Kotaku seems to be a great example of this. One just another one of the gaming sites, though it did get its share of in depth pieces thanks to Jason Schriers articles involving crunch in the workplace.
Sadly, at some point, there was a shift from their focus on videogame news, as we saw a rise in the number of articles that were either just filled with ‘reactions’ from twitter, or ‘clickbait’ articles with a title blatantly designed to draw people in with a wild claim/accusation.

Problem being, while many people complain about these articles, they were also clicking on them, which meant they were getting more traffic, which meant more ad revenue. So they started to become more and more common, to the point they became the focus of the site, and the actual news stories became a rarity…

http://richardeflanagan.com/lab/10-fract-beta-come-and-play

the game is Fract. it’s about… a first-person, open world, puzzle game set on an uninhabited island… is a “Myst+Tron+Rez” kind of game

i don’t want to advertise or spam… but it’s something relevant, right? i was impressed and like “wow! i bet this is how playing The Witness will feel” so yeah, hope you guys give it a try and enjoy it… if you need a more common analogy to another game Fract is probably alot like Real Myst. which i guess is how The Witness will play like… alittle

And maybe this could give jonathan some ideas : )

I certainly try to refrain from exploiting the subjects of my created content, but the same can also be said of the subjects themselves, especially when the subjects approach the outlet in support of or in context with a product that they themselves are trying to publicize. Being in a position to direct more traffic and consumer interest back towards the subject is a very valuable and ponderous power, so it is in the subject’s interest to deliver “interesting” or “compelling” information/”news.”

Mr. Blow, I listened to yr Rice talk; that part about the “doublethink”/”knowing wink” attitude of retail pricing (“$9.99! It’s totally less then $10.00!!”) makes a neat parallel to the real “mechanics” behind the economy of “buzz,” and the consequent impulse to generate more “noise.” It’s all made to manipulate the consumers.

All that said, f*** these GVC guys. Yeah, everybody’s got to hustle, but as you pointed out, it can be personally and professionally damaging when media outlets take it too far, disrespecting the subject by treating them as unthinking, discard-able resources. They violate the relationship/unspoken rule/assumed contract between the subject and the outlet, the unspoken trust. Sometimes you end up with your situation, which has negative consequences for all parties involved: 1) the consumer, who gets a skewed version of your comments at least in the headline (didn’t bother reading the article) 2) the outlet, which suffers a blow to its credibility at least with those (admittedly small percentage of) readers interested enough to find yr full comments in context, who will then question or at least scoff at for a few seconds the outlet’s attempted manipulation/twisting of yr statement, and who might then might decrease their traffic to the outlet, which might end up decreasing the value of the outlet’s advertising space 3) the content producer at the outlet, who might develop a habit of this ugly attitude, and have their content suffer for it, lowering their journalistic “value.” 4) the subject, as you may know.

This is not to say that this isn’t sometimes a good thing, as the damaging of, say, a criminal Somalian warlord’s personal and professional reputation might be considered a constructive act for society at large.

tl; dr: Bluh.

or is The Witness a new thing you have never done? if so… where did it came from, what is it about… can you talk about that?!

I think the analogy is clear, and this is how i see the outcome of this post:
1. You got CVG great traffic, and great page views!!! The title it self is of great value to them and mentioned article did very good!
2. Instead of reading the real Edge article (which i didn’t see a link to) i spend my time reading this post,
3. I didn’t know CVG before reading this, and i already been to their site and not yet in Edge.

Long story short, i think this post could have been “Journalism at its best @Edge!” with the first paragraph that you wrote and nothing more!
That would have definitely got me mach faster to the real thing. And now off i go to find it ;-)

But I guess getting quoted out of context might be infuriating for anyone, and well, you may lose trust, and in the future you will be a little more careful when saying things to anyone who has “one liner news ears” :P. It is an important lesson for everyone when you’ll get interviewed ;).

But you are right, that is not an “angry forum flamer scream” at all, thats my bad (an overreaction myself, U_U). I still believe its still a very strong and should have been taken less of a big issue.

Where did Jonathan “scream” like an “angry forum flamer”?

I have absolutely no idea for the possible problems you could have with Microsoft for a statement like that, so I am talking to the dark here… but I do not think they are going to say “OH Jon said THAT!!! we are bringing him down the HAMMER!!! Who cares if he made Braid and brought a huge amount of people on our X360s and has a huge voice around the indie community, he’s DOWN!!”. They aren’t stupid (I think) and they know they are not going to drop independent dev support in such a non fashionable way, only to see Mr. Blow complaining on the internet and calling out MS and have another CVG headline like “MS drops Jon Blow all support and whatsoever because of what he said two weeks ago!!!” and getting all of the world-wide indie rage for that.

In MS they are probably going to read that statement and say.. “hmm, well what we can do to fix that problem”, be more kind with game devs, and prevent them from letting them go flying over other companies distribution systems and instead they will keep their indie user base firmly attached (or not, maybe the won’t even consider that an issue). And probably send them a PR or support dude saying some standard comment like “MS always tries to do the best for indie developers and such bla bla…”… and thats it.

And that would have happened if nobody said anything, and if really it was a big issue. I honestly think its not that big. But you overreacted and now many people are not really taking it from you because… it was something so simple that could have been answered without a “knee-jerk” reaction…

Then again I have no even created a game for something like X360 or PSs3 or something like it, so I may be wrong and this could be really problematic… I dunno…

CVG isolated a few statements, taking them out of the context of balancing statements and thus changed their meaning, in order to generate a “more exciting” headline.

If they had cherry-picked slightly different sentences from the same paragraphs, their headline could have easily been:

“Braid creator: Microsoft’s online service more successful than Sony’s”

So it ought to be clear to you that this is a heavily-misleading process.

I think a fair headline for the article would have been something like:

“Braid creator discusses pros and cons of XBLA and PSN for indies”

But that’s not going to be as exciting, right? That’s not going to incite console-wars nerd-rage in the same way. Thus they intentionally engage in distortion in order to get a more-exciting headline.

Let me simplify the situation a bit. If someone in an interview says, “Where should indies publish their game, XBLA or PSN?” And I say, “That depends on what the developer is looking for… on XBLA you have the potential to sell many more copies, but on PSN you have more freedom to do creative things,” and someone decides to just cut out the second part of this sentence: “BRAID DEVELOPER: PSN BETTER THAN XBLA BECAUSE INDIES HAVE MORE FREEDOM,” that is a clearly misleading headline, even though those words were said in the interview. The reason it’s misleading is because the statement is removed from counterbalancing statements.

That’s what they did here.

The point – that Sony seems to encourage more in the way of artistic expression – is a valid one. CVG have no obligation to cover any other aspect of the interview if they don’t deem it to be of great interest to their readership. Indeed, rather than lift the Edge article word-for-word (which is practically what you seem to be advocating) it probably makes more sense to simply point people in the right direction and let them read the interview in its original form.

I can kinda see where your coming from. However in this case I honestly believe you’ve suffered a knee-jerk reaction that has somewhat missed the mark

The ultimate scarce resource […] is _attention_.

Anyway, I’m saying all this to show that the more sites like CVG play the pageview game, the more they doom themselves. Not only will they lose more and more readers who no longer trust them or no longer find what they write enjoyable, but they also make pageviews as a metric for advertising dollars less valuable for all their competitors, too.

Sites that depend solely on pageviews are in a race to the bottom and are, in the long-run, unsustainable, particularly sites smaller than the CNNs or NYTimes of the world (though those sites are in trouble for other reasons, i.e., profitability).

The ultimate scarce resource, the one that can’t be gamed by breaking articles into multiple pages (or entirely separate posts, as CVG did), link-baiting and other tricks that artificially inflate pageviews

It is also very kind of you to say that Hecker was “one half” of the interview, because what I’ve gotten from it was “An interview with Chris Hecker with an occasional comment by Blow.” Being that I really like Hecker and that awesome website of his, that’s not a bad thing. But I’m here commenting on your article for a reason: what you said at Rice about the intent behind The Witness drove it to be above all other games on my expectation lists and rendered me obsessive.

Which ultimately drove me to purchase Braid recently for the second and third time in the same day: once in the Humble Bundle, and once on PSN because my XBLA version is in demo mode and I got tired of that. The point that I’m trying to make here is that you got me effin’ obsessed with the proposition of epiphany in The Witness. I wish I could say more, but I’d just come across as an arrogant ass whose words are most likely interesting only to himself.

Thanks for Braid. Thanks for the Rice talk. Thanks for the full interview. Thanks for saying “lousy hacks.” And thanks for giving a shit enough to keep us posted on the progress. I still don’t know what “THROUGH MANY BIRTHS” part is supposed to mean, but the last line of the first stanza is satisfying.

However, then you commented on it here – and to be honest, you’re coming off the worse. People expect the news (in all forms) to cherry pick the juiciest bits from the article, so unless you didn’t say what you said they are not being hacks. A hack would make crap up. They didn’t – you did say those things – and your complaint is that they didn’t mention the gazillion other things you said. Guess what? That’s what the magazine is for and is the reason why they put a big pointy arrow telling people where to go.

The problem is that your blog post actually is more arrogant than what CVG posted – full of ‘bwaaaa, they just don’t understand me’ nonsense and sniping of the media, who’ll happily destroy your reputation proper if you give them reason to hate you. Get over it – these things happen and you’re getting off lightly. The problem is that your partner-in-crime Chris Hecker has been caught out not mincing his words lightly in regards to the Wii, and his backlash to the media last time, over something he actually said, wiped out his popularity in the press – which can hurt an indie dev more than keeping quiet. The media backlash painted Chris as an arse, and now that reputation he created for himself has ruined both his popularity for some, and the popularity for SpyParty.

You should take the following advice Kelley Armstrong (the author) had regarding the public and the press: ‘Resist the Urge to Respond Publicly to Criticism’ (http://bit.ly/b3DZWw). Whilst out-of-context banter makes you look bad for the short term, the fact of the matter is that the actual statement, despite being incendiary in your eyes, is 90% what you meant and actually nowhere near as shocking as you think it is. If you hadn’t flipped out over this, people would have passed it by. But you didn’t – you reacted to such a tiny thing that now you too are risking being branded an arse who goes back on what he says and makes mountains out of molehills, which may harm you in the long run no matter how good your games are.

Good luck for the future in all this.

http://www.destructoid.com/jonathan-blow-cvg-and-the-sh-tstorm-i-caused-190165.phtml

Its how news works. Not the end of the world. Unless Microsoft was riding your ass about defaming them in the interview (which you didn’t, even from the small portion that we got, it is pretty easy to distinguish you as just and observer of two very different business models, concerning indie development), I’d not give a shit. They’ve got their right–I suppose you can just decline interviews from CVG from now on?

Anyways, keep making awesome games.

They make 2 paragraphs and call it an article news:/

I would like for you to clear up one thing. In the past they mentioned you were unhappy with the way Microsoft handled the pricing of Braid and you acted like you had little input in that. Yet your game was also the same price on PSN and the PC. Lots of forum dwellers out there want to continue to depict Microsoft as this evil empire much like what is happening with Activision.

Goodbye and keep up the good work, Jonathan, you’re one of my favorite game developers, i look forward to “The Witness”.

Edge is also owned by Future, and CVG simply chose the things that they wanted from that article to suit their modus operandi. They didn’t quote the whole article because then they wouldn’t be doing their jobs properly.

Blogs exist because of readers and regular visitors. People nowadays will do what they have to do to obtain views, and in this particular case, CVG did just that. I agree with you wholeheartedly that such a quote could harm relations with publishers and whatnot and I understand that that is a huge problem for a developer such as yourself, but considering that you simply said the specific quote that CVG used on it’s site in an interview that discussed a multitude of topics which more than likely contradicts such a quote, then what would stop Microsoft or Sony understanding why you would say such a thing?

You obviously have a reason to be concerned with such an article, or in CVG’s case, a snippet of an interview that is used to promote Edge magazine, but all I’m saying is that CVG were simply doing their job, and I don’t think that they’re a bunch of “lousy hacks” for doing their job.

That said, I’ll just add that I enjoyed Braid a lot and hope that you continue to make many more incredibly unique games in the future.

If that makes some developers apply censorship and/or dumb down their responses it is yet another unfortunate result of this ….

You have my support

Secondly, for the record, I don’t like this kind of journalism. As the deputy editor of a well-regarded print magazine, we have far more luxury print insightful, full-bodied investigative pieces and indeed to stand firm as an honest journalistic entity.

Web journalists do not have this luxury, and I think really what you’ve highlighted here is the primary difference. Sure there are many sites out there – Eurogamer, for example – which have the numbers to not have to extend their remit beyond transparent reporting, but the vast majority rely on increasing their hits to survive. The sad fact is that anyone saying that one platform-holder is better than the other will always generate hits because, and I put this in the nicest way possible, it’s the only thing that complete morons like to read about.

Having worked on the web for a spell myself, I can absolutely assure you that many, many an in-depth, scholarly feature or interview gets printed, just to see it generate precisely no hits. The old adage about the tree falling in the forest?

Just like the mainstream media, in which tabloids regularly take non-contextual quotes from interviews conducted with highfalutin moral agendas for the sake of selling papers, you can hate them – and believe me, I know full-well about stretching PR relationships – but they play a near-vital role. If the article is in Edge, sure enough people will read it, but there is an incalculable amount of fantastic features and interviews out there that no one ever reads unless someone does something to – artificially – beef up its clickability factor.

Its something that those who deal with the mainstream newspapers are media-savvy enough to accept as a necessary evil, but I’ve noticed that many developers are some way behind in accepting it. I think all your points are valid, but, even though this kind of thing gives us ‘journalists’ a bad name, I also think it’s something we all just have to accept because it’s not the ‘journalists’ who are at fault, it’s the bickering, flaming, whining idiots who think that an intelligent discussion about videogames can be found on N4G or NeoGAF, and who will only click on something if it somehow supports their inexplicable mortal loyalty to one box full of chips and circuits or another.

Dan Howdle
Deputy Editor
360 Magazine

No it wasn’t, the interview mentions Microsoft has many indie games in their indie channel and that produced some fine games.

I’m not sure why you wouldn’t believe this. It’s obvious if you are familiar with the reality of how game development works.

On second read even the body is bad so just forget that too.

I think the real story here is that you are finally famous enough to hit the tabloids! Congrats and make sure to stealthily exploit it to cross-promote your upcoming game, The Witness (from the creator of Braid)

Don’t get me wrong, your work is incredible; i’m a fan. It’s just disappointing to hear that you’re the type to make mountains of molehills.

“It’s nothing but misinformation; it’s worse than worthless.”

;)

It harms your reputation more when you overreact so badly to such a tiny thing. Grow up man.

but i will link you to something else,

http://angryjoeshow.com/2010/12/geoff-keighley-interview/

i’m completly neutral in this subject of “journalist” but just so that the people know… hip-hop , the economy guys that make wrong predictions and everything…

this is your gaming press, ladies and gentlemen!

wiiandthekid.com

Ironically, and on a totally unrelated note, I ended up seeing Chris Hecker be misquoted… again… about the Wii and saw his rant.

I am so sick of journalism. It is all lies. The poitn is always just to get eyeballs, sell papers, or commercials. I have long stopped believing headlines about anything… games, world events. It is all sensationalism and even articles are written just to highlight juicy quotes. We are never afforded context.

This leaves us in a sad place. If no one reports the news, I am increasingly disconnected, and stop caring about anything in the world but myself… because everyone is a sensationalist liar with an angle… even in the gaming press.

This just sickens me.

Lucky for these other game sites, shredding the Edge interview into pieces, there’s no online copy of it so it’s gonna be even LESS likely that somebody’s gonna cross-research the interview to hear the whole story. It’s just sad. Typical, but sad.

I can’t wait until Sushi Bar Samurai comes out and the press find the Jeff and Casey podcasts about Mircosoft. That’ll be a riot – and it’ll be ok, because you can take any of their barrage of insults out of context and it will be indicative of the whole.

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2010/12/22/braid-developer-psn-quot-less-conservative-quot-than-xbox-live-indie-games.aspx

Don’t worry, we’re used to the low professionalism of much of the gaming press. Inflammatory and misleading headlines are daily bread, so we often hesitate before we give them any credibility.

I hope to read about the interesting topics you talked about in the interview.

Is the actual interview up online anywhere, or is it just in the print edition?

PS, you forgot a picture of the island as it currently stands!