James Urbaniak is quite possibly my favourite celebrity blogger. His LiveJournal posts are always both entertaining and informative, and he’s not afraid to speak his mind. Fans of The Venture Bros. know Urbaniak as the voice of Doctor “Rusty” Venture, who unlike Urbaniak is both pompous and inept.

In a recent post on his LiveJournal, Urbaniak mentions journalistic integrity by bringing to attention a recent mess of a situation regarding Maxim magazine publishing a review by David Peisner of the Black Crowes album “Warpaint.” The review was written before review copies of the album were even available, so there’s no way Peisner could have possibly heard anything but the album’s first single, “Goodbye Daughters of the Revolution.”

Maxim’s initial response to questioning about the review was that it was “an educated guess preview,” whatever the hell that means. Ironically enough, Peisner was quoted in 2002 as having said:

Albums aren’t so much reviewed by individuals anymore as they are reviewed by consensus. “What will everyone else think of this album?” is now the operative critical question, which breeds a herd mentality that’s got nothing to do with genuine criticism — only hype and bluster.

- “Idiot Wind: Deflating Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft,” Creative Loafing, 2/6/02

Since you can read Urbaniak’s excellent post about it here, I’m not going to get any more into that particular situation. I will, however, agree that journalism is in a sad state these days, and I’m not just talking about music journalism. This kind of trend is happening with both movie and gaming journalism, and I’ve witnessed this first-hand.

It’s also happening with the mainstream news media. The free press is becoming more of an abstract concept than a reality. We don’t see the stories that we need to know about on the front page of newspapers, if they’re in there at all. We all know what Britney’s doing at all hours of the day, but you’ll only find out you have to pay more property tax when you look at your bills.

But that’s actually not what I wanted to talk about. It should come as no surprise that I brought this all up to begin with because it somehow relates to video games. That’s right. In this age of constant fear and economic uncertainty, I can still think about and play video games. In fact, I need to if I want to keep sane. It’s the little things that get us through the day, after all.

Integrity is something that is, for the most part, missing from gaming journalism. A lot of it is the fact that publications make their money from ads. In the case of gaming publications, the supporting ads are usually for games. Sometimes games that publishers know are not very good will get bigger ad budgets than games that actually are good (Metroid Prime 3 had very low presence in terms of advertising). The publishers of these magazines, be they online or in print, will have to decide whether to give a negative review to a game that has brought in ad revenue for them.

You can see how this is a huge mess of a situation.

The Black Crowes’ album review in Maxim was only a few sentences long, so even if Peisner had listened to the album, there wouldn’t be much room to really talk about it anyway. Instead, the review consists of a few short quips, jabs, and references (to establish the writer’s cred, no doubt).

The previous publication I wrote for is a national music magazine that deals mostly with what’s hot now while trying to maintain its indie cred. It’s an act they’ve been trying to balance since well before I started writing for them. In fact, they’ve been accused of “selling out” by many of their detractors and, well, how could they not? They have mouths to feed and bills to pay, like we all do. Reviews in the magazine are almost always too short to really get into the meat of what the album was really like. Even worse was that the gaming section was relegated to a half page of real estate and those reviews were even shorter. Sometimes they were even two sentences. Does one really need to play through a game, start to finish, to write two sentences about it? They have since removed the tiny gaming section from the magazine (oddly enough, when a game for me was recently sent there accidentally, they had no problem keeping it for themselves and assigning it for review despite not covering games anymore).

I’ve always enjoyed gaming and writing about it, so this really wasn’t a problem for me. But I do wonder how many reviews were published using the mentality Peisner mentioned. “What will people think of this game?” In fact, consider the whole mess with GameSpot’s coverage of Kane & Lynch: Dead Men and also how they arguably didn’t properly play Wii Sports Tennis, Baseball, or Bowling (and let’s not forget them thinking they were playing a Wii game in this PlayStation 2 review of DragonBall Z Budokai Tenkaichi 2 – which is hilariously still not fixed).

Is the gaming journalist’s responsibility to write his or her opinions of things? I know that it’s hard sometimes, particularly if the reviewer is not a fan of the type of game they’re writing about. Should he or she then have to role play and think, “if I did like this kind of game, would I like this game?” or should games only be assigned to writers who will like them? Is this an industry based on professionalism or is it one based on payola and pretension?

What do you think? Chime in.