Kiwi Farms

Special thanks to @Jaimas and @neural for help with this post.


Game journalists have a simple, cushy job. Play games and have opinions about them. Yet they keep fucking it up.

While most journalists aren't worth their own thread, there's plenty of laughs to be had collectively. This usually (but not always) comes in one of 2 forms. Their utter lack of competence in their chosen field, or their inability to keep personal politics out of their work, sometimes both at once.

To list every journalists and every fuck up would result in a OP longer than The Bible. This kind of nonsense has been going on for almost a decade, longer if we include the previous generation of game journalists. Add in the current fast turn over of the games press and this OP will often be out of date. So this OP will focus on some of the highlights.


POLYGON

"I'm standing at a safe distance, drinking fizzy water, eating puff pastry canapes and chatting to another colleague about politics in the Philippines. I'm having an okay time." -A Polygon writer at a preview for a Rock Band game.

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Polygon is the ResetEra of games journalism. So utterly devorced from gaming that the site often reads like some half arsed political blog that occasionally mentions games. If it's not far-left politics, then it's clickbait, often both at once.

A Polygon writer getting PTSD flashbacks while playing a VR shooting gallery. This edit shows the difference between a typical YouTuber's reaction to the game, and the supposed "professional games journalist".

Polygon refused to play the new Rock Band game at a swanky preview party in LA because "all games are stupid", resulting in the quote above. The preview is so badly written we arguably end up with more information about the journalists grandmother than we do about the game.

Polygon playing Doom so badly that it was almost like a 1 handed drunk was playing.

A Polygon journalist wrote a review of his own book. (Originally the article was credited to "Polygon staff".)

Polygon wrote a hitpeice on a Twitch streamer when it's clear they never bothered watching any of his videos.

And finally, their review of Sim City which had 4 different scores. First a 9.5 (the score shown on Metacritic to this day), then an 8, then a 4, before finally settling on 6.5. Was this some kind of genuine change of heart, or a cynical attempt to appease advertisers while going along with the backlash happening due to the games always online DRM? Nobody cares as it's dumb however you look at it.


KOTAKU
Click bait personified. Kotaku is ostensibly a Japanese-centric gaming site, but they rarely seem to talk about Japan and when they do they seem to hate Japan, Japanese culture, and Japanese games.
Their articles can barely be called such as they are often pulled from other sites or press releases with 1 or 2 paragraphs of hastily written non-content to justify the plagerism. Not that their original content is much better, with articles so bad that it's easy to confuse the real thing with parody articles.
Like this article where the author has a moral crisis for having said "rape" online.
Which is often confused for this parody article.


This article shills for Destiny 2 by implying anyone complaining about the game secretly likes it.

An article about Donald Trump's penis

Despite writing generally pro-feminism articles, they seem to like being sexist creeps. Dedicating an entire article to how a PR rep smells.
And another to bragging about having sex on Sonic bed-sheets.

Update: Kotaku, not satisfied with scrapping the bottom of a barrel stored several thousand miles below sea level, decided to see just how low it was possible to go by letting one of their writers post an article about their porn habits. Complete with uncensored source film maker screenshots of the child characters from Harry Potter fucking. Here's some censored screenshots.
This understandably got a huge amount of backlash from the wider gamer community.


IGN

"Who cares if Mass Effect 3 had 90% of the game was locked on the disk? That doesn't mean anything." -Colin Moriarty shilling Mass Effect 3

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If the other sites mentioned so far will sell out in the name of politics, IGN cares only for ad money, quality of their content be damned. As the saying goes "You can't spell ignorant without IGN".
From criticising Pokemon for having Too Much Water.
To Failing to understand the concept of a football manager game.
And giving some Wii shovelware a better score than a cult classic beat 'em up.

The bar for quality is set so low that if it was any lower it'd be in the Earths core. But it's not just reviews that IGN fail at. They also had a go at being pundits.
Like complaining that Call of Duty Ghosts doesn't have women in it, and when women are added complaining they can be killed like the men.
But their one of their longer lasting legacies is starting the whole "gamer/nerd entitlement" rhetoric with a cringe inducing video full of jump cuts and censored swearing, saying that you're entitled if you don't like Mass Effect 3s ending.

I think it's worth adding that Colin Moriarty (the man in the video) was ultimately fired for making a "sexist" joke on Twitter, and now spends his time making anti-game journalism rants on YouTube. More on that later.



INDIVIDUALS
Not all journalists are tied to specific sites. Some game journalists are "freelance", selling articles to other sites or running their own Patreon supported websites, YouTube channels, and blogs. Other bounce from site to site, getting fired from one only to immediately get a job at a supposedly rival site. eg. Patrick Klepeck has worked for Giant Bomb, Kotaku, 1Up, EGM, and Vice/Waypoint. So it's sometimes it's easier to follow individual journalists than trying to keep track of who works for where and when. Many of these types of journalists/pundits have their own threads already.


LEIGH ALEXANDER

"I AM games journalism!"

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Leigh is by far one of the most corrupt game journalists there is, with 23 journalist ethics violations according to DeepFreeze. Her self defined ethics policy is "Get money, fight bullshit, and make sure that those I love stand the longest.". So we can safely take her word that she is the living embodiment of games journalism.

She is also notorious for her drinking. One of her more infamous exploits was when she went on the Giant Bomb E3 livestream when she was fall down drunk. Ranting incoherently, she claimed that the LA convention centre cost 775 million dollars to rent for the weekend before accidentally showing her tits on stream.
She was invited back next year to make amends where she arrived drunk again.
Leigh worked at various sites burning bridges as she went. Eventually she was too toxic to be employed at any of the major sites, so she made Offworld. This was going to be her own gaming website with blackjack and hookers and no readers. The site shut down soon after. So much for "Gamers don't have to be your audience.". Leigh disappeared after that, resurfacing briefly to shit on Total Biscuit's corpse before disappearing, presumably into a bottle of booze.

@Medicated made a post explaining what she's been up to since she disappeared from game journalism here.


JED WHITAKER

"That gave me the brilliant idea that I'd try to play said mini-game by putting a Joy-Con up my ass." -Professional game journalist Jed Whitaker

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The less said about Jed Whitaker the better. He defines the term "degenerate". While most game journos inspire laughter, contempt, or pity, Jed inspires revulsion and disgust. If you need one example of why game journalism is not respected, Jed is your man.

He is most famous for an article in which he complained that the signal on the Nintendo Switch joy cons was not strong enough for him to play games with the controller shoved up his own arse. Publishing a detailed breakdown of his methods and results.
Because of this, he's often confused with ANOTHER journalist that reviewed Amiibos based on how well they worked as butt plugs.

Then there's his video of Plants vs Zombies which some claim he tried to have pulled from YouTube or excuse as a parody. It's a video that's so bad it's difficult to watch. Feel free to post a timestamp of how far you got.



MAINSTREAM AUTISM
Sometimes, game journalists are so bad at their job the backlash isn't limited to a few nerds reading articles about games all day, but breaks out into mainstream gaming and beyond. Spawning their own memes and becoming shorthand for the state of gaming journalism.

Such as this infamous video of a game journalist trying to play Cuphead and being unable to beat the tutorial. Watch carefully and you can even spot the moment the game developer leans over and tells him what to do.
My favourite edit is this side by side comparison.
And remember, these people play games for a living.

Then of course there's the big one. Gamergate. We're all tired of hearing it, but it's still brought up as a spectre that haunts game journalists and is the single cause of all their failures since 2014.
You could write a book on this one topic alone, but it's origins were surprising simple. Zoe Quinn had sex with games journalist Nathan Greyson, who had written positive articles about her at the time of their affair. When this was made public, there was a huge cover up the likes of which the internet had never seen before. Everywhere from 4chan to Reddit banned all discussion of it. A web host pulled down a site that refused to retract the story. Anyone who the journalists couldn't shut up was branded a misogynist. Eventually it was revealed that game journalists were all colluding with each other. Sex for favours, rigged award shows, industry blacklists, you name it. This was pretty much confirmed when game journalists decided the best way to prove there was no collusion was for supposedly rival sites to all post an article with the same message on the same day.
While most GamerGaters have moved on since then, anti-GamerGaters, particularly the games press and left leaning lolcows, never let it go. Blaming it for everything from trolls to Donald Trump.
If you don't believe me, do a search here on Kiwi farms for gamergate, and sort the results by date. You'll probably find at least one mention of it in the past week. You can read more about gamergate here.


ANTI GAMES JOURNALISM
In the wake of gamergate and Total Biscuit dying of cancer, people were looking for alternative voices. Anti-games journalism is the cottage industry of sites and YouTubers who's editorial voice is mostly shitting on what's left of "mainstream" game journalism. While not as consistently bad, they are lolcows in their own right. From One Angry Gamer turning into a strawman version of a gamergater, ranting about jews and sex and SJW conspiracies. To a Niche Gamer turning out to have plagiarized articles. But of the time, they just talk about the same topics repeatedly, repeating the same shit over and over and over again.


THE FUTURE
Games journalism continues to circle the drain. Their increasing desperation for clicks, relevance, and Twitter impressions means that they will likely keep selling their dignity for another pay-cheque or 15 second of Twitter fame. As a result, this OP will likely have to be updated as more of these people fall into obscurity and sites shut down.


THE REST
There's so much good stuff out there. Here's some of those that I think are funny enough to be worth mentioning.