A near-nine minute video from YouTuber Dunkey spends a majority of the time pointing out all the basic stuff most of us already know about video game reviewers and critics: they aren’t very good at their jobs or they just don’t represent the gaming community the way they should.
If you listen to TotalBiscuit, Jim Sterling or any other YouTuber out there who actually plays games (or mostly plays games), they’re usually pretty hard on the current culture of the so-called professional game reviewing circle… well, unless it’s a friend of Jim Sterling or it’s his buddies from the GameJournoPros list and then he’ll turn face, bend over, and spread those buns like it came out of a 13oz Ballpark pack, ripe and ready for the wiener of nepotism.
Anyway, you can check out the video below from Dunkey called “Game Critics”. It’s a bit all over the map, but his invective is in the right place.
After excoriating the current review landscape of video game journalists, a lot of the comment section noticed something strange happening on the social media front.
The last comment actually highlights some of the subversive commentary of the video itself. It dissects the fact that it’s tough for a lot of reviewers to justify their end means.
Dunkey illustrates this by doing what the game reviewers do; he loses focus.
However, he brings it back on track by pointing out that after having lost focus, many reviewers then resort to giving the game a score that sometimes belies what they were talking about beforehand. So you’re left with a diatribe that ends with a 9.1, or a piece praising a game that ends with a 6, and the only thing you can do is scratch your head about a score that doesn’t match the review content, sort of like the drapes and carpet not matching the furniture in Caitlin Jenner’s basement.
Game reviewers, however, were angry at this; no, they were furious. Twitter, for most game journalists, recently became a home for a chaotic pity-party called dejection.
Video game reviewers react to @vgdunkey pic.twitter.com/RhLKvZrRdb
— Nick Monroe (@nickmon1112) July 10, 2017
Actually, his point was that there needs to be consistency from larger outlets so that gamers have an understanding of trust and reliability between the staff and the content they output. Several dozen writers with varying opinions contradicting each other in their reviews creates dissonance amongst gamers when it comes to trust. Someone may have liked one Mario game but a different person hated the sequel because they didn’t play the first game.
EGM rectified this problem by having multiple reviewers review a single game and then they would include snippets of those reviews in the magazine, giving gamers a reason to understand why different reviewers had different opinions about a title.
Others like Scottie Stephan claimed gamers just weren’t high-minded enough to be on his level of interactive entertainment critiques.
Even Kotaku’s Nathan Grayson chimed in, a regular entrant for DeepFreeze.it material and the prime culprit for making #GamerGate as big and as notorious as it was.
Another member of the GameJournoPros and one of IGN’s own, Dan Stapleton, also took a similar view to Stephan, claiming that the unwashed masses like Dunkey and his followers just don’t understand how criticism works.
Dunkey, mind you, has more than 3.6 million subscribers… so he likely has more people willing to listen to his criticism than there are people who even know who Dan Stapleton is.
There’s a consistent pattern of members from the GameJournoPros speaking out against Dunkey – likely after the content was shared in the GJP 2.0 group – and are now voicing their displeasure through social media in order to rack up virtue signaling points and accost Dunkey’s point of view with a torrent of groupthink newspeak in order to sway the masses.
Thankfully, since #GamerGate a lot of people who are aware of the media’s corruption aren’t too keen to fall for it, and there are definitely a lot more people who seem to be supportive of Dunkey’s point of view than the original gaming media’s point of view.
(Thanks for the news tip giygas)