By now, video games are ubiquitous across almost all facets of society; we see adverts on buses and YouTube videos for upcoming Call of Duty releases, numerous mainstream TV series and films are adapted from video game source materials (see the popularity of the Fallout and The Last of Us TV series, or the financial success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie), and seemingly all of my friends are busy begging me to join them on Lethal Company or Helldivers 2.
As someone who grew up playing games and still treats gaming as a nice hobby I get to indulge in during the too-few hours that I have free each week, video games are present across my life. The industry itself is the highest-grossing entertainment industry, making it even more important that we observe and scrutinise it. Accordingly, I’d expect the media to accommodate this. Why, then, is games coverage so thin on the ground?
Let’s establish what I mean by that. Certainly, the industry does get some coverage, largely through purely games-oriented publications such as IGN, or Polygon, but major stories and releases within the industry go generally overlooked by major news publications. Despite having sweeping consequences for the industry, the 2023-4 industry layoffs have only received substantial coverage in games-oriented publications and fringe publications, as did the Activision Blizzard civil rights lawsuit. It’s rare to see interviews with major players in the field, and discussion pieces on the industry and its artworks are virtually non-existent.
Many major journalistic organisations have only started covering games to any extent in recent years. The Daily Mail only has two pages’ worth of games coverage on its website, which it titles ‘Latest Gaming News, Releases, Reviews, Tips and Features’; this description is, I find, generous at best, given that the majority of articles feature are about footballers and their their roles within the EA Sports FC series. Reviews are few and far between, and, in the (very brief) reviews that do exist, the reviewer is frustratingly vague about the game and rarely offers any real insights or personal thoughts on it.
Of course, this isn’t to say that there’s nothing. The Guardian features a games section with a number of well-thought-out pieces, and has even conducted some high-profile interviews, including multiple interviews with Hidetaka Miyazaki (which is impressive, given how few Miyazaki interviews exist at all).
Even so, there’s still a noticeable absence of, well, stuff. Why, for example, did no major publications other than GQ interview Sam Lake, the creative director for Alan Wake 2 after the game’s success last year? Lake, a director with a rather distinctive style and a long history shaping the games industry, would be a perfect candidate for intricate interviews – so where are they?
In more recent history, the release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl should have warranted a flurry of interviews and articles on how a games studio based in Kyiv managed to produce such a fully-fledged sequel to a classic. Development of the game was delayed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and there are obvious allusions to the invasion in the game’s actual content, including the radical rename from the Russian name ‘Chernobyl’ to the Ukrainian ‘Chornobyl’. And yet, coverage of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 has been marginal at best.
Even major stories such as the US Copyright Office’s rejection of a DMCA exemption – requested by the Video Game History Foundation that would allow libraries to offer access to digitally preserved video games – have gone underreported. This is a highly significant rejection for the preservation of the games medium, and has been engineered by games publishers over fears that “there would be a significant risk that preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes”. I took that quote from a GamesRadar article that seems to be the only real coverage this ruling has received – but, why?
What’s going on here, exactly? It’s easy to throw your hands up in the air and proclaim that the media just don’t respect the games industry or the art it produces. It’s even easier to suggest that Gamergate, a movement that explicitly sought to silence a diversity of critical voices in the gaming space, has completely gutted the majority of effective games journalism.
Years later, ‘gaming journalism’ continually catches flak for, as far as I can tell, expressing a variety of opinions on an intensely subjective artistic medium. Even we, The Mancunion, have struggled with covering gaming in the last decade or so, despite the section being one of our most consistent in the 90s and 00s and one of our most popular sections.
While I am tempted towards defeatism, I don’t think that quite covers everything. For one, while the games medium may no longer be in its infancy, it is still in its adolescence. In many ways, we’re still struggling to find the right sort of vocabulary to use for a medium that is relatively new and has changed so much and so quickly. Likewise, games are still being released that completely revolutionise how we look at gameplay and storytelling. When Return of the Obra Dinn was released, I struggled to articulate what it even was to my friends, never mind explain what it was that I liked about it – I think we suffer from a similar issue in games journalism.
The games medium also has the most potential for variety within it; how can we cram both Inscryption and Hi-Fi Rush into the same media category when the two games are about as distant from one another as two pieces of the same media can be? This, in turn, causes issues within games media coverage, leading to discussion around such variety feeling like an insurmountable task. The ever-changing nature of games as well (see the existence of ‘Early Access’ or ‘Live Service’ games) only heightens this difficulty.
Nevertheless, it’s important that we continue to cover games to the best of our ability. Given how much money it rakes in and how many workers are in the industry, it’s more crucial than ever that we continue to cover and examine the games sector and everything surrounding it. Despite the criticism they receive from the very consumers they work to keep informed and educated, gaming journalists have done some great work in the past, most notably in recent years through revealing the prevalence of crunch culture in large games companies. Let’s not just leave the media coverage to the other art mediums, shall we?
