How Games Journalism Lost Its Soul

Once a voice for gamers, games journalism somehow turned against them...and perished...

This is another Areo Magazine, blast from the past. I wrote this about 6 years ago. What do people think? Has games journalism gotten better or worse since then?

In the first decades of the 2000s, when the violent video game debate burned at its brightest, games journalism (journalism aimed at the audience of avid gamers) was at the forefront of exposing moral panics.  To be sure, games journalism (in which I include a range of outlets geared toward gaming, geek, tech and related interest audiences) then might have been criticized as defensive of the audience’s beloved hobby, but research data ultimately proved skepticism of harmful video game effects to be well warranted.  Curiously, even as mainstream media has improved in its coverage of video games, I’ve observed games journalism has actually gotten worse.  Numerous articles have begun appearing insinuating video games might, indeed, have nefarious impacts on players.  Why has games journalism decided to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, trading critical skepticism for virtue-laden pearl clutching and unfalsifiable claims? 

The notion that video games contribute to mass shootings or other real-world acts of serious aggression is all but dead.  But, whether on violence or sexualization, a slew of new games journalism articles have insinuated video games may have pernicious impacts on player attitudes, promoting acceptance of violence, normalization of fascism, extremism, sexism and misogyny, or even rape.  The formula for such pieces is typically to state upfront that “Games don’t cause X” since data can’t support that games can be meaningfully linked to negative outcomes but rather “Games may influence how we think about X.”  This, to scholarly eyes, seems like a dodge.

Such statements essentially acknowledge there is little evidence for what follows next, which tends to be reduced to a moral entrepreneurship narrative that nonetheless implies a vague causality.  Yet, either the implied vague effects have themselves already been tested and falsified, or are put in terms that are simply unfalsifiable.  Often, the argument relies on clumsy references to Cultivation Theory, or “second-order effects,” despite evidence for games having such effects are weak.  For instance, related to the issue of sexualized games, there are, by now, more studies that don’t find evidence for such effects than there are that do.  Some studies even suggest sexualized games may be associated with more positive attitudes toward women, perhaps because game content tends to promote moral reflection.  One deeply flawed Italian study from 2016 is often resurrected, despite having been thoroughly debunked.

Games journalism is vast and heterogeneous, of course, and there is plenty of great games journalism out there.  I don’t intend to paint to with too broad a brush.  Yet, this turn toward moralistic overreach seems to have increased, particularly since 2013.  I suspect there may be a few related factors in this trend. 

First, the Gamergate controversy undoubtedly hit games journalism hard, though perhaps not in the way intended.  Gamergate began as a critique of games journalism, although a segment of the movement ultimately attacked women journalists, designers and advocates with the worst venom of anonymous online communities.   

In preparing for a recent talk on sexualization of women characters in games, I decided to compile all the empirical academic studies of Gamergate.  It turns out this was easy because there are none.  We don’t know how many individuals who identify with Gamergate’s journalistic critiques supported or were involved in harassment of women.  For that matter, we don’t know how many individuals involved with Gamergate were women, nor their age, ethnicity, nor actual identification as gamers.  Games journalism could have pushed for more empirical data but too often became mired in the vitriolic debates surrounding the issue.

Around the same time some games journalists clumsily insinuated that the gamer identity itself might be “dead” (turns out, not so much.)  The olive branch offered by Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett “If you call yourself a ‘gamer’ and are a cool person, keep on being a cool person” may have been a bit too little following “Note they're not talking about everyone who plays games, or who self-identifies as a ‘gamer’, as being the worst. It's being used in these cases as short-hand, a catch-all term for the type of reactionary holdouts that feel so threatened by gaming's widening horizons (bold and italics original).” Plunket had, after all, just recommended one article that equated the “gamer” identity with “toxicity”, “hysterical fits” and “hatred of women” claiming “The gamer as an identity feels like it is under assault, and so it should…the traditional gamer identity is now culturally irrelevant.”  A second article recommended by Plunkett referred to gamers as “…obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers…”  Saying, in effect, “but maybe some of you aren’t so bad” after that perhaps isn’t so helpful.

Claiming a thing beloved to some individuals is “dead” has been a time-honored trope since the periodic obituaries for rock and roll.  Such headlines no doubt have clickbait potential but don’t appear to be sophisticated analyses of gamer culture.        

The second issue is that games journalism often has fallen into the polarization trap that mirrors polarization and tribalism across so much of the modern political landscape.  Games journalists and their audiences seem ever more divided over what types of content are appropriate for games.  Pushing for some changes, such as more female characters in games is worthwhile, but it can be tempting to move from reasonable requests to negative insinuations about people who enjoy other sorts of games.  In this sense, games journalism like mainstream journalism may have found it more difficult to remain neutral in the cultural and moral wars of who is good and who is evil, screaming matches that seldom have much to do with a nuanced view of data and efforts to find common ground.  These changes in games journalism may have been inevitable given the challenges facing journalism and modern society more broadly.

Curiously, in this sense games journalism may have fallen into similar traps as media effect scholars have struggled with for decades, namely sweeping claims of effects that are difficult to substantiate with data.  Just this year, we saw yet another study on violent games grossly exaggerating the evidence for negative effects even when it actually found the predictive value for violent games predicting aggression in self-report surveys is little better than a coin toss.  As noted earlier, there is now better evidence against cultivation effects for sexualized games than for them.  However that hasn’t stopped some scholars from cherry-picking data including highlighting the debunked 2016 Italian study and raising empirically problematic concepts like “toxic masculinity.”  As the Bullshit Asymmetry Factor notes, when scholars say extreme things in new media, this tends to get far more attention than the subsequent debunking of those claims.  This is one reason the general public often continues to believe sciency claims long after they are scientifically discredited or dead. 

Maybe it’s unfair to expect games journalists to be critical evaluators of extraordinary claims when scholars appear to be so bad at it.  Yet games journalism historically had done this hard work, becoming one small part of a change to mainstream journalism’s consideration of games and arguably even aiding in reevaluations among scholars themselves.  For most of the history of games research, particularly on negative effects, the scholarly community has ignored or dismissed the views of gamers.  Games journalism helped push for more inclusion.  It would be unfortunate to see that lost.  I hypothesize that some writers may feel that a kind of humanities critical evaluation of the medium raises the intellectual discourse about games.  But, to the extent such criticism is divorced from the empirical realities of scientific data it does more to confuse than illuminate.        

I don’t mean to imply that all games journalism was wonderful prior to 2013 or so.  Nor that games journalism has become an irretrievable wasteland since.  There have always been bad examples of games journalism, and there are still many excellent examples of games journalism today.  However, I do detect that a certain spark of critical thinking and skeptical inquiry has been flickering more weakly in recent years.  This, whether a too-ready adoption of cultivation theory, humanities-based theories of media criticism, or moralistic claims, or simply a decay in intellectualized critical thinking is what I mean when I suggest that games journalism sometimes seem to be losing its soul.   

I do believe games journalism can find its way back, balancing the need to critically examine relevant issues such as harassment of women and girl gamers, without making unfalsifiable claims of games effects on players.  I might suggest games journalists rediscover the ability to critically evaluate the claims of advocacy groups, even those operating in good faith.  Articles that mainly seem to highlight the social virtuousness of the author while critiquing game content or game culture may not be good journalism.  Reliance on cultivation theory or the humanities more broadly are unlikely to bring us to empirically supportable claims about games.  In short, games journalisms could use with a bit more critical thinking about causal claims, even when these claims are convenient to otherwise reasonable advocacy goals.  Upon achieving this, games journalism can serve to highlight important social issues without sacrificing accuracy and integrity.