Gerstmann-gate: Outrage For All the Wrong Reasons
Over the past few years, one of the more pernicious trends in advertising has been the tendency to appropriate activist slogans and images for selling stuff. Basically, ad companies use the tone of sixties-style marches to create fun pitches like “Hell no! We won’t take high detergent prices anymore!” or “Every man, woman and child has the right to more bacon in their burger!“. It is, to some extent, predictable and inevitable – but it doesn’t make it any less annoying.
I mention this because I couldn’t help but think of those ads in relation to the firing of Jeff Gestmann from Gamespot.com, allegedly due to advertiser pressure after a negative review. To put it mildly, the internets exploded in righteous indignation with people not only decrying Gamespot and its parent company CNet, but also questioning all ‘games journalism’ and the invasion of the almighty dollar into neutral, objective game reviewing.
The entire hullabaloo rubs me the wrong way for the same reason as the ads: there is a complete conflation of actual issues with the economic concerns of supply and demand. Here’s the thing: game reviews at Gamespot never have been journalism and they have never deserved the protections implied by the ‘freedom of the press’. The purpose of a review at Gamespot is not to evaluate the intellectual and aesthetic aspects of a game title but is to tell you whether or not it is worth your fifty or sixty bucks. Gamespot is not a site of journalism but instead one of consumer information. The sort of outrage we’ve seen seems to argue that Consumer Reports is as important to intellectual freedom as the Globe and Mail or the New York Times. But the relationship of game reviews to the industry is akin to the co-dependence between fashion and gossip rags and Hollywood – they both need each other to make money. Gamespot’s function is to play a part in the economics of the gaming industry, to sustain the buying and selling – not to function as an analytical cultural outlet for discussing the social, aesthetic and ideological issues surrounding gaming.
I think the best we can expect is that we get a neutral evaluation of whether we should spend our money and in this, Gamespot failed. But the outrage about the entire affair is trying oh-so-hard to differentiate between advertising and reviews; while there is an important difference, I also think we should note that both of them work to get you to spend your money and are tied up in the same thing. To wit, when reviews are only evaluations of worth rather than art, advertising and reviews are simply two sides of the same coin. So yes, in a very practical sense, be outraged about the encroachment of advertising pressure into reviews; but let’s also remember that it’s the positioning of games as only economic objects that is the root of the problem.
[Update]: As expected, N’Gai Croal took on the issue. I think he generally arrives at a similar place to me, albeit in the far more detailed and rigorous manner of an insider.
