Gaming vs News Media - In Depth Feature

The mainstreamnews media’s coverage of games is so absurdly out-of-touch that it isin danger of damaging its own reputation. Colin Campbell reports…

Fox News’ recent story about Mass Effect – and the strong reaction itslazy reporting and gross inaccuracies inspired – is a warning to themainstream media. The days when TV news could tar and feather gamingany time it pleased are gone. Gaming is no longer the weedy kicking boyof mass entertainment.

But that is sorta beside the point.

Mostof the commentary surrounding this episode has supposed someanti-gaming agenda in the news media. Or has opted for simple Foxbashing. Or has focused on the development of gaming itself as a mediumin its own right. But this story is really about the changing shape ofmedia as a whole. It’s much bigger than ‘TV news versus games’.

Some years ago, a Japanese couple decided to tour the Biblical lands.Naturally, the Churches of Bethlehem were on their busy agenda.Millions of visitors come to Bethlehem every year, so their vacationplans could hardly be expected to attract global notice; and yet theydid.

They visited Bethlehem in the middle of a deadly all-outwar between Israeli forces and rioting Palestinians. TV news footageshowed the bemused, frightened couple dodging bullets and bricks,negotiating tanks where, perhaps they might have reasonably expectedthe odd ice cream van or postcard stand.

We watched this couplewith incredulity. How could people be so dumb? How could they not knowthat, at the time of their visit, Bethlehem was a war zone? Didn’t theywatch the news?

Scanning for Pictures

Weall rely heavily on the news media to shape the decisions we make inlife. As I write this, the TV news is playing in the background. Ihave a long journey to make later today and bad weather is threatening.I might look out the window and decide whether or not to try thejourney, but more likely, I’ll watch the TV, scanning for pictures ofstranded vehicles or over-turned trucks.

So it is withvideogames. The media’s role in which games we play or even whether ornot we play games at all, is immense. You read reviews. You read Op-Edsand you read the news. They don’t entirely shape your view of the worldof games – friends, personal experience and innate prejudices are alsoimportant - but they do have a big impact.

The news media’s mostimportant raw material is not information, but trust. Organizationsthat report falsehoods or that judge their editorial tone poorly arepunished by viewers. In this age of fast-moving information, news mediathat fail to treat issues like trust with enough emphasis are widelycastigated – look at the shit-storm GameSpot was recently forced towade through.

It’s only right that the media is held to account. It is a businesslike any other and, ultimately, it serves its own financial wellbeing.Mostly it serves noble concepts such as ‘truth’ only insofar as thatserves its own bottom line. This is why different news organizations –reporting on the exact same event – will offer such differingperspectives. One newspaper’s heroic campaigner for justice, isanother’s wretched rabble-rouser. They play to the crowd.

Certainnews outlets can shrug off criticism of slanted coverage. After all,they are merely following a centuries-old tradition of media outletsthat peddle the interests of their proprietors and the prejudices oftheir readers. (Newspapers owned by slavers, for example, didsignificant harm to the anti-slavery movement in Britain and the U.S inthe 19th Century.)

But media outlets cannot sustain gettingsomething so badly wrong that it confounds the experience of itscustomers. People enjoy Fox News (to use a famous, though not isolatedexample) because it offers them a view of the world they agree with.But when it fails to offer up that familiar vista, the result won’t beto change the mind of the viewer, but to lose him to another network.Fox News succeeds only because it gives people what they want.

So why are news networks getting it so wrong when it comes to videogames?

They seem to bestuck in a weird time warp; one where consumers find videogames strangeand threatening; one where games are the province of young men, proneto anti-social behavior and potential violence.

News networkswoke up to the idea that people who use computers are not always nerdssome time in 1989; because that’s when the execs and journalists whowork the networks took delivery of their first IBM-compatible desktoppersonal computer. The reason the old guard hasn’t gotten with it ongames is because they don’t play them; and neither does their rarefiedsocial circle.

This is, in fact, a failure on their part becauseit’s not normal NOT to play games. Playing games is the thing regularpeople do. So when the networks start blustering about how it’s“interactivity” or “gore” or “porn” in games that does the damage, theylook like idiots. And not just to some hardcore fraternity of die-hardgamers, but to millions of their viewers.

People who play gamesrecognize that theirs is an absurd world-view. Only someone hopelesslyout of touch could hold these antique opinions.

Sexual Imagery

Itwould be fine if the campaigning news networks were consistent in theirconcern for our moral well-being. But in at least two regards they arenot. Firstly, they are happy to show extreme violence and sexualimagery 24-7. Secondly, they do not hold the same draconian legislativeviews about any other media except for games and maybe social networks.

EvenFox stops short of calling for bans on books it does not like. Very,very rarely do we hear TV news networks calling for a ban on televisionshows. Cinema offers no shortage of content that challenges us withimages of violence or sexual content and yet the only voices we hearcalling for bans are only loony religious types.

All of theabove media businesses are self-regulated with rules in place thatattempt to prevent the wrong people seeing inappropriate content. Noneof them succeed at this any better than games; and yet it’s games thatget the brunt of the networks’ outrage.

You can’t help feeling that the TV networks resemble playground bulliesat the very end of their power. For years they've been picking on abunch of “losers” like immigrants or independent thinkers or gamesplayers, like we were so many bucktoothed kids with glasses. But oneday the bullies realize their victims have more power and more friendsthan they’d thought. For gaming, that day has arrived.

It’s timefor the networks to cease seeing games as merely a vehicle for outragednews stories or as some new fad. We are sick of hearing that games are“becoming big business” as if this had not been a reality for most ofour lives already. The news network needs to realize that its editorialvoice – at least on this subject – is completely outdated.

Ofcourse, as editorial directors retire or drop down dead from cirrhosisof the liver (see how clichés have such power?), younger people who dounderstand that games are merely part of the entertainment landscapewill replace them. But it might be nice for some of these old codgersto figure this stuff out for themselves, before they finally shuffleoff to the obscurity that they merit.

Big media is under attackfrom new technologies. Blogs, video upload sites, social communitiesand game consoles all represent a new media landscape in which the TVnetworks have significantly less power than they have now. They willalways have a place in our society, even one that is much diminished.But in order to protect themselves from further decay, they need tounderstand how we, as consumers, relate to enabling, interactivetechnology. Old-school tech-bashing is finished.