It would be disingenuous of me to say that game journalists are not, in any way, shape or form, writers. That’s a gross generalization and it’s not fair to the literally hundreds of writers in the field who actually know what they’re doing. However I think it’s fair to say that there are people in this field who, while having a passion for gaming, don’t seem to have a passion for the actual writing.

People like Johnny Cullen, who couldn’t write his way out of a Greek play if you gave him two-dozen Deus Ex Machinas and a copy of “The Writer’s Tale” by Russell T Davies. People like Greg Miller, with his ninth-grade writing style and copious use of the word “amazing”. People like Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett, who apparently doesn’t know how to keep any level of consistency in his articles.

I can’t stress to you just how important consistency is. They make the difference between you looking like you know what you’re talking about, like you’ve given the subject some definite consideration before writing - perhaps standing  beside a window looking out at the world while sipping on a glass of brandy - as opposed to coming across as an amateurish clod who doesn’t actually give anything even vaguely resembling a shit about the content of the article.

Plunkett did this today with his article entitled “Rest In Peace, Guitar Hero”, an article brutally dissected by Gawker Media’s new layout (in the interests of readability I have republished the article in full here, sans gallery, under the terms of Gawker Media’s Creative Commons licensing terms). I’d like to take this opportunity to once again call Gawker a gaggle of cunts for making their sites so utterly unreadable, but I feel the upside of this is that assuming they’re too stubborn to change it back we’ll probably be rid of the network entirely in about a year. Progress, I feel.

But anyway.

early on in his article, Plunkett says:

The first Guitar Hero was released on the PlayStation 2 in 2005. Developed by Harmonix, the team behind Amplitude and Karaoke Revolution, and published not by Activision by by RedOctane, it brought the previously arcade-only experience of playing a plastic guitar in a video game (see Guitar Freaks) to a home console. And it was great.

Great! Superb! Finally, after having to put a million allowances’ worth of quarters into arcade cabinets in specialist arcades, people could experience the greatness of playing a musical rhythm game such as this in the privacy of their own home. We’ll ignore the fact that Plunkett appears to have forgotten about the home releases of Guitar Freaks for the PSone and PS2 - factual accuracy isn’t something I expect from a Kotaku article.

Later in the same article, however…:

In early 2009, an arcade version of the game was released in the United States. It never really took off. Probably because while it’s fun looking like a dork in the privacy of your bedroom,it is not fun looking like a dork in public.

But you’d previously described the arcade title Guitar Freaks as “great”, Luke. You used that word to describe bringing the game style into the home. Why is it that now, seventeen paragraphs later, you’ve decided that these arcade experience are dorky?

Am I quibbling over a minor point in an article? A Kotaku article, of all things? Well, yes. Obviously that’s what I’m doing. And a few months ago I’d have left it there. I’d point and laugh, call Luke something exceedingly witty and clever like “Kerplunkett”, and then waltz off to sleep with mansions in one of my many hookers.

The problem I have is this: as a large amount of the field is made up of hobbyists and enthusiasts who write about the field not because they can write but because they like games and writing about games is much better than, say, flipping burgers or filing tedious paperwork for upper management, a lot of it is written in a style that suggests that the writer really didn’t want to have to think too hard about the actual thing they’re writing about.

Indeed, factual errors and contradictions aside, Plunkett is merely listing games from the Guitar Hero franchise whilst pointing at particular games and saying “Yep, this is where they should have stopped. And here. And probably here. There would have been nice, too.” Plunkett apparently loses interest halfway through writing the article - so much so that he lets that factual error and that narrative inconsistency slide by. Sorry, did I say I was going to set those aside for a moment? Well I changed my mind.

Anybody could have written this piece (and, given Plunkett’s track record*, anybody probably did a few hours prior), which is by and large part of the problem. If something reads like anybody could have read it, what intrinsic value does Plunkett provide to the Kotaku brand? In this instance, nothing. If Plunkett were to fuck up at Kotaku - for example, by saying something incredibly sexist and being forcibly removed from the staff by Gawker - Crecente could easily replace him with… well, anybody. Would we notice? Would we care?

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* Allegedly.