
After the publication of our Let’s Edit of the Destructoid article “Dragon Quest X to be revealed later this month (updated)”, their post was removed–viewing it simply shows the message, “This post is not live and only visible to editors”. There’s a verb missing in there–but let’s not harp on that point. It’s not arrogance to suggest that our post had something to do with this–we alerted the writer via Twitter about our article, he responded, and the post was removed the next day. However, sweeping this under the rug is not an acceptable response: Instead of owning up to a mistake, instead of attempting to fix it, instead of admitting to wrongdoing, they’ve performed a Ministry of Truth unpersoning here. This was not our intention. We are looking for videogame journalists to have a higher quality of work, for a new era of honesty and openness and legitimacy. Pretending this never happened is not the way to go.
We’ve used Destructoid stories for both of our Let’s Edits at this point. While it’s certainly extremely easy to use stories from that site–it’s not known for its restrained, intelligent manner–our intention is not to keep picking on them. While this won’t be the last time we use them, we will be picking from a wider variety of sites.
It’s our hope that Lets Edit will not only be entertaining, but will hopefully have some sort of impact. We obviously have a great love for videogames and the community, and–we’ve always said this–we all deserve better. All we’re asking is that writers start to think before they write, and that sites question their editorial practices. You know what would make us happiest? If we didn’t have to do other peoples’ jobs for them.
Want more Let’s Edit? We’ve got it!
Filed Under: Blog
