Fellow hacks, this video game reviewer is on to us
- Journalists like yours truly have an inflated if fragile sense of self. Every now and then, we need someone to take us down a few notches
Being a couch potato watching YouTube all day isn’t entirely wasteful, just 99.9 per cent. The other 0.1 per cent showed up for me yesterday. It was an excellent characterisation of the state of global journalism.
The guy wasn’t an Oxbridge professor or a heavy French thinker, but a popular reviewer of computer games and movies called The Critical Drinker, with 1.24 million subscribers.
He was lamenting the state of computer game journalism, but he might as well be talking about my august profession in general. I include myself among his targets. Here goes, “How To Be The Bestest Journalism Ever” (sic).
“There is a well-known fact that today’s crop of journalists are some of the best, most professional and trustworthy individuals that you can ever wish to meet,” he prefaced. “Whether it’s reporting on current events, politics or the world of entertainment, these fearless seekers of truth can always be relied upon to ask difficult questions and deliver hard-hitting, impartial and unbiased answers.”
Sarcasm there? “And no members of this esteemed profession are held in higher regard than video game journalists,” he said. That’s true, they’re definitely better than talking heads on TV.
The Critical Drinker continued: “What do I have to do … to join their august ranks? For starters, you may assume you have to be passionate about video games, well-versed in their history, and definitely skilled at playing them. But that’s just not the case. In fact, your incompetent playing style and lacklustre interest is no longer a barrier to success because most game developers have helpfully included a journalist mode in their games, specifically designed for people just like you.”
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I have heard similar criticism about foreign correspondents as well as war reporters “embedded” with the US military, which offers sanitised press briefings in PowerPoint.
“That way, you can sit back with your decaf soy latte and watch the pretty colours on screen as the game basically completes itself,” he added.
“You will feel totally comfortable to offer your opinions on the game with absolute authority. Don’t trouble yourself with … trivial technical details … You got better things to do: activism!
“You need to ask: ‘How many characters in this game are attracted to people of the same sex?’; ‘Why aren’t there more ethnic people in this historically accurate game set in medieval Europe?’; and ‘Why is there so much water [in the game]?’”
The last one came from a Pokémon review.
