Starfield review controversy traces game journalism's orbital decay | This Week in Business

In an industry riddled with intense antagonism and high expectations, “Low Sodium” harkens back to what makes gaming so special: pure play.

For the sake of post-nutshell clarity, assertions like literature is inherently more serious than games boil down to two anxieties, one material and one aesthetic:

1) The underfunding of the humanities. As college deans and corporate executives shred venues dedicated to reading, writing, and the instruction of reading and writing, many of literature... See more

I like to say that I write about media generally and journalism specifically because the industry is a canary in the coal mine when it comes to the impact of the Internet: text shifted from newsprint to the web seamlessly, completely upending the industry’s business model along the way.Of course I have a vested interest in this shift: for better or... See more

Gaming is a hits-driven business, where the biggest productions cost hundreds of millions of dollars and need to find a way to recoup their sizable investments. As a result, the companies behind these massive games look for as many ways as possible to mitigate risk, either by copying popular trends (like the battle royale craze of the late 2010s) o... See more

And one of the biggest lies that internet culture tells us is that something is only important and interesting if it is new. As someone whose day job is at a nonprofit newsroom, I have a front row seat to the consequences of that lie. Convincing anyone to read a story that is more than a week old is an uphill battle

Media on the incumbent web is in crisis. It turns out that paying publishers for clicks, endless loops of “content” and ads, all served on platforms far beyond their maximum-viable scale is ideal for misinformation, disinformation and the decay of trust.