GRAPHIC COURTESY OF WORDSTREAM.COM

In this modern age of digital game magazine publications, many companies have decided to ditch quality and engaging journalism in exchange for clickbait and bottom-of-the-barrel reaching and scraping to get as much traffic to their website as possible. 

The internet has given many the opportunity to generate money based on how much traffic their website or videos gain from their content, thanks to advertisers. While it’s a great thing to be compensated for creative media you upload to the web, it has created a plague that infects every single piece of online media now: clickbait. 

Sending out daily babbling with no correlation to its over-the-top eye-catching headline was favored over quality and interesting writing due to the traffic generated by the casual scroller, who found more interest in the title of an article over the actual content. Even if they spent only a few seconds on the website, the owners of the publication were still paid for the page being opened. 

While those with a sense of media literacy have learned to avoid these wastes of internet space, clickbait still has a hold over the internet to this day. However, one part of the web still feels the effect of clickbait worse than others: gaming journalism.

Video games in the past decade have had this sense of hype and anticipation behind their releases, specifically, franchises that have had long waits between entries generate insane amounts of speculation about when the next game will be released or what it will be about. This sort of attention is what has made gamers prime targets for the clickbait created by gaming journalists.

Gaming journalists will use this hype to their advantage and find any small bit of information or quotes from developers to manipulate in their favor. A short ten word sentence from an interview that could be interpreted in the tiniest way as a hint towards a future game can become the basis for an “article” to these publications.

There are only small amounts of truth behind these stories revolving around speculation, with most of it being made up by the writer who may not even believe what they are typing. It can’t be dubbed as flat-out lying due to it being speculation, but headlines saying “This Game Company Just Revealed Their Next Project by Accident” bring it quite close to just spreading false information. 

It is an extremely scummy practice that takes advantage of readers for its own gain, generating false hype with baseless speculation and lies. Writing such as this shouldn’t even be considered journalism, as it isn’t to inform the public. Rather, it is to mislead them for profit. 

It feels like this sort of writing runs rampant within the games industry especially, but still lingers in other industries as well. 

While profit still can dictate the focus of journalism without tainting the overall content of what is written, this sort of “writing” is the absolute worst form of trash you can come across on the internet as it feels like the most blatant form of jingling keys in front of an infant’s view that can be consumed. 

Categories: Opinion