Thinking With Tay: Ryan Perez And Gaming “Journalism”

Jonathan Tay

I awoke this morning to interesting news: Destructoid, one of the gaming industry’s most anomalous sources of information, had fired Ryan Perez, a contributing writer. His crime was tweeting at Felicia Day, asking her if she “mattered at all”, and calling her a “glorified booth babe”. But Perez is no stranger to provocation: some of the pieces he’s written at Destructoid have titles such as, “About the ‘art’ debate: Please shut the f**k up” and “Overheard at E3 2012: Sh***ing in the dark edition”, while others, such as “About fantasy: Please let there be a dragon extinction” see him openly call The Elder Scrolls series “cheap, bargain-bin fantasy”. I’m sure that Mr. Paget would disagree.

But wait a minute—this is Destructoid we’re talking about! The site houses one of the industry’s most infamous critics, Jim Sterling! You might remember him as the fellow who gave Final Fantasy XIII a 4 and Assassin’s Creed II a 4.5, while tossing the entertaining, yet flawed Deadly Premonition a perfect 10. He’s also been recently blacklisted by Konami for an excoriating critique of their business practices.

Perez is crass, to be sure, but aside from his crude prose, is he any different from Sterling? Anyone who’s ever bothered to read the latter’s reviews knows that he probably isn’t trolling: Sterling’s points are, for the most part, valid, while his criticisms should be taken as constructive, not malicious. Perez can be seen in the same way. His articles put forth a legitimate opinion while providing enough justification to back them up; he just might word things to be more attention grabbing, is all.

The difference between Perez’s written articles and his comments on Twitter is that the latter are simply provocative for the sake of being provocative. He has no evidence to substantiate his—by his own admission, poorly researched—statements, and thus, they seem like angry comments from your average internet attention-seeker. Perhaps Perez thought that his tenure with Destructoid would keep him free from harm, but clearly, he was wrong, as he is now no longer affiliated with the site.

Destructoid’s hasty removal of Perez seems like a clear act of damage control. The question is, were they justified in doing so? There is little evidence to indicate that he was being sexist—just mean-spirited. In fact, Jim Sterling once famously called someone a “feminazi slut” on Twitter, and yet he still writes for Destructoid. Is there a slight hint of favouritism going on here? Perhaps. Sterling holds an influential voice within the industry, but Perez is still relatively unknown. And let’s not forget the size of Day’s fanbase, as well as those of the others he insulted. Maybe Destructoid isn’t the platform for free speech that I once thought it was.

An industry legend.

Perez raises an interesting point in retrospect, that being that he should have simply commented against God or the Catholic Church. Still provocative, and yet we can almost be sure that he wouldn’t have been fired for it. It could be due to the fact that God and the Church are abstract entities, and Day is not, but that’s irrelevant. This whole debacle is indicative of something that’s been on my mind lately: videogaming culture, at large, doesn’t take itself seriously.

While publishers are certainly at fault for this, the “game journalists” and fans share an equal part of the blame, if not more. Discussions about videogames stagnate, as any dissenting opinion—i.e. a Metacritic score that doesn’t fall in line with the average—are immediately set upon by the masses, and sometimes, the journalists themselves. Jim Sterling’s occasionally contrarian opinions and Jeff Gerstmann being fired from GameSpot are signifiers of this. Gerstmann’s case is especially embarrassing for us, as giving a low score to a videogame is no grounds for a layoff, even if the publishers of said game were advertising on the site. When we review games, we’re supposed to give an honest critique of them, and how can we do that when fans, and even the websites we write for, are against us?

Contrast games journalism with, well, actual journalism, and you’ll see how immature we, as a whole, really are. Take the example of the late Christopher Hitchens, who, while I often disagreed with him, was probably one of the greatest journalists of our time. The man often went against the popular grain, much like Perez and Sterling: Hitchens’ critiques of Nobel Peace Prize winner Mother Teresa and his support for the Iraq War are merely two small drops of water in a sea of contrarian opinion. And, although there were many dissenters, they frequently met him in open, semi-rational debate. The papers he wrote for never fired him because he offered a differing, sometimes extreme opinion. On the contrary, his voice was highly sought after—just look at New Statesman, The Atlantic, The Nation, and any other reputable sources he wrote for.

And then look at us. We’re sensitive children by comparison, upset by anyone who dares to pop the fragile little bubble that surrounds us. Games journalists are more PR spokespeople than discerning critics, and if we ever want to give off even the slightest veneer of professionalism, then we had better drop the former. And all of us would do better if we could listen to opposing viewpoints before reverting to grade school insults. Do I think that what Ryan Perez did was stupid? Yes. Do I think that how Destructoid handled it was too extreme? Almost certainly. Does the site have a double standard? Probably. But there’s an important lesson to take home from all of this. We have to remember that videogames aren’t just toys anymore, so we better stop acting like children and grow up.