G4TV.com, Stephen Johnson: River City Ransom 2 Coming To WiiWare This Summer [March 25th, 2011]

G4’s own Stephen Johnson, seen here portrayed by Paul Giamatti, signs off another news post about an exciting-looking Wii game with the old “dust off the Wii” gag. Oh ho ho! Aren’t you clever, Stephen?

Except no, you’re not - whenever G4 reports on a Wii-bound game that actually looks rather good they find themselves falling back on this tired old joke which serves to tell the reader that the Wii isn’t a very good console. It’s an expression of personal bias on the part of the G4 team who long ago decided that if they didn’t like waving a hard white cock in front of their televisions then chances are no one else would.

Bias in journalism is an incredibly dangerous thing, moreso in standard newsy-woosy journalism than in this industry’s pathetic attempts at reporting on inconsequential shit, because if a news anchor takes sides or tries to shift the narrative then it influences the viewer who assumes that the anchor is, in fact, speaking from a position of impartial neutrality - not an unfair assumption to make because that’s exactly what the anchor is supposed to be doing.

This is exactly why people get so incredibly pissed off with “fair and balanced” news network Fox News, who regularly spin virtually every story they report into pro-Republican anti-Democrat barnyard noise, even going so far as to manipulate pictures of Democratic politicians, making them look less handsome and more like the sort of person you wouldn’t want to sit next to on the bus.

There’s almost no impartial neutrality in game journalism because, as most game journalists will go to great pains to tell you, they’re not actually journalists. On that front we actually agree. While Fox News leans so far to the right you’d be forgiven for thinking that the gravitational pull of the earth has shifted, they are, at least, doing it to push an agenda. Meanwhile the opinionated biased octopus farting of game journalism is made all the worse because they’re not doing it for any reason other than they don’t know how to do anything else.

One journalist - Jim Sterling, if I have to name names, which I don’t but I will anyway - once described Destructoid as more of a pundit box than an actual news, as they infuse their reporting with… well, with personal opinion and editorializing. This is all well and good, but it becomes more of a problem when virtually everybody is doing it. When everybody is presenting a story in this biased manner - say, if every major gaming news-site-slash-blog makes the ‘dust off your Wii” joke every time a worthwhile release finds its way to the Wii - everybody is playing pundit and, consequently, nobody is reporting the with the detached neutrality with which it should be delivered.

Consequently that biased viewpoint becomes the neutral viewpoint, which affects public perception of the content being reported on, in this case the perception of the Wii as a console worth investing your time into.

Is the Wii something worth spending your time on? Yes! No! I don’t know! Personally I think the Wii (Don’t worry folks, I’ve taken the liberty of shielding my thoughts from you so I don’t inadvertently influence your opinion on the thing - Ed.), but that’s just my opinion, and it’s not my place to insert that opinion into every news post about an Exciting New Game™ coming out for the damned system.

Amusingly, you seldom see this sort of negative bashing with other systems. Xbox Live Arcade titles are seldom reported like this, for instance:

At last, a game is out via Xbox Live Arcade that might actually make it worth digging through their incomprehensibly ridiculous menu system to buy!

And new PS3 exclusives almost never get their coverage sprinkled with phrases like:

Switch on your PS3 and get those software updates going right now — in a month’s time you’ll probably be ready for the launch of Jellycock, the incredible new game from Shitbox Software.

And yet every time an exclusive hits the Wii we’re reminded of dust, Friend Codes, last-gen graphics and waggling, as if the goal of every game that’s ever come out for the system is to help some chum from across the seas reach climax by jerking off his Mii in an allergen-free environment.

It happened in the last console generation too, where we were often reminded to dust off our Game Cube and relearn how to hold their oddly-configured controller when a genuinely brilliant title like Pikmin or Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door came out, but when a smashing multiplayer romp like TimeSplitters 2 came out for the PlayStation 2 almost no attention at all was drawn to the console’s middling TWO (count ‘em!) controller ports and elongated loading times.

Even recently, when Halo Reach refused to let people play the campaign online with friends if they didn’t own a sufficiently bulky hard drive, journalists seemed to overlook this particular clusterfuck as just One Of Those Things, a pitfall of owning a console in the modern age. The only people who suffered were people with teeny tiny hard drives, and they aren’t real people, are they? No, of course not! Look at them, with their 256MB internal memory, or whatever! Fucking arseholes. They make me feel physically sick. In fact if you have anything less than a 60GB hard drive in your console, any console, I shouldn’t even have to share the same online network as you. How utterly disgusting.

And perhaps the greatest irony is that while opinion leads the news content, it seldom has any real sway in the criticism of games. A writer can spend the majority of a review complaining about why a game is worse than global warming, and then slap a 7 out of 10 at the end of it and make all of the negative commentary magically vanish in a small box summarizing the game’s pros and cons, almost none of which align with the content of the review itself.

And they say game journalism isn’t broken.

(via gamejournos)