Why is that not up for debate? What is bad about the footage? That they didn't have a high enough accuracy on their shots? Like, really, if you break it down you see just how elitist this view is. If you throw me into a genre I've never played before it would take me a while to learn how to play. That doesn't make my views or my footage of me playing said game bad.
Do you ever find yourself thinking "I bet a bunch of people would be really interested in watching this" while you suck at a game? If you worked at a games site would you volunteer to cover a game you suck at?
It's fine if someone sucks at games, even if they work at Polygon, but it seems weird that they'd be chosen to cover games that they suck at. Footage of someone sucking at a game may not be
bad, but it is kind of pointless. How many people are interested in Doom, have no clue how to play an FPS, and want an opinion from someone in the same boat? In comparison, how many people who watch Polygon content DO have a working knowledge of how FPS games work?
At usual with these things it's the editors' reactions that are troubling to me, not the actual egg-on-face moment. They uploaded a video of someone sucking at Doom, it's funny and baffling that it happened, but so what? But then you have other employees like Gies getting defensive on Twitter saying stuff like "Oh, sure, like you've never sucked at a game before!"
You write about games for a living. No need to take it so seriously or get so defensive over something so small. Explain why the video was made, make a note that that type of content isn't popular, and move on.
Elitism is something that happens when your standards for people or the things they produce (which is something everyone has whether they like it or not) reaches a level that makes other (or the same?) people uncomfortable. "Stop being elitist" sounds like "stop having standards". In things that "matter", like food preparation or science, you would never be called elitist. Maybe videogames or their analysis don't matter (i.e., for your safety), but since this is a videogame forum...
From what I've seen a lot of game writers don't take criticism well. Gies and Kuchera will block people on Twitter for disagreeing with them. I know they get a lot of vile shit sent their way and it gets old sorting out constructive or genuine feedback from a bunch of people telling them they should be burned at the stake, but whenever something like this happens editors seem to get defensive and disregard any criticism. Like with this video thing, how hard would it have been to say "Oh yeah, I can see how this would be worrying if people think that we don't have any sort of skill requirements for reviews, but we do." Or "We've seen some people worry that since Doom is really fast that they may not be able to play it, so we made a video to show that it's friendly to al skill levels, we should have made that clearer."
But no, instead the response basically boils down to "Oh, you're so high and mighty, like you've never made a mistake." It's not "We'll do better," it's "We're only human, what do you expect?"
My point being that the people running the sites who create video game content don't seems to have much in the way of standards, and often use the same "Stop being elitist" response that the posters defending them here are. So holding them to any sort of standard or expecting them to learn anything when they do something like this or the Mario Kart graph seems to be a fool's errand.
