Gaming Journalism & Technical Incompetence

If you've ever seen a video interview on technical features from some of these journalists, you know this to be true. Even the simple questions they ask betray their inability. As long as they don't act like they know what they're talking about, it's not too bad. Thankfully, they don't stick their necks out like that very often.
 
You should not demand from journalists what doesn't even take place in a dev house, I mean have you ever tried talking to an artist :rolleyes: ... :LOL:
 
Dave said:
Funny thread, in that I've been thinking about this myself lately. Maybe a subdomain off the main site, such as http://gaming.beyond3d.com or if it would deal specifically with consoles, http://consoles.beyond3d.com. It could prove to be valuable and entertaining.

-Dave
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Heh :D I actually bought a domain a number of months back and thought of making it a news/comment like site and inviting select certain members from here and elsewhere to contribute news and what not. I deploy CMS services that can handle this, but the problem is time, coordination, as well as the reality of advertising and contribution staff and all that stuff is handled... because we all know I would be using it to get myself a console :devilish: :LOL:

A lot of good news goes through B3D and other forums first. A portalish news / discussion site could be very successful if it had the right balance of contributors and exposure. Takes a lot of work for such. I co-operated such a site back in the N64/PS/SS era and it can be fun, but also a lot of work.

I had inquired a couple people about interest but like myself most have lives and for such an investment of time and effort would like to see a return.

Likewise I always thought constructing a game review site that had a primary 4 person panel of distinct interests and then a user score that based user scores based off of a rep like system based on review quality (partial for specific review quality + overall rep) would be a nice way to get a quality review site the engaged discussion as well as quality content.

Turning some of the better posters here into quasi-bloggers on a news site would be just as entertaining as well. B3D is a great place, but also has a lot of noise + has a limited appeal as forums require significant wading of content.
 
xbdestroya said:
Dude, IGN is a bunch of idiots. It doesn't take much knowledge or research to know the answer to this query here...

BUT... then again this is from the people that brought you 'Xenon - Equal to a 9GHz CPU'
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bah I've seen worse.

Last year, according to a very popular dutch gaming site the Wii was also able to show some 'magic' kind of high definition graphics called '480p'. When I finally convinced the autor (after a very long discussion) 480p isn't HD they deleted the newspost. Afterwards they also banned me because I 'disrespected' their work.

Another funny story is a man called 'Frank Molnar' who has his own gameshow on television in Belgium. In an interview with some guy (responsible for the WRC games op PS2) he suddenly asked ' how many polygons are there in your game?'. :LOL:
 
What do you expect?

They're gaming fan sites targetting your average gamer. Gaming journalists' lack of technical knowledge is obvious to those who post here but so does the lack of technical knowledge of your average Popular Science magazine journalist to those who's experience and knowledge goes beyond superficial interest in the science and engineering fields that are typical topics of Popular Science. And thats all the average gamers has in terms of console technology, superficial interest.
 
There is so much wrong in the major gaming sites these days, from the reporting to the community areas - I'm actually quite sick of it. It was one of the reasons I came here, because you guys are not interested in berating systems that you don't own, just because you don't own them.

I think there is call for a new kind of <dedicated> gaming site... and feeling totally let down by what's out there at present, I have decided to do something about it :p
 
Well, any effort that were to take place, I would definitely support and get behind.

I have very high confidence in this forum memberships ability to 'out-expert' the usual experts... and for those that might remember, last year I actually recommended in a similar vein that B3D member panels might put out industry analysis reports to compete with those 'professional' reports put out by less savvy individuals/firms. Since we're a very egalitarian locale, it could even have space set aside for dissenting opinions in the reports, and the reasons given for them.

Ahhh, to dream...

Well, whatever happens... at least there's the forum itself. :)
 
Seems like there's public demand

Just wanted to point out that a Gaming/Console section for Beyond3D IS under construction.

We started working on the new site layout and CMS months ago, it should be operational sooner than later.
We'll also implement blogs in a really intricate way, which will allow readers, via a control panel, to add any of our members blog entries (news/article/editorial tags) to their own B3D front page.
Of course, if an entry is "quality stuff", we'll publish it as an official B3D entries (after discussing the matter with the author, naturally).

We will put together a gaming/console oriented team too. As you may have guessed already, we will seek help from our own members. :D

If you guys have queries or ideas you'd like to expose concerning the future B3D Console and gaming, you can always reach me via PM or email. You can also start a thread on the subject, if you want to.
 
The problem in my opinion is that the majority of technical journalists have no clue (or real interest) about the topic they are writing about.They simply search the Internet and pick up snippets of information which they re-hash and present as an article. The problem with this is that most of the material they use is either biased or hyped material from company PR releases or from articles by other equally clueless journalists who are doing exactly the same thing they are doing. Gamers get their material from such journalists plus the hyped company PR material and post their comments in various forums in their niche, which other gamers in that niche pick up and run with. You then have the situation of the blind leading the blind, and hype and misinformation snowballs.

Most people who are not knowlegeable or informed first hand about something (this includes most gamers), assume that if a lot of articles or forum posts say the same thing, it must represent a convergence of independent opinion and so must be true - a bit like a jury deciding a trial. Unfortunately in the case of technical journalists and Internet forum posts, this is not necessarily the case - the majority of articles and forum posts are often the same source or opinion regurgitated rather than an independent opinion on the part of the journalist or forum poster, and while sensible people factor in a certain bias/hype factor into statements coming from those with vested interests for example Sony or Microsoft statements on their and competitor's products, they fail to do this when the same PR is rehashed in seemingly independent articles and forum posts, because they can't see the connection.
 
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Dave said:
Yes.. I'm Dave Barron.. Based on when you registered, you wouldn't know me. I started the site, handed it over to Reverend, who in turn handed it to the other Dave B. :)
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Who in turn handed it over to me, after the lure of an [strike]ati[/strike]amd.com email address became too much :cool:

V's right in that my plans for this place run to a gaming sub-site, and that we'll be looking to you guys to help make it a brilliant resource for everyone else. We'll keep you posted on, so definitely poke V if you have an idea for such a place, and he'll raise it with me.

As for the topic at hand, and as a former technical editor at another site, I know how hard it is in that role and to keep on top of everyone's content. But that's their job, so there's really little excuse when writing about technical content in any given field that you get it as right as possible when publishing.

Of course certain content types should be excluded from that person's remit, if it's free-form or unedited by nature, like a blog. However the requirement to get it right still doesn't go away, which means the onus is then firmly on the shoulders of the author to do their research before running with any piece. Thus there's no real excuse, if the site and its authors are good enough and doing their jobs properly.
 
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xbdestroya said:
Dude, IGN is a bunch of idiots. It doesn't take much knowledge or research to know the answer to this query here...



BUT... then again this is from the people that brought you 'Xenon - Equal to a 9GHz CPU'
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One of the worst was, EGM once stated that developers were telling them the PS3 was "orders of magnitude" more powerful than the Xbox360 (back well before the PS3 came out).

I mean, one order is 10X, Orders plural is then a minimum of 100X. So, devs were telling them the PS3 was at least 100X more powerful? And EGM, a supposed knowledgable gaming magazine, believed it?

It's ridiculous how technically incompetent some of these publications really are.

Btw, listening to the 1up podcast will give you another clue just how generally technically incompetent these editors often are. They only understand what's under the hood of the machines in the vaguest of terms. Garnett a few weeks back got the 360 EDRAM mixed up with regular ram for example. They were doing the "news" and the story about Mark Rein getting the RAM upped to 512 and costing MS a billion was discussed. For about 5 seconds. At the end Garnett says something like "yeah well good for them. Developers are always talking about how one of their favorite things about the 360 is that extra EDRAM" or something like that, where he equated the EDRAM with the whole Mark Rein deal.

Another good one was where IGN accusingly asked a microsoft rep if the 360 really had the necessary "internal bandwidth between the CPU and GPU" to do "true" 1080P..whatever that was supposed to mean.
________
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