Wagner James Au, formerly Second Life's embedded journalist and currently Slate's games writer and freelancer, socked it to games journalists last week at the South By Southwest (SXSW)'s ScreenBurn gathering in Austin, Texas. He complained that "preview ho's" were bunging up the innards of good gaming journalism - admittedly sometimes out of obligation rather than laziness - and it was because of their poor previewing word choices that "games, for the most part, unrelentingly suck such ass". He expanded his vitriol at Kotaku, where he explained,
For the thing of it is, game magazine previews are almost uniformly positive, even for the most undistinguished titles. So it unrolls thus: publisher makes mediocre game; press previews depict mediocre game as being good or at least worth a look; excited gamers read previews, foolishly believe them, start making pre-sale orders of mediocre game; driven by preview press and pre-sale numbers based on that press, retailers stock up on mediocre game; publisher makes money from mediocre game, keeps making more games like it.
And the circle jerk is complete. All started by the gaming press, in their preview section.
Sure, not an opinion novel to these pages, but as the proactive guy he is, Au is determined to do something about it.
Once a month, Kotaku will call for nominations for "Preview Ho of the Month", asking readers/players to name and shame the journalists they feel have hyped the most. The aim is to transform the gaming industry into a force that produces good games rather than evil.
I have my doubts about the effect this will have in the boardrooms of international megacorps, and think that non-hyping journalists will feel the implications of this closer to home when they can't get code from their formerly-friendly publisher (having experienced this myself), and won't get paid for their work.
If this approach does do anything, it will force readers to make more critical choices, and to pay more attention to bylines. Not always a bad thing.
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