Mister Saturn said:
You mean like Gamasutra and Rock, Paper, Shotgun?
This is the thing that I don't get. Polygon has said a lot of puffery about creating a revolution in the enthusiast press, assembling a team of the "best of the best" to accomplish "the impossible."
But with that in mind, all the guys they drafted onto the editorial team are basically "the best worst dudes." The two biggest groups of alum come from extremely similar blog-style news/preview/review sites with heavy ownership emphasis on pageviews (particularly in the case of Kotaku) driving the editorial mandate.
They didn't get anyone from Rock Paper Scissors, they didn't poach anyone from Gamasutra or Kill Screen, they didn't get any of the great indie writers or anyone that you'd see regularly on
Critical Distance (of course most of those are already devs, natch), they didn't even get anyone who was like, ex-Edge or Next Gen.
For all their talk, I don't see any guys who have real track records of pushing the discourse of the enthusiast press in new directions. What I do see is a bunch of guys who are going to do basically a Kotaku/Joystiq mishmash with a heavy dose of the terrible version of "New Games Journalism" as described much more artfully than I could ever hope to by the Artful Gamer:
Instead of becoming deeper and more insightful, we became pretentiously intellectual. Instead of writing about our personal connections to games and what they mean for the entire social collective as loving/breathing/thinking human beings, we write about our individual opinions. Instead of understanding the game-player dialectic as a holism one implying and transforming the other we atomize and deconstruct gameplay and player experiences as separate things. Instead of providing deep critiques of games and reflect upon what they express of our societies as they are now, the vast majority of critiques cherry-pick superficial aspects of a game such as an NPCs skin-colour or gender and perpetuate the very stereotypes they wish to undermine. Journalistic objectivity has been replaced by opinion and thinned-down experiences, rather than exploring how games-publishers-societies-experiences set the stage for our opinions of them. We ignore hundreds of years of thought on the review of art and aesthetics, and instead feed off of the blogs and inane personal judgements of game developers who are themselves part of the mess.