Anatomy of a meme, or why games journalism is iffy
It is like playing a giant game of telephone.
Accurate (The Guardian):
Game designer Raph Koster picked up on a forum thread about recruitment consultants and WoW.
Wrong stuff starts creeping in (Games Campus, which also wins a prize for the headline “How to be jobless in a down economy”):
Raph Koster at Massively picked up on a thread at the f13 forums in which we learn that a recruiter in the online media industry has been told by employers numerous times to straight-up avoid World of Warcraft players as potential hires.
Completely wrong (Softpedia):
Employers Don’t Like World of Warcraft Players
They make bad employeesOnline gaming journalist Raph Koster has posted on his blog a statement he received from a job recruitment consultant accurately showing that even though some people cite the leadership experience gained from establishing a guild in WoW, employers tend to avoid such persons.
Not only did this little story bring down the blog, but it also managed to reach the Times of London, Silicon Valley Insider, etc etc. Yeesh.
Of course, this comment on BoingBoing did crack me up:
Interviewer: Do you play World of Warcraft?
SKR: Absolutely not.
Please don’t ask about EVE.
Please don’t ask about EVE.
Please don’t ask about EVE.Interviewer: Great, when can you start.
SKR: On Monday.
but I have a fleet battle on Friday, so I’m going to take a sick day.
18 Responses to “Anatomy of a meme, or why games journalism is iffy”
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That comment on BoingBoing is hilarious. Had I been drinking milk at the time, it’d be spurting out my nose.
–matt
Guardian: The article implies that the actual story involved a candidate including his World of Warcraft experience in his CV, hence the off-topic comments. I like JoeH’s comment: “Any solo activity that involves hours of wrist action is a no no on a CV.”
Softpedia: Reads like high-school journalism.
Boing Boing: New comment by anonymous. Hilarious.
Hey wait that one has a quest!
That made my day. Thanks.
Soo … you write for Massively now? Awesome. 😀
I learned how arrays and hashes worked making 1000 line one button mashers for Warcraft. I then made a Mysql/Rails database for work (25 employees, 1.5-2.5 million i sales). So Warcraft was a benefit to my work. And yes I quit Warcraft after they nerfed one button mashers.
It’s why blogging in general is iffy. But fun!
Well, great exemple of “circular traffic” of information and sources.
Maybe they were talking about that Ralph Koster guy?
LOL at least it was while there were some really interesting articles on the main page that were interesting reads.
“why games journalism is iffy”
I think you could remove games from that sentence. Isn’t this typical modern day slack-fact-checking, and telephone game at internet speed?
K
Oh brother.
http://www.pixelsocks.com/2008/12/19/there-must-be-a-discrimination/
Emphasis mine.
Raph:
Where would gamers be without their conspiracy theories?
We could have so much fun with this, but that would make it all even more sad.
This all makes me kinda sad. I mean it’s not exactly hard to check the blog to see exactly what it said. (With the exception of that brief down period anyway)
This is worse then some of the stuff at Magical Wasteland, wow. I’m pleased to read it though, I know more sites to avoid now 😀
Impressive!
It’s the culture of the shallow side of the lake.
Toss a blog on the waters and watch the frenzy to see if an original and possibly useful thought is returned. So much faster and cheaper than real research. A thousand eyes creates a thousand illusions that the lurkers can promote as original thinking. The olde yippie formula was to get ten people to recruit ten people to recruit ten people and then from the the middle of a thousand, ten would toss bricks. Voila. Instant riot.
All too typical. The web is an amplifier. Full stop.
Argh. Even the Gray Lady gets it wrong:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/world-of-warcraft-players-need-not-apply/