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Dennis follows up his incisive portrait of Gerard Williams, aka The HipHopGamer, with an examination of whether Williams represents journalism or entertainment -- and why that distinction is important.
Last week I profiled Gerard Williams, aka The HipHopGamer, a member of the amateur video-game media who has garnered an appreciable amount of press access to events in the past three years. Some journalists think he's a passionate and genuine guy with every right to work alongside the professional video-game media. Others think he's loud, obnoxious, and rude, threatening to beat someone up at an E3 conference this year, and generally being disruptive to their work.
I have no reason not to like Williams personally, but in terms of his work, I think he is decidedly not a journalist by any stretch of the imagination. I could offer up some of the common criticisms of his work like misleading headlines, unprofessional interviews, deliberate attempts at starting flame wars, and a complete lack of bias neutrality. I could look at the fact that by also admitting last week that he only reviews the games he likes, his value as a credible reviewer is nonexistent. Most damningly, I could point out that he openly admitted to plagiarizing content in my interviews with him.
However, the claims that Williams' antics somehow denigrate the whole of video-game journalism are ridiculous. Williams is a hype man, an entertainer. If you're not a journalist yourself, you can't tarnish journalism.
And yet the fact that the charge is even levied illustrates the basis for real concern. Wiliams threatens to injure the reputation of the amateur media and further obfuscate the already murky perception as to what constitutes a credible video-game journalist.
I recently spoke with Gamasutra News Editor Leigh Alexander about fanboy enthusiasts who get press passes for industry events. “The main problem with fanboy or enthusiast writing is, I think, that it takes some experience to learn how to differentiate between one's own taste and what's relevant to a broader audience," she said. "To learn enough about game design to say ‘this is good design’ even if it's not your taste; to learn how to differentiate between ‘I am really excited about this event’ versus ‘this event has a high degree of industry relevance’, etc.
”So when someone who's primarily just excited to be at E3 and 'have a shot' at a games journalism career is getting the same access and opportunities as people who have that experience thanks to covering the industry as their full-time employment, the result is that audiences may not be able to decide whose is an educated perspective or not.”
In his most recent Edge column, N’Gai Croal pointed out that amateur video-game journalism is not all bad. "I prefer to focus on the best of the Internet rather than the worst," he wrote. "It has enabled other thoughtful, considered, and knowledgeable voices that would never previously have been heard to attract an audience to take game reviewing away from solely a consumer guide function and explore games from as varied a perspective as other media." I see this "citizen journalism" as an essential process of garnering a wider audience for the legitimate discussion of video games, similar to what happened with film when journals like Cahiers du Cinema began publishing.
Whether or not amateur games journalism helps accomplish this depends entirely on the quality of the voices. As one of the most visible representatives of this group, Williams can wrongly be viewed as a symbol of an overall lack of quality in the amateur press. And when the audience doesn't understand the difference between video personalities like Williams and actual journalists, the end result may be a retardation of this process of adding innovative “citizen voices” to video-game journalism.
“While it's true that not all the pros are perfect -- ours is something of a guerrilla press corps as it is, at least on the consumer-facing side -- we certainly don't need even less-practiced voices competing to be even louder, faster, sloppier, and more sensationalist than we are because their 'lifelong dream' is at stake," Alexander told me.
(I want to emphasize that Alexander, one of Williams' most ardent supporters in the professional world, was not speaking of Williams in particular here or during any of the other quotes in this article, but I can't help but notice that her words describe Williams' work perfectly.)
I admit that as someone who has only just begun to break into professional video-game journalism, that I long to not worry about whether I'll get into all the major E3 conferences every year such that I can report on them, and look forward to building relationships with luminaries of the video-game industry. Williams' brand of controversy and confrontation have opened those doors pretty quickly for him; and yet Williams is stuck on the show floor at E3, where the garish displays feed the annual circus that attracts the attention of the mainstream press. The actual journalism and the truly cool reveals take place in "the other E3": the meeting rooms and private software demos where only the professionals are invited.
In order to break into this world and truly become a professional journalist, Alexander offered this advice: "Everybody has to start somewhere, of course, but there're ways of doing it right. And what you find is that respectful independent writers who comport themselves professionally and produce good, honest content have a lot better chance at earning more of a living and more bylines than rabid, insecure fans arriving on the scene determined to show us all why we're doing it wrong, or something.
"When people ask me about ways to get into games journalism, I always ask them why they want to do it. 'Because I really love games' or 'because I think it'd be an awesome career' are not very good answers. Whether pro or not, the valuable writer wants to be here because they care about the industry, because they have something to say or something to help audiences see and learn. And someone who cares in that way (as opposed to being on some ego trip, or some vendetta to ingratiate themselves even further into the arenas they've used for entertainment) is going to do a good job, or is going to work on learning to do a good job, I think."
I said in last week's column that Williams was a success -- and by his own thinking, he is. I don't believe that "success" is some kind of objective concept we can measure ourselves against. We set our own personal bars, but how we get there matters, and the problem with sensationalist acts like Williams is that eventually people get bored with them.
At some point, anyone who is serious about breaking into video-game journalism has to decide whether the immediate reward of celebrity is more important than long-term professional respect. I think that the latter will lead to far greater rewards than page-hit mongering will ever provide.
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. Follow him on Twitter: @DennisScimeca. First Person is his weekly column on Bitmob concerned with meta questions around the video-game industry and the journalism that covers it.
