Dearest Penny Arcade,
This morning, you guys made a rather bold proclamation: Gaming news is broken, and you're going to be the ones that fix it. To help in that lofty goal, you've scooped up Ars Technica's Ben Kuchera.
"We’re bringing him on to create industry coverage you can read without holding your nose, essentially," you wrote. "I want a perspective, I want a Curator for the Internet’s gaming content. In a couple words, I want something less insulting and disposable."
As you'd probably expect, responses to your announcement have been all over the board, running the gamut from enthusiastic fans to indignant game journos. I suppose, for my part, that I fall somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. On the one hand, I'm excited to see that a site with the profile of Penny Arcade has drawn attention to the gaming media's problems, but I also think you've missed the mark by a pretty wide margin.
Truth is, the biggest gaming sites didn't get that way by accident. As objectionable as you or I might find the bulk of their news content, that sea of low quality articles is the best way for the majority of gamers, myself included, to keep up to date on the things that interest us.
But, you'd likely protest, most gaming journalism is just poorly written slop, regurgitated from somewhere else without anything of value added. Let's ignore all the talented, hard working game journalists out there and assume that your claim is universally true. If gaming journalism is in such a sorry state, it's the focus on news that got us there in the first place.
Indulge me, if you would, in a bit of theory. All news, regardless of topic, can be broken down into two components: story and packaging. The story is the event that has occurred, the headline and whatever details flesh it out. Man bites dog. Dewey defeats Truman. Bobby Kotick drinks the blood of infants to stay young. The packaging is everything else, be it phrasing, organization, or spin. Straightforward enough, I'd think.
But here's where things get interesting. Packaging can be quantifiably stolen — we call that plagiarism — but the story can't. The reporter who breaks a story doesn't create anything. He merely observes an event and compiles the observations of others. So long as everything is properly attributed, that source can be reworked into an entirely new article without any wrongdoing.
And there's the fundamental dilemma of all journalism: there's no impulse to produce the essential part of what you're selling. In most instances, it's far more efficient to wait for someone else to do the grunt work, then repackage it under your brand. After all, you can offer your customers more value through broad coverage than you can with sporadic original content.
The outcome, of course, is that stories are lifted wholesale from other sources, be it newswires, other publications, or press releases. This behavior, commonly called churnalism, has become shockingly widespread. One study found that 80% of news articles in the British press were unoriginal, and it's easy to imagine the rest of the world is in the same boat.
So, gaming journalism is hardly unique in that regard, although our focus on commercial products makes us more susceptible than most other beats. That's the only real uncomfortable truth here, I think. The gaming press only exists because it provides cheap advertising for publishers. All but a handful of the gaming stories that break in a year are announcements direct from corporate PR. We're all out here, competing for exclusives and scrambling to recycle the work of others because that's all gaming news is. Barring some revolutionary changes in the industry, that's all it can ever be, no matter whose name is in the byline.
There's my real problem with your announcement. Your grandiose vision doesn't seem to be anything more than a compelling narrative. Kuchera will still be writing some subset of the stories everyone else is, and the bulk of them, no matter how elegantly crafted, will still be repackaged PR bunk.
Framing him as some informed, trustworthy "curator" doesn't set him up to change anything. All gaming sites curate content. All gaming sites offer a perspective. There is no blog in existence that covers every story that breaks. I don't think anyone out there is honestly upset over some absence of filters in the gaming press.
The underlying point, then, seems to be that Ben Kuchera's judgment is superior to every other journalist at work today, and that he'll single-handedly be able to decide what news Joe Average Gamer will find scintillating. But this business doesn't work that way. The gaming community is a niche filled with innumerable smaller niches. John Venn would have had a fucking field day. Sites that eschew broad, frequent coverage in favor of quality are usually slow to report and narrow in focus, and they flounder in obscurity as a result. Even if Kuchera can cover just as much content as he did at Ars, he'll still be ignoring a vast majority of the stories people care about. At best, you're offering a supplement, not an outright alternative.
And therein lies the folly of this attempt to "fix" gaming news. By definition and by necessity, news will always value speed and volume over quality, though it's certainly possible for all three to coexist happily. You want to save the unwashed masses from shoddy game reporting? Hire quality writers who can provide depth and breadth, rather than sacrifice one for the other. Want to champion content that has enduring value? Try criticism, analysis, commentary or any of the other criminally overlooked and underdeveloped aspects of game journalism. You've proven time and again that you've got enormous sway within the community. Why waste that soapbox on news, when even the best written article about the Wii U's release date will do next to nothing to advance the discourse?
Honestly, guys, you've been doing pointed commentary of the industry for years, commenting on news and current events without ever slinking down into the trenches yourselves. With PAX, PATV, and Extra Credits, you guys are already a stone's throw away from giving gaming its own New Yorker. Let's not settle for New York Daily News at the last minute.
