The noise of E3

It’s become rather hip to pick on the gaming press, to point out ever pratfall and giggle at every typo. Nothing should be excused, but I generally cut gaming journalism a lot of slack, especially as its my job. Gaming journo, that is, not professional slack cutter.

But when E3 rolls around, it becomes an annual wake up call that the online games press is broken, that it’s a loud, exhausting, directionless band of bloggers, tweeters, live bloggers and 20 word post makers.

Throughout the three day blowout that is at E3, millions of words are farted into a website CMS (I grimly returned to my Google Reader following the Sony/Nintendo press events to find a draining 950 new items), but few are readable, or worth reading. Thanks to the breathless anticipation of new games, the headless chicken reaction to news and the zany idea that people need this information the nano second it’s released, E3 results in unreadable prose, more errors than ever and an unfollowable stream of information.

Ironically, in a time when hundreds of press members descend on Los Angeles with the intention of covering the news, its more indecipherable than ever. If anything, the press gives the conference a layer of confusion and haze. Check out Twitter or Google Reader, and see if you can catch up on the conference in less than an hour.

I woke up this morning to see what happened at Ubisoft and EA’s conference, only to find upside down liveblogs, individual news pieces on every piece of content (regardless of interest) and unfixed typos, grainy off screen footage and factual errors. I just picked out a piece from CVG that classed the Donkey Kong game as both a remake and a brand new game, in the same article. Utterly useless.

Only The Escapist digested the stream of information into something readable. Wired’s coverage was a little rushed, but also cut to the chase, and discounted the crap. More websites like these would be fantastic.

What we see instead with websites are people who have editorially painted themselves into a corner, thanks to the website’s strive to cover every minute morsel of boring news. Whereas a magazine is forced to pick and choose, with deadly efficiency and ruthless frugality, what is and isn’t worth covering, a websites literal bottomless pages mean nothing has to be skipped, much to the readers chagrin.

And time, as much as word counts, massively affects the quality and usefulness of what is ultimately written. Read Edge Magazine in a month, and compare its coverage of the conference to what has been written on the website in over 100 articles. Witness how a little time can afford writers to digest, think, analyse, pick out trends, discuss and dissect what was shown.

When it comes to entertainment editorial, I see the job of the journalist to be a filter to the content. To assess trends, find out what is cool and turn me, the guy without the time and money and access to try all these new games, onto stuff I should be playing. Not to bombard me with thousands of unreadable words on games I never intended to play in the first place. Be selective, have authorial control of what is and isn’t worth talking about, and have conviction in your writing.