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Not that I am much into gaming, but I just checked out the site and the one article I clicked on was literally the writer bitching about how the coffee machines
by greg_gorrell 3y ago
Not that I am much into gaming, but I just checked out the site and the one article I clicked on was literally the writer bitching about how the coffee machines were depicted in Starfield. I miss the gaming sites of the 90s and early 00s, you could expect to read passionate articles from gamers. Just reading the headlines on the main page makes me feel like they have some agenda to push, in a political kind of way, and you won't be finding any good game reviews here.
- netbioserror 3y agoFrontpage littered with activism and first-world whining. Looks like it was the worst parts of Kotaku that left.
- fells 3y agoTurns out lots of people play video games!
- netbioserror 3y agoTurns out a lot of people don't care about those people's political hot takes when they just want to read news about video games!
- fells 3y agoThere's lots of places on the internet for those people too. They are also free to find them and share them! Maybe they'll even been upvoted on HackerNews!
- netbioserror 3y agoBe careful what you wish for. Sites like these aren't lasting long in an era when people are exhausted of being 24/7 assaulted by the political hot takes of random nobodies.
- mplewis 3y agoNo one is making you read this specific gaming news site.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- netbioserror 3y agoSo don't be surprised when sites like this pull no revenue and end up shutting down because people really, really do not care about some nobody's political hot takes when they want to read about video games.
- yoyohello13 3y agoYou seem to care quite a lot...
- netbioserror 3y agoAre you trying to well-poison "caring" about the scope and quality of entertainment media? What's your aim here? Am I supposed to pretend that total randoms flooding entertainment media with their off-topic pretentious garbage is normal and alright?
- klausa 3y agoGenuine question: what other „entertainment media” are you reading in 2023 that does not contain what you describe as „off-topic pretentious garbage”?
- netbioserror 3y agoThese days, nothing. I avoid entertainment media. But I remember the days when PCGamer used to write about how amazing Carmack was at pumping out engine tech, how Guild Wars was going to revolutionize MMO design, how Supreme Commander would have a freaking unit cannon that could fire units tens of kilometers across a map. It's impossible to find that now without having to wade through low-quality sophomoric political treatises and exposes on activist developers making games nobody is going to play.
- butlike 3y agoWhat is 'news about video games?' Can't you just read a dev blog for the technical aspects, and ask the game store clerk what to buy?
- chaosharmonic 3y agoIt also turns out lots of the people making them like unions.
- arrrg 3y agoWhere’s the whining? I didn’t find it. Please substantiate your claims.
- klondike_klive 3y agoCheck out Rock Paper Shotgun. One of the few sites whose articles I read purely for pleasure.
- DizzyDoo 3y agoI very much enjoyed RPS in the days of the original four writers, and also when Quinns was contributing, though I haven't kept up so much in the last eight years or so. Eurogamer seems to cover the games news and reviews in the way I like best right now, and Digital Foundary's writing and videos that lean on the more technical side of games are just excellent. (I believe DF also have an arrangement to do some content for RPS, so it's probably being shared around as it should.)
- MrMember 3y agoRPS is a shell of its former self. The amazing writers from the early days all left years ago and it's mostly just an SEO spam site now.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y agoThat site has been dead to me ever since the gamersgate fiasco. Leading up to that fiasco people were already frustrated with game media for being in bed with game publishers. And no, I don't care if they have a right to sleep together, I care that the journalistic integrity was so missing they couldn't be bothered to have someone else write the piece or be open about it. And then the entire war on gamers as misogynists for wanting game journalists to have some integrity. I've never even opened their website since.
- menacingly 3y agoCareful, it’s gatekeeping to prefer that your game journalists have ever played a game at all other than when researching for an article. They write like this because it’s how anyone writes on a topic about which they have no experience. If you embed me as a wartime reporter, I’ll talk about the weird food and noise, not what most people reading the article want to read about.
- HideousKojima 3y agoPersonally I only read reviews of running shoes from lazy obese people, paraplegics, and amputees.
- djur 3y agoWhat do you think people reading wartime coverage want to read about?
- menacingly 3y agoI don't know. So I will let my 0.0% experience with the topic keep me from writing about it.
- torginus 3y agoGoing by Henry Ford's "faster horse" quote, I prefer my media to be aspirational, to assume potentially too much of me and be disappointed, not the other way around.
- jccalhoun 3y agoYou really think that these people who have worked for multiple gaming sites and are now starting their own gaming site really don't play games? It seems like there would be an easier way to make a living than writing about something you don't care about.
- menacingly 3y agoI do think that, and a lot of other people do as well. It’s why they aren’t taken seriously and have a hard time being employed unless we’re in wasteful high growth economic states. And identifying a profitable market segment, inserting yourself as a critical member, and blaming doing a poor job on vague concepts of gatekeeping and bias seems like a good enough way to make a living that they keep trying at it
- mcphage 3y ago> one article I clicked on was literally the writer bitching about how the coffee machines were depicted in Starfield. I miss the gaming sites of the 90s and early 00s, you could expect to read passionate articles from gamers. You and I have very different memories about what "passionate articles from gamers" were about in the 90s and 00s.
- hnreport 3y agoI’d you all you talk about is games, eventually you’ll have to talk about the fucking coffee machine in the video game.
- Wurdan 3y agoI get the sentiment of people who are only interested in game reviews and recommendations. But as a gamer myself, if that’s all a site offers then I’m not paying $7 per month for it. I wouldn’t be willing to pay anything for that content to be honest. I can get a better sense of the quality of a game from aggregated steam reviews. I’m not the target audience for this site, but I do recognize that they can’t just write dry game reviews if they want to make a living.
- grumpwagon 3y agoI don't know anything about Kotaku, but I read that same article and thought it was pretty clearly a tongue-in-cheek faux investigative article and laughed at it.
- r113500 3y agoop's is a valid criticism in a post gonzo journalism world. hunter thompson, an otherwise conventionally trained professional, embeds himself in the world of his subjects, and produces a masterpiece of investigative journalism. it's also sexy, and generations of journalists imitate him after. but the division remained up until quite recently, where you have the chicago manual of syle, and then you have (late 90s) vice magazine. tongue-in-cheek faux investigative article works when you're a professional humorist and that's your beat, or when you're a professional game reporter, and you want to produce some levity. in the second case the deficiencies are excused, because what otherwise carries your writing and by extension your reputation, are your serious pieces. in the post gonzo journalism world most writers act as if they have that reputation to cary them, but what they consistently produce are low effort tongue-in-cheek, insider jokes articles. there's simply not enough good will to humor them.
- delecti 3y agoAs a fledgling coffee nerd, that article is very clearly a coffee nerd being a bit tongue in cheek. The thesis is not "Starfield is bad because the devs made bad coffee machines", instead he's connecting the lifeless NPC's to the strangely designed coffee machines in a way that should make it pretty clear that it's not entirely serious. Totally fair if the humor didn't land, but I thought it was amusing. Those coffee machines do look absurd.
- q3k 3y agoAs another coffee nerd I'm happy to realize I wasn't the only one who did a double-take when they first noticed the in-game espresso machines.
- notjoemama 3y agoIndividually packaged units of coffee grounds in a micro-chipped plastic container for the pot to recognize it as an officially licensed “pod” is our daily life. I think real coffee has become absurd. lol
- chongli 3y agoThat’s lazy average Joe’s daily caffeine supplement. Coffee nerds have their own brand of absurdity: coffee distribution tools, pressure profiling, temperature profiling, water treatment mineral packs… never mind all the money people spend on high end burr grinders and plumbed-in rotary pump machines!
- auxfil 3y ago[dead]
- zeta0134 3y agoI do feel like the last remaining werido in my family with a standard drip machine. But why would I replace it with pod-DRM hell? It makes a perfectly good cup of joe, with the quality mostly impacted by the beans and whether or not they were pre-ground. So far, every cup of coffee I've had from a pod has been noticeably worse. And I'm supposed to pay a premium for these things? I'm not even a coffee snob and I can easily tell something went horribly, horribly wrong somewhere along the line.
- bigbillheck 3y agoThe way I remember it is the gaming sites of the 90s and early 00s were all pretty dire.
- Jeslijar 3y agoBased on the link it sounds like they want to carry on with what they've always done but get more money. I get the desire but I doubt the content is going to go back to what it was 25 years ago. The way I see it today, ideological reviews are what is mainstream. It's not about how the game is, it's how inclusive they are to minorities that is what reaches the front page. It's fucking bizarre but it makes sense when the goal is to reach as many people as possible. On both sides of politics it's just rage bait depending on which way the needle swings. Rage bait creates the clicks that brings the mass appeal not just "nerdy gamers." I'm a nerdy gamer. I just want to know how good of a game stuff is. When you go to actual niche forums you find real information without the bullshit. You aren't going to find that at all on mainstream mass media sites like the Verge, Motherboard/Vice, Kotaku, et al. I think the goal of aftermath is to just create another mainstream outlet. I hope they prove me wrong.
- 542458 3y ago> ideological reviews are what is mainstream. It's not about how the game is, it's how inclusive they are to minorities This seems like a pretty heavy exaggeration to me. I just spotchecked several reviews on IGN, PCGamer, and GamesRadar (top 3 sites I get when googling "games reviews"), and found nothing of the sort. I'm sure if you go digging you could find that content somewhere on the site, but to claim it's the crux of their review model is just false. For example, the new MW3 is a game where there's lots you could comment on in terms of the ideology of their portrayals of the war on terror and "ends justify the means"... but not one of the mainstream reviews I can see spends time on it, other than to mention the villain's vague motives. Or on the flip side, take Fae Farm, a game that explicitly advertises itself as inclusive - only one paragraph of GamesRadar's the nine page review is on the topic of inclusivity, and it doesn't go any ideologically deeper than "there's a lot of customization here, including androgynous options and things like dreadlocks and turbans". The entire rest of the review is about gameplay and graphics.
- izzydata 3y agoI'd rather watch some gameplay footage with no commentary. I don't find that a person reviewing a video game contributes anything meaningful to the decision of whether or not I want a game or not unless I know them personally and we have similar taste. I have a suspicion that the only way such content has any value today in a world with quick and easy access to online video is that they are given copies prior to the release of the game. They get clicks because of peoples impatience to learn more despite being able to see effectively infinite amount of content as soon as a game is officially released. But the problem here is that game reviewers livelihood is entirely dependent on getting early access and if they don't speak highly of the game then their livelihood can be cut off. They are basically all bribed into giving positive feedback. I think it is actually worse than nothing at all. It is actively harmful to finding out what a game is actually like. I guess my point is that we should just wait until a game is released. There are infinite copies and there exists more games than anyone could ever play. Reading some heavily biased opinions about a video game a week before it comes out is not meaningful.
- seanw444 3y agoWell, considering Kotaku is well-known for gaming articles filled with political activism and social justice, this is not surprising at all to me.
- djur 3y agoMy recollection was that Kotaku had an entire subsection of the site dedicated to posting pictures of attractive women doing cosplay. I don't remember much political activism -- do you have an example?
- ajmurmann 3y agoThey generally have a lot of quality content, but will slip in political commentary. IMO, this review is a decent example: https://kotaku.com/1850858948 https://kotaku.com/1850858948 The political commentary starts a paragraph after the summary box. Huge article and maybne two paragraphs fit the bill. The anti-capitalism stuff always makes me roll my eyes, but it's a game review, just ignore the parts you don't care about.
- djur 3y agoThe paragraph you describe criticizes some of the characterizations in the game and a lack of options for character customization, both of which seem to be safely within the ballpark for game reviewing. The reviewer clearly has an anticapitalist perspective, but I don't think that's sufficient for "political activism". Reviewers always have some kind of perspective that affects what they emphasize and de-emphasize.
- ajmurmann 3y agoYeah, I hope I made clear that I don't think it's a big deal. It's exaggerated by the gamergate crowd which might have truly kicked off our current culture war in it's current form.
- mempko 3y agoDid you read the Alan Wake II article?
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago1. Why would you cite a trivial non-political example to support your position that they have a political agenda? 2. What separates someone simply having beliefs that inform their lives from them having a political agenda? And where did you ever get the idea that politics is this thing that lives in a bubble, so innocuous as for its effects to be separable from our lives, such that we all have agreed to conduct our lives and careers without mentioning anything related to that bubble? Is it possible you see political ideas you agree with throughout each day and don't find them to be an agenda because they don't make you uncomfortable?
- dogleash 3y agoA lot of the blog news sites beyond just gaming had a vibe switch in the 2010's. You used to find passionate and hungry writers with something to say. Then it became bitter and jaded misanthropes that don't recognize they're misanthropes. They tried to keep an alt-media rebellious tone, but warped it into tired boomer-splaining. A tragedy really. I had to admit it was over when someone argued an opinion I already agreed with and they were still pissing me off.
- e12e 3y agoYou might enjoy rock, paper, shotgun? https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/
- rideontime 3y agoIf you actually read the article instead of reacting violently to the headline, you'll find that the coffee machine subject is just a conceit to talk about Starfield's clumsy aesthetics and lack of cohesion as a whole.
- butlike 3y agoHow do you reconcile being a journalist, who WANTS to write an in-depth piece (being a writer and all), and the powers that be wanting you to write an advertisement for their game? You lambast something innocuous like the coffee machines to get your furvor for writing out.