Home
Dennis' in-depth profile of Gerard Williams (aka The HipHopGamer) is the sort of intrepid journalism you'd more likely find in the New Yorker. Lucky for us, Dennis favors Bitmob.
Williams considers himself as a journalist, even though he openly plagiarizes news articles. “If I see an article online, and I think it’s interesting, I’ma take it, and I’ma link it, and that’s it,” Williams said. He also relished telling me about the free trips, with accommodations, that he accepts from publishers to cover industry events in Los Angeles. What seemed to be a final straw for some journalists was Williams recently accusing IGN’s Greg Miller of being a “liar” in response to Miller’s Mafia 2 review. Questioning Miller’s integrity as a journalist while Williams shows up in the video decked out in a Call of Duty: Black Ops sweatshirt delivered to him by Treyarch is delicious irony.
What may be particularly galling to professional video-game journalists in light of Williams’ open refusal to adhere to standard journalistic ethics is the harsh criticism Williams throws in their direction. “You got a lot of journalists that come there, and only do their job, and that’s it,” Williams said. “To me, I feel like that’s fucked up. You want so much from the developers and the publishers, you want this, you want that, you complain about this, complain about that, but yet when it comes to doing the interview, you ask the same questions that everybody else asks, same routine bullshit, and you just call it a day.” Williams told me that he likes his interviews to “be an event,” citing as an example a recent interview about Kinect where he began the interview walking on his hands. It’s eye-rolling stuff from a traditional journalist’s perspective.
“Why is it that when you become a journalist, you’re required…not to express the love you have for games to consider yourself [legitimate]?” Williams asked me. I mentioned AJ Glasser’s recent article on GamePro, No Cheering from the Press Box, and told him, “It’s because you love games that you’re willing to take that perspective. Those are the people who sacrifice their enthusiasm in order to be the person setting the record because they want the record to be right because they love games. That’s how I define a games journalist. The reason why they’re doing it is because someone has to tell that story, and it has to be told right.” It’s a shame that not many professional video-game journalists seem willing to engage with Williams about these concerns, because his response to me was sincere: “I appreciate that. Real talk.”
It’s reasonable to suggest that Williams’ existence as a hip-hop artist and participation in that culture isn’t considered carefully enough by his detractors. “You got a lot of people who don’t like me being a journalist because of who I am and where I come from and the fact that I get more recognition than they do, and they went to school for this, and they went the standard route, and I just utilized my passion and got further. You got a lot of people that’s envious of that.”
Boasting about one’s skills is an inextricable part of hip-hop culture, where new artists make their names by battling one another in the underground scene and proving their skills. Exuberant public displays are about making a name for oneself and standing out from the crowd of thousands of wannabe hip-hop artists looking to cut a record. Williams applies this mentality to how he covers the video-game industry, even if other journalists don’t want to play his game.
I wanted to know what Williams meant by “getting further” than other journalists. He doesn’t get any industry access that seasoned professionals don’t also have, and where he covers the gaming media as more of a serious hobby, the professionals do so full-time. Williams suggested an answer to my thoughts recently in a follow-up conversation. “I'm now a partner with Sony, and my material is inside PlayStation Home,” he said, “but I have other deals currently pending that will net me some good money, real good money.” He isn’t announcing those deals until 2011, but he says it’s going to be enough to quit his day job.
When I made plans to write this piece, I wasn’t interested in the brand and alter-ego that Williams had ostensibly developed for himself. I wanted to know who the person was behind them, but my assumption that his public persona was just an act turned out to be utterly false. He may wrap himself in hip-hop culture’s affectations while recording his “vidicles” (video articles) or conducting interviews, but there’s no guise being donned. The Gerard Williams we see on his website or out at events is the genuine article, and there is, admittedly, something refreshing about that. It reminds me of what Susan Arendt, the senior editor of The Escapist, has said about focusing not on snark and one-upmanship, but rather on our communal love of games.
“Personally, I don't feel like Gerard doing what he does is any affront to what I do nor interferes with me doing it,” Alexander said. “If games writers have some massive concern that Gerard's presence somehow disrupts the sanctity of games journalism or confuses their audience as to what constitutes real reportage, then that's a problem of our relationship to our audience and has nothing to do with him.”
While we were making our final arrangements to meet, Williams told me several times how excited he was to sit down with me and how much it meant to him. After listening to him regale me with tales of Keighley, Pachter, Jaffe, journalist Stephen Totilo, and consultant N'Gai Croal, I had to ask why my particular interview was so important to him. I’m the tiniest of potatoes compared to some of the heavyweight company in which Williams circulates.
“Yeah, it means a hell of a lot to me, man! It lets me know that someone cares about what I do, they’re interested in what I do, but they’re also interested in who I am, and what makes this possible.” Perhaps, more than he’d be willing to admit, the lion’s share of Williams’ ire towards the video-game journalism establishment is a lack of simple respect for what he’s been able to accomplish in so little time, with nothing more than earnest effort and passion behind him.
Maybe Williams traded off a professional career covering video games, and his potential credibility as a journalist, in order to get the access and visibility that he currently enjoys, but if he truly has a deal coming in 2011 that will get him out of the mail room and covering the video-game industry full time, questions of his credibility will become academic.
Or maybe Williams just doesn’t care about the career and merely wants to be a part of the scene, to live the dream of meeting the developers and publishers, attending the industry events, and enjoying the VIP status when he does. If that’s the case, then Williams is a success, and no one can take that away from him. Like he says, “The industry didn’t make me, so the industry can’t break me.”
Dennis Scimeca is a freelance writer from Boston, MA. He has written for The Escapist and @Gamer magazine, is currently penning a feature for Gamasutra, and maintains a blog at punchingsnakes.com. First Person is his weekly column on Bitmob concerned with meta questions around the video-game industry and the journalism that covers it.
1
2
