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Can anyone point to a better source for this so I can't share it with people? Kotaku is the TMZ of gaming and I never share it, but underlying content is good o
by bananamerica 3y ago
Can anyone point to a better source for this so I can't share it with people? Kotaku is the TMZ of gaming and I never share it, but underlying content is good on this article.
- delecti 3y agoThis is the original source, reporting on a conversation between the writer and someone involved in the design being described. There can't really be a better source than that. Kotaku's uniquely bad reputation among gaming websites is only a result of people pushing a false agenda.
- hnbad 3y agoSpecifically Kotaku's bad reputation primarily stems from GamerGate.
- bananamerica 3y agoNot at all in my case. I have no beef with their politics. Kotaku is just a terrible website due to its shallow reporting and almost all its content has a better source that is often linked in the article. They are also needlessly inflammatory and not at all careful in their journalism. Again, this is 1000% not about politics.
- hnbad 3y agoYeah but that was never a distinguishing property. All gaming journalism was pretty bad at the time and continues to be bad. This is why the fig leaf of "ethics in games journalism" was so attractive to anyone not paying close attention to GG: it was an open secret that many game reviews were either outright paid by publishers or written by journalists held on a tight leash with exclusive early access privileges implied to be contingent on positive review scores. I grew up in the 90s and 00s and I very much recall the boiling hatred for EA for buying out successful developers, restructuring them and leaving empty husks that churn out infinite sequels until the IP ran dry. People used to make fun of games like Call of Duty for boiling down all narrative mechanics to quick time events while railroading you through a third rate movie. Kotaku ended up being singled out over the allegations regarding Depression Quest where it pretty much became ground zero for GG. The allegations themselves were mostly fueled by a cultural backlash of "true gamers" against "walking sims", the derogatory label for projects using games as medium for interactive narratives and experiences, which they saw as a threat to traditional gaming and gamer culture (which makes more sense if you compare it with the Great Replacement conspiracy theory and see it as a precursor to the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory especially popularised by Jordan Peterson). Heck, even the affiliation was shaky at best: a person claiming to be the ex of the person who created Depression Quest accused a journalist writing for Kotaku to have given Depression Quest positive coverage while they were in a relationship. So at worst the argument was that the developer used a friend to create attention for the game by writing about it without disclosing their (at the time non-romantic) relationship. Compared to what every major gaming journalist was doing with triple-A publishers at the time this was a nothing burger - except GGers disliked what the game represented (i.e. progressives using games as a medium for interactive art pieces) and who was behind it (women and queer folk, i.e. people with "political" genders/ethnicities/orientations rather than straight-passing white-passing cis-passing men).
- bananamerica 3y agoI feel that you wrote about a lot of things that are nothing to do with anything I wrote. I don't live in a alternate reality where Kotaku has great content. I'm not sure why you do. I read other websites that are equally "woke", but with good content. Polygon is one, just to give an example. As a leftist Black progressive from Brazil, I don't need to pretend I like a shitty website just to appease to crazy American prejudices.
- hydrok9 3y agoKotaku was a joke for me and my gamer crew way before that.
- bananamerica 3y agoI understand that you would think that given the assumed context on this website but I'm not even American and the gamer gate thing was very distant from me, something foreign I read about in the news. I have absolutely no issue with this website's politics or any kind of agenda. Kotaku took a turn for the worse specially after the departure of Jason Schreier. I've read Kotaku for years, and I largely agree with Kotaku's political views and I was never part of any ridiculous gamer gate movement. It's just a shallow website that is largely made of reposts, low effort sensationalism, poor journalism, and articles that could have been a Tweet. I do not repost it because it is extremely low quality even when it is the original source. But that subject was interesting so I wanted to find another source to share.
- delecti 3y agoJason Schreier left in 2020, and the title on this post indicates it's from 2017. So even if all of that is true, and none of your negative perceptions were absorbed due to gamergate, this article still came out in the period before the point when you think Kotaku took a turn for the worse.
- bananamerica 3y agoOh Kotaku was a low quality website long before that. And of course I'm being truthful why would you just assume otherwise? Do I need to send you my Brazilian RG and CPF? The internet is so tiresome. Just open the website, read it. It's really bad. This is not a fucking narrative.
- delecti 3y agoKotaku has always been, and remains, fine. On opening it now, it's basically indistinguishable from any other gaming news outlet. That's why I'm skeptical of your claim that your opinion isn't influenced by gamergate; it has always been an unremarkable video game outlet, neither notably fantastic nor notably terrible.
- 3y ago
- jabroni_salad 3y agoI definitely read about this on wowinsider at some point. sadly it has been really annoying to search the stacks since it got turned into just an engadget tag so that AOL could turn their wow.com domain into a failed coupon venture