Topic: What makes a game "GOTY"?

@JaxonH

https://www.thedailybeast.com/intercept-staffers-roll-their-e...

https://mobile.twitter.com/erikwemple/status/1321896097099489283

Glenn greenwald lost his credibility long time ago.

@jump
Agree about all corporate news. Its been compromised.

But Youtubers are an immense group of millions of independent channels. That's the only place left to go. YouTube is rich with great content creators. You just have to find them.

Again, I recommend ACG (PS, Xbox, PC), YongYea (PS Xbox), Skill Up (PS, Xbox) and Switch Up (NSW). These are reviewers I feel confident in standing by. They may not be perfect (no human is) but at least when they give an opinion I know it's free of ideological influence, and SwitchUp in particular values gyro as much as I do. Its always mentioned when a game includes it.

@JaxonH Independent is not a keyword for me, if anything it's worse than corporate news since at least corporations have some (no matter how limited they are) internal controls and accountability to line managers unlike independents. People on Youtube still chase views for monetization, Patron memberships etc so it's not much better than how corporations works.

A key buzzword for me for News is accountability which has largely been disabled in America since the 80s.

@Guest88
What you just posted is exactly the kind of bias I'm referring to. It's a defence piece designed to downplay the fact he was being censored and told to remove everything critical of their favored candidate. That's exactly what I'm talking about. They'll try to give reasons justifying themselves, but at the end of the day it was a concerted effort of suppression. When the guy who blew the lid off the Snowden scandal has to resign from his own company, something is amiss. And that shouldn't be a political statement.

@jump
That's true. I dont disagree with your logic. I think your logic is sound. I think where we diverge is that I believe those controls are irreversibly broken, and while the lack of accountability with independent sources can be a problem if one is not careful, the lack of corporate agenda holds more weight. So it becomes a question of simply finding those with integrity you can trust, which is built over time. And they are out there. You just have to find them. Then verify verify verify.

@JaxonH

He wasn’t censored. He quit because the editor didn’t want to publish his unverified info, and Glenn didn’t handle it very well. The entire censorship complain is piss poor excuse for low effort journalism.

@Guest88
"Unverified" is the excuse the media used to suppress it. Their job is to report the news, not hide it. Especially when they hypocritically only apply those standards when it suits them, and there are countless examples of similar caliber information being reported on when it aligned with corporate agenda (which is the crux of the matter). Of course, there are so many other examples one could write a book (and books have been written about it, though it's only a matter of time before they're banned, as we see this growing effort to suppress information).

But hey, believe as you wish. I'm not here to change your mind. Just sharing my own perspective.

@JaxonH

Then you clearly don`t understand how journalism works. Reporting everything without checking is how you lose credibility or get sued. This is common sense 101. Even 13 years old kids understand that.

@JaxonH I think we fundamentally disagree, but that’s OK. I feel relying on news from people in their bedrooms opens us up to a Wild West of conspiracy theorists, dog whistles, radicals and nutjobs - even if there are plenty of honest professionals out there working their own private beat. Corporate media has a professional responsibility. As mad as Fox can be, it’s not QAnon.

Also, you just shut down a commenter who tried to shut you down on Glenn Greenwald. You have both chosen to trust your own sources of opinion - what makes you right, and the other wrong? When it comes down to individual’s opinions and interpretations, it all breaks down.

Ah, I don’t know what the solution is. You say trust and verify, but where do you go to trust and verify? One of the advantages of old media is that, even when organs misrepresent the facts, offer skewed opinions or just simply make mistakes, they get called out on it by their rivals. When it’s all a million individual voices shouting into the void, you get babel.

I use to work for news company (not a well known one or even for that long) and the amount of rubbish stories which would come in is ridiculous, especially nutters making things up, so most were ignored. If everything single thing that came in was reported on all news companies would go belly up from people no longer taking them seriously or from lawsuits.

Well this thread sounds like fun. I suppose GOTY would be whatever game(s) are acknowledged by gamers and gaming media as a title of significance as quality. If it keeps coming up in conversation (Breath of the Wild), then it's probably important. This does make me realize GOTY is probably something that takes more time than a calender year to truly determine.

Is it true that 'The Last of Us Part 2' won game of the year? Good for it, I suppose, but I really don't see it being very significant in the years to come. I think it seemed to cause a lot of arguements about it's content but not anything substantive.

I never tried to shut him down. I gave him full context when it comes to Glenn Greenwald. It’s up to him if he wants to believe or not.

@Krull
I shut them down because of the double standard. You cant hold one news story to a different standard than others. That argument only holds water if the standard is applied equally across the board, which it's not. It's only applied when it suits the corporate agenda. That's a problem. Plus, the information was verified, they just used the excuse "ya but it was obtained in a hack" to justify suppressing it.

There will always be nutjobs and conspiracy theorists. It is what it is. That comes with the territory of having freedom. It's up to personal responsibility to separate the wheat from the chaff. Just because loons exist in the world doesnt mean you throw the baby out with the bathwater (as previously mentioned).

I think you have a misconception about Youtube though. One shouldn't irresponsibly jump down the rabbit hole and listen to anything that pops in their feed. But an intelligent, open minded, non partisan person can easily discern the good from the bad. That's the research one must do. It takes effort. But once you find reliable sources you've vetted time and again that report everything and let YOU decide, that simply share facts which can be validated, you stick with them.

But I agree facts are becoming ever harder to validate. Duckduckgo is a good search engine for getting non biased results.

It's a serious problem though, at least on that we can agree. We may come to different conclusions on how to respond, but half the battle is recognizing the problem exists. You're one of the few I've met who actually realizes this problem does exist. Many prefer to ignore it because it conveniently aligns with their beliefs. The danger in that is, today it aligns with your beliefs, but tomorrow it doesnt.

You advocate listening to both sides of the media, but the problem is most dont. Most only watch one side, whichever confirms their own bias. As a result, they never realize they're being manipulated. So when someone tells them the media cant be trusted, they look at them like they're crazy. Because they dont know what's going on. They havent the slightest clue.

And with gaming, many people only look at the scores. So they never see the agenda unless someone points it out to them. They dont realize how much of the corporate gaming media is ideologically driven, and they dont realize how its affecting their scores and their votes for GOTY. Angry Joe was banned from resetera for giving TLOU2 a bad review. This is the site all the insiders frequent. It's very cult like. And that ideology runs deep in the gaming media.

@Guest88 Apologies for misrepresenting you. I was using you to make a point, and obviously fluffed it.

@JaxonH Thanks for the debate - it’s been genuinely interesting.

Where do we go from here? What makes a game GotY? Short answer: depends who’s picking it.

There's one problem with saying TLOU2 only (keyword) got GOTY because of it's "ideologies" is that the game was always in likely contendership for GOTY anyway, it's from a series seen as high caliber with the previous entry having won various GOTY awards. This is just more of the same like when GTA, Dark Souls or Zelda win especially since it's a week year.

@Krull It`s cool.

@jump true. I'm being a bit biased because I still struggle to see anything that made the first game special. I guess in comparison to the games you mentioned they have shaped video games as a whole. Heck, Dark Souls is one of the most influential games of the last 10 years. I don't see TLoU having the same reach. I s'pose with 2020 games it makes sense. Personally I would've given GOTY to Animal Crossing. Thats me being a Nintendo nerd, but it was a life simulation released at the beginning of a year long lockdown. That's the kind of crazy happenstance that's stranger than fiction.

@Krull
Indeed.

Its refreshing to have an honest discussion about such topics without emotion dominating the discourse.

I feel like there is a school of thought that believes games are at their highest art form when they are as close to a playable movie as possible. This is basically the Naughty Dog syndrome - not that their games aren’t mostly top class. But this is why games like God of War and The Last of Us consistently reap the big prizes.

Then there are studios that believe the gameplay comes first (Nintendo, obviously), but these games are often deemed inferior by some (not all) critics because they’re not trying to do anything “more”. Has a sports game ever won GotY?

Personally, although Hades or perhaps Crusader Kings III is my personal favourite release this year, I would think Animal Crossing should get it - because it’s the game that most defines 2020. Massive seller, critically appreciated (mostly) and created its own zeitgeist of escapism in what has been widely accepted as a frightening and horrible year for much of the world.

Still, Wycombe Wanderers got promoted, so it wasn’t all bad...

And here I thought that I was risking derailing this thread with my comments.... allrighty, then...

@JaxonH There's quite a few more good, largely unbiased/honest YouTubers out there, especially where Switch and/or Nintendo is concerned: my favorite and most mellow YouTuber of all time is Arlo, then there's Nintendrew, Spawn Wave and Commonwealth Realm.

And a still very entertaining (in my humble opinion) channel for multi-platform news is The Know. Another decent multi-platform channel is Rule of 2 Review.

You may not like all of them, but there might at least be one or two that you could add to your personal roster.