Let’s Fuck Some Games
Back in January, I interviewed Chris Grant, the editor-in-chief of the new journalistic endeavor Vox Games. The interview consisted of his goals and plans for the new site, why he left Joystiq, and thoughts about what he’d like to see the site become. The conversation also segued into a more general discussion about the commercial viability of videogame criticism and what sites actually do to make money.
In the past week, Vox Games more-or-less officially launched as a temporary subset of The Verge, a tech news site and part of the same parent company that owns Vox Games. The writing there is generally good and mostly inconsequential—the sort of stuff you’d see on any widely-read professional gaming news site. I’m not really sure why all these dudes had to leave their other jobs to recreate the same stuff in a new place, but I guess that’s a little like asking why people eventually move out of their parents’ house to go live in a different house in the same town.
At any rate, I just listened to what I could of the inaugural episode of The Besties, the new Vox Games podcast. The name has a twofold meaning—the four hosts are all the best of friends, and the conceit of the show is a sort of round-robin elimination where each week they will each pick one game that is “the best” and… I don’t know actually, because I shut the podcast off after 5 minutes.
Leaving aside the poor production quality, the show could be interesting—the concept is just different enough from most gaming podcasts that with the right talent, it could be made interesting. But the show is infested with the tiresome dudebro nonsense that is found so easily in this culture—they’re all “besties” and they really want us to know that. The show even opens with some inane joke about how one of them is boring—certainly what you want to open a brand-new show with. Of course this brings about uproarious laughter.
Let me be clear—I hate most podcasts. They have bad production standards, the hosts are terrible, and the content is uninteresting. But since they’re largely an amateur medium, who really cares? Let the chaff fall to the bottom and the wheat rise to the top, and we all get something to kill our commutes or desk jobs with.
Look, I know of which I speak—I co-created a podcast that was largely me and my best friend sitting in our apartment trading insults and talking about games sporadically at best. However, we created it three years ago, and the only models we had were the dudebro podcasts. We got some listeners, we got a bit experimental, then we hit the wall of what we could do with the format and decided to kill the show. In short, we matured.
But when a new site like Vox Games, a site which has some pretty substantial writing talent behind it, which has money behind it, releases a podcast that is the hoariest of dudebro podcast clichés and doesn’t even seem to be aware of it—that doesn’t give me hope for the medium or the site. It’s enough to get four people in a room—doesn’t matter who they are—and have them ramble on about inside jokes and laugh and generally have a great time.
And this is troubling not just because it means there’s a ton of extremely mediocre radio out there—if that were the only thing wrong with this, it’d be easy enough to ignore—it’s troubling because professionals, people that are getting paid to do this, aren’t trying to do anything better. And what’s worse, podcasts like The Besties set the tone for other podcasts, who get the message that you don’t need to try and it’s probably not worth the effort to.
To “The Besties”: I don’t care that you’re friends, I don’t care what you think of each other, I don’t care that you find each other the most hilarious thing ever, and I certainly don’t want to be your friend or be involved in some weird fantasy that I am your friend. Stop making a joke of this medium and start trying to push it forward. And if you’re not interested in doing that—not every gaming site in existence needs to have a podcast anymore than they need to have a site flower—then go write another blog post about the collector’s edition of the new Modern Warfare game and leave podcasting to people that care about it.
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