E3: Is Anyone Out There With Testicular Fortitude?
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When I first got into the media business, I told myself that after I’d dug in and established a reputation I’d grow that pair of balls the industry was so sorely lacking, and stand up against the sort of coverage I was all too used to seeing as a player: The obsequious pandering interviews and “Aw, shucks, Mister Developer, thanks for making such an awesome game!” reviews that produced nothing of value to anyone, and served only as mouthpieces to advertise game X or product Y.
But, after two years of covering the MMO genre, I’ve come to a sad realization: No matter what you ask people, with few exceptions, everyone is living in such fear of the PR department taking them out to the woodshed if they deviate from the company line that it makes no difference how giant or brass your balls may be, or how “tough” a question you may want to ask, no one is going to give you a straight answer–they can’t.
Straight answers are dangerous, unpredictable. Someone might slip up and reveal something that hasn’t yet been announced, or make an off-the-cuff remark that damages the company name. MMOs are multi-million dollar projects, employing hundreds, spanning years of development time. We can’t have some malcontent from the design team going out there and making fools of us just to appease the ego of some random, no-name reporter!
Much safer to have Marketing define a message, rehearse it, and then regurgitate it to every member of the media they come across.
I guess what I’m getting at is this: I know it’s a shot in the dark, considering that E3 is by its very nature nothing but a massive PR junket, but is there anyone out there who’s interested in sitting down this week to have a real, honest to god discussion? Where I ask questions I don’t already know the answers to, and you aren’t reading off a script?
If so, please drop me a line at steve@mmogamer.com.
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Generating an interesting discussion is your job as a reporter, and if the current PR environment is such that most developers are wary of giving you honest responses, so be it. You can talk around sensitive subjects that don't invite PR recriminations. You could invite comparisons and appeal to generalities that taken together given an accurate picture and insight into a developer's project or ideology. Lastly, these people are automatons. So much of an interview is lost in translation to the page. Editorialize on the experience of interviewing your subject and help your reader fill in the gaps between what may read as a rehearsed script.
Good points.
But, the counterpoint is, how can I effectively create interesting conversation when most of the people I speak to are forbidden to venture off the script?
"Interesting" and "What the producers/PR department want them to say" are often at opposite ends of the spectrum.
On that note, the worst possible interview I can do is when somebody from PR is actually sitting right there at the table while we're speaking. Then *I* start getting drawn into the script.
You get that feeling that if you don't spend X percent of the interview advertising the game they're going to stick you on the blacklist… and without access we'd have to turn this place into a rant site.
Whoops! I had meant to write that developers giving interviews aren't automatons, they're real people that even with a script in their head or a PR representative hovering over their shoulder, can't help but communicate through facial expression, intonation and body language more than what they actually can say. What I was trying to emphasize were these elements of the face to face experience that don't come across in a transcript but that can give more insight into a developer's intentions. I am at a loss though of how to work around the "need to advertise" or softball portion of the interview that is essentially an invitation for the developer to personally deliver their game's press release.
Perhaps it is a necessary evil in an environment where publishers have a stranglehold over your access as a journalist. This isn't unique to games and games reporting by any means though. I just listened to an On the Media podcast in which the hosts discussed the phenomenon of political reporters writing sycophantic articles about high level administrators in order to curry favor and access.
That's the thing though, we're not talking about nuclear missiles in Iran or Senate confirmation hearings on Supreme Court justices, we're talking about games.
To me, gaming journalism should have a certain amount of joy to it. The purpose of games is to entertain, to lift you out of the skulldrudgery of your ordinary day. Nobody you talk to ever says they got into the gaming industry for the women or the money, they all say they got into it because it's what they loved to do.
But, few of them can talk candidly about what they love to do, because of the realities of how much these games cost to make. Interviewing a company about an upcoming MMO these days is almost like sitting down with a defense contractor to discuss their latest billion dollar government black project.
No one wants to take the risk of going off message and potentially costing the company money.
I don't think that's going to change until these games no longer take 40 million dollars to produce, unfortunately.
That's an unfortunate and hopefully temporary state of affairs. I don't get the sense that entertainment reporters interviewing movie directors/producers have the same sort of heavily censored interactions. Perhaps, even if game development budgets continue to balloon, a growing celebrity or auteur culture around game designers might change the current gaming journalism environment for the better. If publishers could market game developers the same way movie studios can market directors/actors, then perhaps developers will be able to speak more freely on their own behalf because the focus would be less on a PR roll out of game features and more on the nature of designer X's creative vision. A precious few developers have already achieved this – John Carmack comes to mind – and I hope more will in the future as the medium matures.