I must admit this, from Kotaku’s Eliza, just made me laugh:

“I am situated directly over the throbbing, gelatinous heart of the gaming memewad. It’s swampy, rotten and opaque, but one gets to recognize the amorphous feelings emanating from the evil cesspool of incoming RSS. An RSSpool, if you will.”

Yep. “Two years ago…? What is this ‘controlling interest’ of which you speak? I don’t follow.”

Rockstar’s confusing press release in May began:

CHUNK: “This time, Xbox® Nation won’t have to wait. Responding to the cries of millions of Xbox 360â„¢ owners, Microsoft Corp. and Rockstar Games, the universally renowned publishing label of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc., have struck a groundbreaking agreement that brings “Grand Theft Auto IV” to the Xbox 360 platform on day one of its global release.”

And then it went on to say:

CHUNK: “Separately, Microsoft and Rockstar Games are proud to announce a strategic alliance to provide exclusive episodic content for Xbox Live®, giving the community ever-expanding gameplay experiences that simply aren’t possible on other consoles.”

What it didn’t do was clarify whether they meant content for GTA IV or different, standalone content. When I asked them about it (both companies), they said they couldn’t remove the ambiguity for me, so we cut the line from the original EG news item strapline which specified the content was for GTA IV.

Hence, the X06 announcement technically was a development, albeit a very slight one. In this case, the majority had reported the original line on an assumption, and that assumption was proved right. S’not always the case, but even though it was here, it doesn’t undermine Tom’s point.

As I said to him, what we’re seeing here is fairly typical of the internet games newsbeat, which is populated by an ever-growing number of websites – some small, some large – with differing degrees of journalistic ambition. Some simply parrot what’s said elsewhere because they’re just trying to keep their little band of warrior-readers up to date, and the checks and specifities are fewer. Others push harder and do “UPDATE!”s. What you generally don’t see is people ignoring stories until everything’s clear – something we’re trying to do more often on EG, and currently getting about 40% right, I reckon.

(Publishers and platform holders are to some extent to blame for this, mind you – their continuing refusal to clarify things beyond “that’s just rumour and speculation” often goads people into writing before all the ink’s in the pen. Similarly, particularly on UK sites, regional offices and PR people’s inability to comment often pushes us to write before we’d like to, simply because if we hold off overnight for a US response, that US response will have been given to a US website during that time, and we end up reporting on a statement given to a competitor).

Anyway, the wider point is that aggregation of huge numbers of sites writing to differing levels obviously means that the truth’s harder to separate from the fiction without a bit of legwork on the part of the reader (and in that case, who needs the news sites at all?); the net result of this is that the least informed readers populate and empower the least informed sites. As I also said to Tom though, this is sort of good for people at websites or magazines like PC Gamer, which aims higher editorially, because it’s bound to drive people who won’t stand for it into their arms. That sector can only really grow as the other one pushes further and further in the direction it’s already going.

In other words, we’ll probably never be rid of aggregators going mental next month with stories we’ve already read today, but there are some benefits to the present situation. Plus, short of a cull, it’s difficult to see how you reverse it. Blogs have lowered the bar; the adjustment will come readers, not writers.

“Headline answer: yes! Real answer: no!”

I do occasionally drop in to read one of Eliza Gauger’s posts, as she often seems to
A. Write her own original interpretations or summaries of news events without formulaic misanthropy and vulgar humour,
B. Read sources which report facts or events,
and C. As a professional writer – paid to write – properly read, write and spell her own native language. If I saw Crecente, Eckhart, or any of the forgettable chimps at AOL Games/Joystiq say “take a peak” one more time, I was going to get ulcers.

So yes. VG blogs started out brilliant, but their laziness has now dropped them