{"id":24146,"date":"2014-09-02T14:14:20","date_gmt":"2014-09-02T19:14:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=24146"},"modified":"2014-09-02T14:31:29","modified_gmt":"2014-09-02T19:31:29","slug":"experienced-points-why-games-journalists-may-not-reflect-the-ideas-of-the-gaming-public","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=24146","title":{"rendered":"Experienced Points: Why Games Journalists May Not Reflect the Ideas of the Gaming Public"},"content":{"rendered":"

So often I see people accusing game journalists of being biased, pretentious, or having a hidden agenda. There’s a little bit of truth to that, inasmuch as talking about games requires you to have an opinion<\/strong>, and people who comment on games professionally tend to drift away from the positions of people who merely play them as a hobby<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Of course, this column suffers from a bad case of preaching to the choir. If you’re the sort of reflexively angry person who expresses outrage when a critic assigns a “wrong” review score or brings up a topic you think isn’t important, then I doubt my article is going to temper your rage. Moreover, I doubt you read my stuff to begin with. But we do what we can, and sometimes calmly offering some perspective is cathartic. <\/p>\n

I actually really dislike the “pretentious” label. I get it on rare occasions, but Campster<\/a> gets hit with it all the time because his stuff is a little more academic and highbrow than mineWhich is one of the reasons I love Errant Signal so much: It presents a viewpoint I couldn’t extrapolate on my own.<\/span>. It implies you don’t actually believe the thing you’re advocating, you’re simply pretending to believe it to seem smart \/ educated \/ tolerant \/ whatever. It’s an ugly attempt to wall off deeper discussions and analysis. I can understand if someone thought Gone Home was dumb, or boring, or whatever. What I can’t stand is someone making the presumptuous argument that everyone secretly feels the same way about it, and are just pretending otherwise. The assertion is part conspiracy theory, part ad hominem, part attempt to portray shallowness as virtue. <\/p>\n

Anyway, yes. I’m preaching to the choir. After the service I’ll be sure to ask the choir what they thought of my message, and then we can all go to Applebees for lunch and agree with each other. Someone else can pay this time. I paid last time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So often I see people accusing game journalists of being biased, pretentious, or having a hidden agenda. There’s a little bit of truth to that, inasmuch as talking about games requires you to have an opinion, and people who comment on games professionally tend to drift away from the positions of people who merely play […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}