Kotaku’s Greatest Bricklayer
The only person who has to apologize for stories on Kotaku is me. It was my call to run the Sonic story…I had expected it to come off as funnier. That was an error of judgment. But, more significantly… I owe our readers an apology for okaying a story that implies all gamers are straight men. I should’ve caught that. It’s no small thing. I must also add that humor and writing about sex isn’t off-limits at Kotaku. We just have to do it right and not forget our own standards.
Stephen Totilo, via Twitter.
Stephen:
We’ve never met or spoken. If you know me at all it’s because you’ve briefly corresponded with my creative partner Eric Brasure, or because I’m that guy who keeps writing all of these articles about how you’re doing everything wrong. I’ve been chronicling your questionable decisions with the same disturbingly lusty glee that Perez Hilton writes about starlets with cocaine problems. I’m not even, you know, enjoying it any more. I’ve got other things I want to write about. I’m just kind of tired. I want to move on.
But I’m sitting, thinking about what to do for dinner, when I check my Twitter feed and notice a bunch of snarky tweets about some article that Kotaku published. This time–and maybe I should just write a generic Mad Libs-style template to break out every time this happens and save myself the effort–we’ve got an article by guest writer Kris Kail entitled “How I Achieved Greatness on a Sonic the Hedgehog-Themed Bed“. The article is your typical fratboy braggery about how some douchebag with Sonic bedsheets managed to find a girl to have actual penis-in-vagina sex on them. I tend to take a hard line about personal details, specifically a line which says I genuinely do not care about your personal life one bit. I dunno, maybe that’s one of those weird things about me: I’m completely, 100%, totally, filled to the brim with a lack of interest in the sex life of a crass stranger. I find Twitter isn’t that conservative–I tend to find checking my feed to be an exercise in oversharing TMI–but the general consensus is that this article was a bit misguided. Half of the criticism focused on the fact that the article seemed to define “gamer” as “straight male”, something which was found to be pretty marginalizing; the other half decided that the article, quite simply, was tasteless and rather unfunny.
The latter half of that is subjective. (Okay, it’s not–the article was tasteless and unfunny.) And I’m not even sure I even need to go into any detail on the first half. But I would like to address your apology, quoted above.
See…it’s shit like this that makes me think you might be really bad at your job.
Way back in last week you posted a pissy little rant to Reddit complaining about how people tend to focus on Kotaku’s mistakes and ignore its successes. I agree. It’s totally fucking unfair that people ignore it when you work hard on something you’re proud of and make a big deal about a tiny mistake you make. But–come on, man! You seem completely incapable of learning from your mistakes.
If this particular article were an anomaly, that would be one thing–a simple apology, regretting the oversight and promising to catch it in the future. But–come on, man! You have to have known that this was a bad idea. Pop quiz: What are some of the main criticisms leveled at Kotaku? Off the top of my head, most people dislike Kotaku for its reputation as a home of dudebro mouthbreather gamer culture, for its poorly-written articles, for its crassness, for its marginalization of women and sexual minorities, for its pointless stories that only have the most tangential relationship to games. I see you talking about how you reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally want Kotaku to be a great site and how you publish all these suuuuuuuuuuuuper good articles that are well-written and everything. I see you talk about how you want the work to speak for itself. But–come on, man! That’s exactly what’s happening! We’re seeing articles like this–articles which you publish despite the fact that they embody every single goddamn criticism anyone has ever made about your site–and you’re wondering why we aren’t paying attention to the good articles?
You can’t have it both ways.
It’s getting old. Not just you–I’m picking on you because you’re pretty much the easiest target around these days–but so many people write really questionable things and hope that an apology will fix everything. Far better to not fuck up in the first place. Mistakes? That’s fine. Ignorance? Unforgivable.
What is it? Do you not know what the criticisms of your own site are? Or do you just not care? You talk about how you’re trying to revamp Kotaku’s image–why aren’t you supersensitive to everything which gets published on the site? Kail is a guest writer. He’s not staff. Do you genuinely mean to tell me that you read this guy’s pitch, thought it was in line with your current editorial mission and standards, accepted the article, read the article, and still thought it was in line with your current editorial mission and standards?
You are expecting to be judged by an imaginary site that seems to exist only in your mind, and you get angry when we criticize the actual site.
Let’s look at a passage from Mark Twain’s last published story, “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven“:
The greatest military genius our world ever produced was a brick-layer from somewhere back of Boston…. You see, everybody knows that if he had had a chance he would have shown the world some generalship that would have made all generalship before look like child’s play and ’prentice work. But he never got a chance….[E]verybody knows, now, what he would have been,—and so they flock by the million to get a glimpse of him whenever they hear he is going to be anywhere.
Twain’s vision of Heaven is one in which potential outweighs one’s actual accomplishments. It’s a nice idea–I’d much rather simply accept the Pulitzer than go through the process of actually writing the novel that merits it. And certainly our sense of justice and fairness leads us to wish for a world where circumstances don’t conspire against us, where we can do the work we want to without practical concerns. But that’s Heaven, not Earth. On Earth, in the real world, we may want to make a site which publishes all of these great articles and only great articles–but Stephen? You’re not a general. You may want to be a general, and that’s a fine ambition, but you’re a bricklayer. You will be judged as a bricklayer so long as you’re laying bricks.
Stephen, you are laying bricks and lamenting that we’re not celebrating your military genius.
We don’t live in Heaven. We’re judging your site by Earth’s rules. I think you need to begin to do that yourself.
–Richard Goodness
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