Last Friday, a writer at IGN named Greg Miller posted a poorly written review of Dead Space 2. It has since been spread around Reddit – a popular linksharing site for the yet (somehow) uninitiated among you – and thoroughly bashed by legions of Redditors. The story spawned the Twitter hashtag #HireMeIGN, a tag used to mock Miller’s juvenile writing style. The whole thing is crazy and sprawling enough that I will spare you my own recap. It’s the kind of story that makes me at once love and hate the internet, both believe in and evangelize against the power of the web and the masses, and, above all else, makes me wish video games were better.
A brief caveat: this will get tangential. A lot of the people I would like to see on this blog do not play video games much, if at all. To give them a sense of the atmosphere around this story, I’m going to bounce around a bit. Also, there’s a lot to talk about.
The most productive thing to come of the DS2 Fiasco is a discussion of the state of journalism with regard to gaming. Unfortunately, and maybe appropriately if you’re from the school of thought that blames video games for our misguided children, much of the conversation is pointing a loaded gun in the wrong direction. I say loaded gun because, frankly, I haven’t seen the degree of naked cruelty toward human beings that exists in the gaming community in any other technologically advanced subculture. This is a culture that uses the word “rape” to describe decisive victory, a community in which I’m not surprised when a twelve year-old calls me a “niger [sic].” None of that sounds very productive, but I promise, we’ll get there. Read the rest of this entry »
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