When Blizzard revealed the trailer for Warlords of Draenor, its newest World of Warcraft expansion, at a showcase in Los Angeles last month, it opened with the sort of ritual auto-fellatio familiar to anyone who's ever attended any corporate event. What was odd about it—or at least what would be for anyone unfamiliar with the peculiar folkways of the gaming industry—was Blizzard's choice of a master of ceremonies. There was Chris Watters of Gamespot, one of the largest gaming sites on the internet, standing on a conference stage sponsored heavily by Gamespot, hyping a trailer for a game that he had never played.
If the goal of Gamergate is to wipe out corruption in games journalism—if the movement isn't merely a bunch of loosely shaped sublimated qualms about feminism and minorities—it's doing a shit job of identifying the actual, honest-to-god problems in games writing. It's not as if those problems are hard to see. As a rule, games journalism is inherently compromised. From the top down, publishers ranging from AAA behemoths like Electronic Arts to the IndieCade crowd do in fact enjoy symbiotic relationships with gaming media outlets, and if it came down to nothing more than sex and petty corruption, that would be nice, because the problem would certainly be a lot more easily solved.
At one end of the spectrum, you have press outlets that barely even feign autonomy from marketing departments. IGN's "IGN First" features on upcoming games and Game Informer's monthly cover story rely on deep access to upcoming games—access granted to no one else in the industry. Invariably, the stories produced from that access are positive. It's a win-win for game studios and press outlets, and a loss for anyone who'd like to read something other than thinly veiled advertorials about big upcoming games. These kinds of relationships are what makes programs like Kotaku's embedded gamers—wherein writers play four or five series extensively post-release, dive deep into the community, and report back—important for players looking to read coverage outside the marketing cycle.
There are conflicts of this kind all over the place, right out in the open. (Do you know if your favorite columnist paid for his consoles, or accepted them from Microsoft and Sony?) For the usual reasons of professional courtesy or decorum, a lot of this goes unreported or commented upon, but it matters. These conflicts may be common in many fields, but they are especially bad in gaming journalism, partly due to its nature.
I spent close to three years covering and reviewing technology for Gizmodo. The very first thing I learned about reviews was that you can't fuck up. Day to day, writing about products and entertainment—games, gadgets, movies, whatever—is a low-stakes occupation that a lot of people would kill for. The only serious responsibility you have is to make sure that you do not compel readers who trust you to spend their money and time on something they won't enjoy. To do so accidentally is incompetence; to do it knowingly, or to put yourself in the position where you can be influenced into doing it, is just about the only way to fuck up in the job, and an awful lot of gaming writers are doing it, in shops where the walls between ad sales and editorial grow thinner than they should.