This is about framing news and then finding indignation at similar but distinct framing.
I avoid criticizing games journalists as a class of workers or writers because I try to avoid denigrating generalizations, especially about types of work I respect and they get enough stick from tribalist gamers whose identities are wrapped up in affiliation with a commercial brand.[1] In fact, that group, the veterans of the console wars, are among our focal subjects today.
It’s funny (if not completely without reason) that some forms of consumption, including of art and media, are looked at as superior to others. Calling someone a “cinephile” doesn’t quite rate as an insult, but “film bro” does. I know there are TV critics that love the form, but I haven’t ever heard anyone call themselves “a TV fan,” though I am sure they exist. But gamers, well… Gamers specifically have a tattered reputation based in one part on their (our? I’ll return to that question in a second) medium of choice being considered an object for children and in another part on longstanding cultural practices of casual sexism and racism that have ratcheted up in the past few years, after being mainstays over the last several. This reactionary ratcheting is in part a response to these cultural markers being challenged by serious game writers in the Trump years and since, not that the problem or the challenges to it are as young as eight years old. I remember once (here we are returning to that question) on Waypoint several years ago, the crew were responding to a listener question about whether they consider themselves “gamers.” The answer boiled down to that it depends on the audience: when games media people are talking about “gamers” they may be talking about the consumer-identity group with the soiled reputation of misogyny and other bigotry that want the form to be respected but don’t want it to be criticized as a serious artform should be, but they wouldn’t necessarily respond with concern if people within their family that don’t play videogames referred to them as such. The well-earned bad reputation of “gamers” is partially maintained through the constant and perpetual slandering of games journalists.[2]
In general, journalism in the United States has a bad reputation. I don’t think it’s unique to here, but this is where I live. Some of this reputation is because of the corporate capture of the media through increased consolidation. Some of it is because the most well-paid of them are frequently stenographers and propagandists for the powers that be, such as police departments and large multinational conglomerates. Some of it is because the most powerful and least morally upright are good at depicting everyone else as “the media” and themselves as brave truthtellers.[3] Of course, the tendency to critique a group of which you are part by naming that group as if you are outside of it is a common enough tactic, whether done as good faith self-criticism or generalizing putdown.[4] I say all that to mention that I am also not trying to come across as a games journalist speaking truth to the power of more mainstream games journalists. I’ve done very little games journalism, and none recently. This is commentary.
This is all preamble to discuss recent rumors out of Xbox, and how they have been handled. After a merger with Activision-Blizzard that took two years among legal scandals, related labor trouble, and regulatory hurdles, Microsoft’s gaming division swiftly laid off over 1900 people last month. Early indications are that this year will see a contraction of the workforce across games (AKA the disciplining of labor by capital) at a rate even worse than last year, which was an absolute bloodbath.
Microsoft’s gaming division has three subsidiaries – Xbox Game Studios, ZeniMax Media, and Activision Blizzard which have over forty subsidiary studios between them and around 20,000 employees. They own some of the biggest names in gaming after more than a half-decade of acquisitions.[5] They compete with Sony while Nintendo does their own thing. After “losing” the last console generation to Sony’s PlayStation 4 with the confusing vision of their Xbox One, it was the hope of Microsoft’s games division and fans of their games that all these acquisitions would turn into some console-selling, culture-driving games. That has yet to be seen. It was, however, briefly rumored that Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, two Xbox exclusive games, are going to come to Sony.[6]
The initial reactions to this I saw out of games media were a combination of “why do stans care so much about this” and “wow, looks like X-Box is falling apart,” sometimes in the same article.[7] This reads as at least a little bit disingenuous, though it is worth noting that the author of that article, Luke Plunkett, pointed out to his cohosts on the Aftermath Hours podcast that shortly after saying it didn’t matter, they said they need to buy PlayStations. On the February 16th follow-up episode, guest Ash Parrish (The Verge) pointed out that they collectively transitioned from saying Xbox minimizing exclusives wasn’t a big deal to highlighting the success of PlayStation semi-exclusive Helldivers 2 (it’s also on PC, but not Xbox or Switch). To keep it very simple, Sony has a lot of appealing first-party games that do not come to Xbox. If the big first-party games that were exclusive to Xbox are now coming to PlayStation, why didn’t I just buy a PlayStation to begin with? Now, for one thing, I quite like Game Pass – it’s introduced me to games I otherwise might never have bought, like Katana Zero, Weird West, The Ascent, and Hades. For another thing, I skipped a generation; while we were an X-Box household for much of my childhood, I have affinity for the console (my first console was a PSX, then a PS2, and I currently have a PS2 and PS3 in addition to my Xbox, so I’m hardly a gaming monotheist).[8]
More important, perhaps, than the qualitative value of understanding my lens is the recurrent framing that produces these discourses. If you always frame what is happening in games as a competition between corporations, how else are game players, games enthusiasts, “gamers” supposed to see it? Having a corporate-aligned identity is a bad thing, but having a perspective framed within corporate competition is unavoidable if that is how even the least corporate-aligned publications see the thing. And they’re not wrong to see it that way: games is a big industry made up of big businesses. But if you, as a member of the games media, see Xbox putting some games on PlayStation as possibly foreshadowing the death of their console business, how out of line is it for the game-playing public to see it that way? Acting as if the sky is falling is out of hand, but seeing what everyone else sees doesn’t make you imperceptive.
Whether moving all their first party games to other consoles is in line with Microsoft’s vision as established over the last several years with Game Pass is up for debate, but it feels desperate as the Xbox is being outsold about 2.5-to-1 by the new PlayStation and Microsoft has all these developers they need to do something with. One of my overriding concerns is what will happen to those people if Microsoft decides to contract; certainly all the people involved in hardware development have to be looking around wondering what’s going to happen with their jobs.
There were statements made by Microsoft gaming President and CEO Phil Spencer around the launch of the Xbox Series X and Series S that denoted that was their general direction – they want people playing their games in as many places as possible; that could mean bringing Game Pass to console competitors. Patrick Klepek at Remap Radio argues that it’s likely the subscriber numbers have stagnated and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella doesn’t want to be in the business of console exclusivity anymore. The team over at GamesIndustry.biz argue that it’s aligned with their longterm strategy of putting all their X-Box exclusive games on PC long before Game Pass. Frankly, I think that’s going a bit soft on them for the sole reason that Microsoft is a software company that already has market share on most computers – they own the most popular (as in most-used not most well-liked) operating system in Windows and most popular (see above) suite of electronic work tools in Office. They cannot lose out on market share by making their games available on PC (as they have for two decades) because they already make money on PC hand over fist in the bigger parts of their company. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that someone that does not use their PC primarily for gaming will play an Xbox game on PC and later buy an Xbox (though it may be increasingly less likely to need to do that as they position themselves as the lead cloud-streaming games company). It’s not a concession the same way Sony putting their games on PC is, or Microsoft putting major first-party releases on PlayStation and Nintendo would be.
In any case, one thing I think is funny about games media is that, like all media, the need to constantly be telling people the news means that your work sometimes feels like it has a short memory or a short attention span which provokes hot takes and hyperbole.[9] The easy comparison for me is always sports. The Football Ramble (my favorite soccer podcast) has had a decent amount of narratives about Chelsea F.C. over the course of the last several months.[10] But with sports there are seasons, so there comes a point where you do have a complete narrative. With games, the attention and memory is as short, but there aren’t real seasons with firm lines; there are generations (which are averaging about six years before turnover) and there are years.
I wrote the bulk of this two or three weeks ago. I thought about not posting it. Then Jeff Gerstmann (formerly of Giant Bomb) posted this Tweet and it made me feel insane.
“The fanboy stuff was already out of control but I gotta say I’m really not looking forward to this new wave of Xbox Flat Earthers who will take every single move the company makes from here on out as a sign that they’re quitting the console business.”
Like, not for nothing, but Gerstmann used to be coworkers with Patrick Klepek. Patrick Klepek, Rob Zacny, Janet Garcia, and Ricardo Contreras at Remap are not Xbox Flat Earthers. And I don’t think other journalists considering the possible ramifications of Xbox ending exclusivity or stopping making consoles, whether it’s Danny O’Dwyer and the rest of the gang at NoClip, Jordan Middler, Andy Robinson, and Chris Scullion at Video Games Chronicle, or the aforementioned Aftermath Hours folk, or so on. And I guess finding this all so frustrating is a signal about me not being a games journalist any more than I’m a Gamer:
I will concede that capital-G gamers produce myriad problems as an extended internet community. And, moreover, I recognize that my experience online (mainly Twitter) is so different from what big name video games journalists experience as to be a world apart with just the occasional crossover. I concede that the more concentrated around a given subject your Twitter feed or your professional life is, the more likely you are to see its deranged dregs. And some many factors about the digital communities around games contribute to them being perpetually generally hyperbolic, rude, and toxic toward games journalists.[11] So, I am saying, I understand that this framing feels self-contradictory to me because I am not in the same gauntlet as these folks; I mostly only see opinions about games and gaming from games journalists, games critics, or other writers or fans that I follow because I think that they have interesting opinions.
Irrespective of that, as long as the headlines, articles, and podcasts are framing these changes as breaking news which needs immediate response, even if some of that response is about telling hysterical fans to pipe down, you are still contributing to the framing of competition through which the industry is seen. That said, games enthusiasts, fans, the gaming audience, game players, gamers, are not obligated to pick a team. It is no doubt somewhat the fault of the consumer if they (we?) cannot separate the framing of corporate combat from console wars. But even if they don’t have to pick a team, they do have to pick a thing to buy to play videogames on, and it makes sense that if you spend $600 on one machine and are told afterward that, because of change in corporate direction, you will not be able to access what’s available on the other machine, but the other machine will be able to access what you thought you were trading-off for, some level of disappointment is acceptable if not laudable.
I also think that, aside from being inundated with overreactors, journalists are inundated with news. Exposure to a lot of it means you have a better gauge on what is important, how to read and examine it critically; that’s kind of the job.
Now, not to be outdone for bad news, between Microsoft rumors three weeks ago and a Microsoft podcast two weeks ago that announced Starfield and Indiana Jones are not among the first four games to go multiplatform and that Microsoft is staying in the console business for the foreseeable future, Sony announced that their initial expectations for PlayStation 5 sales are coming up short and they’re in the latter half of the console’s lifecycle. Which in turn began discourse about how the PS5 doesn’t have any games as well as a more interesting discourse about the unsustainability of these current trends in game development and console manufacturing. Or maybe it was just Marc Normandin having an idea I agree with and folks at various podcasts arguing that we don’t need to move to the next consoles when we’ve barely seen what the current ones can do. Their ridiculous hardware specifications have hardly been tested; the current length of AAA game development means major series are skipping generations for their releases. Why not extend the window and the console lifecycle?
Obsidian’s Grounded and Pentiment are coming to PlayStation and Switch. Hi-Fi Rush (Tango Gameworks/Bethesda Softworks) and Sea of Thieves (Rare) are coming to PlayStation. The new fights are the same as the old fights and console wars are stupid, but corporate competition is the framework of discourse around game news.[12] And this is already old.
[1]There is a society-wide problem with people not recognizing that journalists exist to defend their interests to those in power. This is true in politics, in sports, in entertainment. There are a lot of reasons for this (such as journalists who claim to be doing that when they’re very much not), but the overarching reason under whose umbrella all other reasons fall is that it is the way people with money and power want it – they want the average worker-citizen-consumer to think of themselves as a consumer first and a worker last and to identify with corporations over their fellow workers within those corporations or critiquing those corporations. Sports are a great example of this because you can see how angry, for instance, college football supporters get at journalists who rightfully critique their sporting organization of choice (typically a state-funded university) for, for instance, hiring a mediocre defensive coordinator under whose watch a player died at practice. Many of the people that run and own media corporations also fund political campaigns. See this article from 2021 at USA Today: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/09/08/tracking-media-owners-political-donations/5719743001/
[2] It is worth noting that however someone self-identifies within the realm of being a casual, enthusiastic, critical, or enthusiastic and critical consumer of games, there are overlapping and sometimes oppositional media for them to consume, as well as different layers of journalists, influencers, and critics that they consult, and circles that work concentrically or in Venn diagrams on the internet. This is because experiences aren’t monolithic, and perhaps also because that enthusiasm can breed contempt for people with different perspectives, even if given internet communities or forum boards or what have you have internal conflicts. This is part of a wider hypothesis (part of it is around how communities and outlets coalesce around viewpoints sometimes incidentally if not accidentally) I will explore when I finally get down to detailing some podcast recommendations, and I probably need to finish the two McKenzie Wark books I’ve started (Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory) to tease this out some more.
[3] Take for instance the way “content creators” and “influencers” cultivate the goodwill and loyalty of the gaming public while taking money to use reviews as marketing as far as this topic, or, in the realm of politics, the most watched cable news network in the country referring to less-watched channels as “the mainstream” or “lamestream” media.
[4] Some of my favorite examples of this are “white people,” “Western leftists,” and “Film Twitter”
[5] ZeniMax media is the holding company for Bethesda Softworks (a publisher with the development division Bethesda Game Studios), known especially for The Elder Scrolls and the post-2005 iteration of Fallout. ZeniMax also holds Arkane (known for the Dishonored games and Prey and currently developing a Blade game for Marvel) and id Software (known for the Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein series, among others), MachineGames (who has mostly been a support studio on Wolfenstein games by id and Arkane, and Quake games, and is now developing an Indiana Jones game), Roundhouse Studios, Tango Gameworks, and ZeniMax Online. Xbox Game Studios comprises fifteen studios, including inXile (developer of Bard’s Tale and Wasteland 3 among others), Obsidian (developer of Knights of the Old Republic II, Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, and others), Rare Limited (GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark, among others), 343 Industries (the Halo developer successor to Bungie), and several others. Activision Blizzard owns Activision (which has several subsidiaries including Raven Software and is primarily known as the Call of Duty studio), Blizzard Entertainment (the World of Warcraft studio), King (the Candy Crush Saga studio), Major League Gaming Corp (a professional esports organization), and a film corporation. Microsoft bought up all these companies in the hopes of becoming a bigger player in gaming.
[6] Most speculation about this points to Starfield coming at a later date, the way Ghosts of Tsushima, The Last of Us, and Spider-Man came to PC from PlayStation.
[7] “While the idea of releasing Xbox-exclusive games on PlayStation might seem incendiary to anyone whose brain has been turned to paste by decades of console war, it’s also the only possible outcome here.” Followed a few paragraphs later by “But if, as these reports suggest, big changes are afoot–these games would be just the first wave–then what even is Xbox anymore?”
[8] It also gives access to EA Play and has some limited crossover with Ubisoft’s Uplay. It’s a great service, and I’ve tended to buy indie games that come off of it, like all of the ones mentioned in this sentence, though I do also worry about its long term affects undercutting real sales.
[9] Kat Bailey on another of my favorite games podcasts, “Axe of the Blood God,” said that this console generation was four years old; the PS5 and Xbox Series X and S came out in November of 2020; it is barely over 3 years old.
[10] Inconsistent results, losing streaks, a brief winning streak… we lost to Liverpool in the Carabao Cup Final today.
[11] (the medium being explored exclusively electronically, frequently online, the median and mode ages skewing younger, the cyclical or symbiotic relationship between the worst of tech culture and the habits of game culture, other material and social factors beyond my immediate grasp)
[12] Some of the podcasts I listened to and am responding to or otherwise have affected my thinking obviously include Remap Radio, Aftermath Hours, GamesIndustry.biz, Video Games Podcast (VGC), NoClip Crew Cast. I’m behind on Nextlander, but I tend to like their thinking as well (which is not the same as ubiquitously agreeing with it, which I think should be obvious to point).
pcvulpes 