... I think that GG's "journalistic integrity" cause was just a very, very, grave misunderstanding. People saw seemingly compelling evidence, and as a result, hopped on the rage train. It grew and grew, and in the end, it was a fierce mass-scale internet argument.
I think there's a lot of truth to this, at least for a lot of people. While I despise how it started, I actually
don't blame some people for having questions/concerns about journalistic integrity after some of that initial information came out. But if that were
all the situation was about, I would have thought the entire thing would have ended with, "Hey, there's no Kotaku review of Depression Quest. The EIC of the site looked into it."
I've seen enough reasonable GG supporters the genuinely do seem to just misunderstand certain aspects of the situation, or have been given incorrect information, or even simply have misunderstandings about how journalism (particularly game journalism) works. I can't entirely fault them for that, because it's not their
job to know how other people's jobs work, but it's also really frustrating when a bunch of people who don't have journalism degrees decide to tell journalists how journalism works -- and refuse to believe you when you tell them otherwise.
(No doubt a few people would like to twist that and say, "Well, critics don't have game design degrees but they try to tell developers how to do their jobs!" but... No, that's not what critics, on the whole, do. They analyse what works and doesn't work in a specific piece of media. I don't pretend to know how to make a game, I just know how to recognize games I do and don't like, then put those feelings into words.)
It'll be hard to solve this misunderstanding peacefully, won't it?
I wish it was easy, because I refuse to be a part of a resolution that's not peaceful. But the couple of times I've tried to wade into the issue on Twitter haven't been as fruitful as I was hoping. Very early on (August 31) I tweeted the hashtag with high hopes, thinking, "Hey, I'll just talk to some folks, clear up some confusion, and things will be fine." Didn't really work. I got a handful of reasonable people asking questions (usually they got an answer, said "Thanks!" and left, which was nice), but they were accompanied by shouting, angry people who didn't seem willing to talk/listen at all, and who often came bearing misinformation.
Then I was "outed" (well, I outed myself, though only one person noticed/cared at the time) as a member of GameJournoPros, and suddenly I had so many people who had probably never heard of me (because let's face it, I'm not a huge name or anything) calling me corrupt that I just said, "Why bother?" It's really hard to try to have a reasonable discussion with reasonable (if concerned) people if there's also a crowd around you shouting angry insults for crimes you never actually committed.
A lot of people see "evidence," are convinced, and then go on the hunt. One guy starting tweeting at my work's official Twitter account with an image from a GJP leak, saying, "Is this the kind of guy you want working for you?" It got a bunch of retweets and replies, cluttering up our Twitter feed for a little bit. The problem? The guy misattributed a quote, trying to get me in trouble for something that I didn't even say. When this was pointed out to him, he said, "My mistake!" and dropped it, but he made no effort to correct the other people he had already sicced on us. Unfortunately, that's the kind of thing I've seen
way too often during this entire thing. People are looking at the surface of an issue, often "confirming" something they already believed, then go on what they think is a righteous crusade. And frankly, I don't know how to fix that.
