Above: I didn’t get far past this guy in Cuphead.
Well, I talked about having super fans, but I also have super haters. I’m that Cuphead guy, right? I posted a 26-minute video back in August from a demo I had at Gamescom in Germany. It was the first time I played Cuphead and the first time a lot of people were able to see what the actual gameplay was like. It was a very noticed video. But I did a terrible job playing it. I spent about two and a half minutes getting through a 30-second tutorial. I didn’t get through the entire first level when I played for the rest of those 24 minutes or so.
This went viral on the internet. It got 1.2 million video views on YouTube. That’s astounding for a VentureBeat video. [We usually don’t make videos, except for our GamesBeat Decides podcasts.] I’m okay with people attacking me for this. Saying, “You’re unqualified to be a game journalist, to review games.” I was fine with people seeing this video and concluding that. But I had a post to go with this that kind of said, “Hey, this is a joke. This is me making fun of myself. I’m self-deprecating here.” I do that a lot.
Above: Cuphead tutorial. It’s different in the final version.
But people didn’t see that post. They went straight into the video, and they went into the video thanks to a guy I would call a “shitlord.” On the internet, in this age of internet haters, we have shitlords who can direct our hate in their chosen directions. One person got ahold of my video, which had 10,000 views at the time or so, and by the time he had shared it and said, “This is why game journalists are unqualified to review games,” he helped me get so many more views from my video, because he cast it in a fake-news kind of way.
It’s very interesting to me how Gamergate and fake news share all this common heritage. When you think about Zoe Quinn and what they went after her for, these major transgressions of supposedly sleeping with journalists in order to get positive reviews were false. Then the Gamergaters said, “Well, okay, that didn’t really happen, but maybe it’s more like, well, using your friends to get positive coverage. Or maybe that’s not true? Well, these guys should have disclosed they were friends whenever they got coverage.” It turns out that the crime there would have been on the journalists themselves, not on Quinn. Disclosing things, yeah, it’s a good idea.
So I wasn’t very good at this game Cuphead. The nice thing was that other game journalists came to my defense. Influencers like PewDiePie created videos making fun of me, so it magnified that million views into many more millions of views. It was funny. It was taking an easy shot at somebody. But being on the receiving end of this, it made me understand what it’s like to walk in the shoes of a person who’s getting totally roasted on the internet.
We all make cruel and snide comments. We look at other people that we don’t like and we throw hate their way on the internet. It’s really easy to do that. It’s really easy to do that anonymously. But to walk in the shoes of these people who are getting so many negative comments — things like, “You should just go kill yourself.” You get a hundred of those a day, it kind of brings you down. You have to figure out, okay, who am I going to listen to here? When everybody in the world, it seems like, is telling you that what you’re doing is shit, are you still going to keep doing what you do?
It made me think about — okay, we need to be kinder to people. We need to go back to those ideas that I always like about journalism. Walk in the shoes of somebody else. Get a different point of view. Understand what it’s like to be someone. Have some kind of empathy. That’s what some of the best journalists do. They’re not personalities who are entertaining you. They’re good listeners, people who have empathy.
I got through this little difficult time for me. It really only lasted 10 days at the most before the internet’s attention went to somebody or something else. Having a sense of humor and some humility about it, telling people they should be kinder — sometimes they would respond and actually reciprocate.
Above: Dean Takahashi of GamesBeat wears the Atari Speakerhat.
But I do think gamers sometimes have legitimate gripes. When they have a good gripe, they make themselves heard these days through the internet. It turns out to be a good thing. Quite often, though, you can also see from the game developer’s point of view. Like, why would I want to make games for these people? I think they should ask these questions about outside in and inside out the same way journalists do. Do you want to make fun of people who aren’t skillful? Is it okay to drive newbies and the unskilled away from gaming?
I wonder if gamers will welcome a broader industry that will get them more and better games? That’s the best argument in the world for welcoming people into gaming. For welcoming diversity in games as well. Diversity among game developers. Why would you react in a negative way to things that are going to get you what you want? And so I don’t understand the resistance we’ve seen. I really hope that it’s temporary.
The latest rendition of this is the loot box argument people are having with Electronic Arts over Star Wars Battlefront II. They do forget, I think, that EA used to charge for downloadable content that came out after a game came out. Maybe three or four packs that they’d sell for $15 apiece. They decided that fragmented the community too much and they made those available for free. They’ve figured out a way, through loot boxes, to recover some of that lost money. I think I’m okay with that? But a lot of gamers are not. You wind up with gamers who feel like they’re being attacked, like they’re looked on by outsiders still. They don’t get the resources they deserve. They don’t welcome new people. I feel like this is something that’s not right about the industry still.
Above: Dean Takahashi tries out Star Wars: Jedi Challenges AR headset.
These are my goals as a game journalist. Seek out new perspectives. Create successful game events where we can make better games happen. Continue to write about the diversity of the industry. Chronicle the journey of people, games, and companies from cradle to grave. Gazillion died recently, and that’s a case in point, where I was covering them at the beginning and I covered them at the end.
I have written 15,000 stories at VentureBeat. I don’t think of them as stories so much as the people I met along the way. I always wrote more stories because I was writing stories about people who wouldn’t have stories written about them otherwise. People who were doing Kickstarters, things like that. I think Susan Cain’s Quiet book is one to admire. She asks this question in there, “How did we go from valuing character to valuing personality without realizing that we sacrificed something meaningful along the way?” Listening, I think, gets you a long way. You can find stories that no one else is telling.
If I have advice, it’s the Kurt Vonnegut quote, for people in the industry. “We are who we pretend to be, so we must be careful about who we pretend to be.”
Above: Dean Takahashi is a well-dressed warrior playing Skyrocket’s Recoil.
I would love to see game journalism thrive as both a business and a profession and an art. I hope everyone gets paid to play games just like I do. I wish we had as many sponsors as someone like PewDiePie. Keeping a distinction between journalism and entertainment matters. Realizing the difference between fake news and real news, that matters. Be kind, don’t be cruel. I think gamer culture should grow up. It should not stay stuck in time.
“Gamers are everywhere. Games find a way.” That’s a quote from Seamus Blackley, who was one of the creators of the original Xbox. He was inspired by Jurassic Park, that line about “Life finds a way.” Whatever obstacles are presented in front of it, life finds a way. Games make their way onto new platforms, even if they’re not intentionally created for games.
The term “gamer,” of course, has lost its meaning. Diversity matters, a diversity of sources and perspectives. This whole diversity cause plays perfectly and goes hand in hand with good journalism. I love creating a career that really didn’t exist before, and reinventing myself, especially by moving from newspapers to the web. You’ll all be called upon to do that during your careers. I waited a lifetime to get to games like The Last of Us, and I do wish that my brother was around to play it with me.
