 In their book Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman argue that the way media and journalism functions is not to inform the public or to hold power to account. Noble ideals that those of the profession might refer to as the Fourth Estate, but instead, it works as propaganda. Their propaganda model for media manifests because of a series of intersecting forces. One, profit. Media organizations are owned by large profit-oriented corporations, and so the type of news they cover will always be information that generates revenue and is beholden to those interests. Then, advertising. Because one of the primary ways news generates money is through advertisements, they will always be submissive to other corporate sponsors. Next, sourcing. Because journalists need access to these large corporations in order to get early coverage, they will try not to be too disruptive, because doing so will exclude you from news that might help with said profit. And finally, there is flak or enforcers. People are institutions that push back against any positions that fall outside acceptable discourse, forcing news into self-censorship. The primary application of this framework is, of course, with regards to political news. How news organizations, even unknowingly, will tacitly comply with the demands of both the state and businesses, because it is in their best interest to do so. Unfortunately, this only serves to manufacture the consent of a population, who meekly acquiesce to forces they might otherwise find objectionable. News is propaganda, journalists are propagandists. Journalists are unfairly lambasted, some might argue, though. Surely they are governed by a code of ethics, you know, cite multiple sources, report the facts, make corrections, limit harm and slander and be as truthful as possible. Sure, but under this model, it matters not the valiant ideals of individual agents, the system incentivizes the wrong things. Distrust of news and journalism is seemingly very high, and what's interesting is that this still applies when you look at other sub-domains of journalism, in our case, video game journalism. The meme of the corrupt journalist needing a journalist mode, distrust for large media conglomerates, there is ample evidence of this sentiment in gaming. In fact, Gamergate, regardless of the politics and implications of the movement, was by its own account a crusade against bad ethics in journalism, irrespective of whether or not that's what it ended up being. At the very least, this shows the power of the idea in mobilizing gamers, even if for ulterior motives. A fascinating thing in gaming is the blending of subversive anti-corporate ethics and reactionary elements all at once, making movements such as these as conflicted as they are hard to pin down. In any case, the net output was widespread harassment, and very little impact on the dynamics of a status quo that gamers themselves participated. Am I going to discuss the history of Gamergate? No. Am I presenting a theory about the structure and nature of journalism in games? No. These are subjects that have and require dedicated research and scholarship that the medium of the video essay will never do justice to. What we can do is play with these ideas and see what insights they yield about how the identity of the gamer itself might be manufactured by these forces. Manufacturing consent is an interesting expression. It implies that our views and ideals are shaped by others. We are always beholden to narrative, to ideology. In video games, the trajectory of an individual gamer is deeply personal. You might have started your life as a gamer as I did when your parents bought you a console. You play with your friends on the weekends. You try and beat them. You eagerly await the release of new games that your parents only buy for you on special occasion. But then, you read reviews in magazines and websites. You get on online forums and discuss with gamers who both agree and disagree. Fast forward enough time, and social media starts to amplify individual voices, creating more polarization and trapping you in an echo chamber of your own thoughts. How does journalism enter the fray here? How does it contribute to manufacturing the gamer? This we can never fully know. It is deeply anecdotal. The corporate and advertiser focus of games media wants to sell you games. This is what sustains the industry. Yet, we also get our information about games, critical reviews about games from these same institutions. In journalism, there is a divide between news and editorial, facts and opinions supposedly. And in most games media, advertising and writing are also separated. We can trust that this does happen in principle. The problem here isn't that we should suspect that this isn't the case, but the strange conflation of journalism and criticism. Journalism is not criticism. They overlapped but are distinct professions. Journalism holds power to account, informs the public. Criticism is about artistic evaluation. When we blend the two as we do in games, we dilute both. Vacuous scores out of 10 are meant to be an objective metric of a game's value. It's a consumer report. Games aren't cheap. But is this journalism or criticism? It might actually be neither. Outlets need access to new games early if they want to publish a game review first. This means they are beholden to publishers to grant them copies. There is ample evidence of publishers blacklisting journalists and critics who they deem unworthy. And so criticism might be financially risky. There is also the infamous episode of a particular journalist getting fired because of his bad review of a game. Having advertisements of games in the same place or criticism of those games takes place might be strange. There is co-dependency. Corporations need journalists to promote their games as much as journalists need games to promote themselves. But why is it neither journalism or criticism? The best criticism in games doesn't happen in large websites by corporate-sponsored media or influencers. It happens in books, journals, blog posts, by renegade authors who are not doing a consumer report. The best journalism doesn't happen under the umbrella of a larger organization. But when independent investigative agents take it upon themselves to divulge information about perverse labor practices in the industry or predatory monetization schemes directed at children or how dirty the supply chains of gaming as an industry are, the information most present to us all is neither journalism nor criticism. We are informed about the medium while simultaneously being completely misinformed. Perhaps manufacturing consent should be adapted to manufacturing content. Content creation, the currency of our age is not knowledge or beauty but entertainment and money. A story about the design philosophy of some obscure developer or about the nature of playing games in academic books does not get as many clicks as some salacious article about leaks in a game or speculation about technology that is never really used beyond the immersive fallacy or fueling the flames of some absurd console war or an article about why this game or person or publication sucks. Money leads but only when entertainment and sensationalism bleeds. We know the drill. Negative headlines capture attention. Arbitrary lists promote engagement. Controversy is another currency of the modern age. Narratives that pit gamers against gamers as the console wars do or pit players against developers are toxic, sure, but they are profitable. Sega versus Nintendo, PlayStation versus Xbox. Console manufacturers feign propriety but are playing a zero-sum game, going negative and then claiming innocence. There is a chain of transmission we all bear responsibility for. Journalists spread the news about the leaks of the Last of Us Part II's plot. Gamers got incensed and directed their anger towards the developers, even the voice actors before the game came out. The media reviews the game positively. Gamers assume this is evidence of misconduct. Accusations get slung every direction. Journalists are being bought. Gamers are rage-filled maniacs. Developers are imposing their political agenda. What gets lost in the shuffle? The actual game. Ironically, this kerfuffle perhaps accelerated disclosure of Naughty Dog's crunch culture and yielded many interesting think pieces about the controversy itself. Regardless, it bears repeating that we are the enforcers of propaganda. In his book, Handmade Pixels, Jesper Ewell documents how our conception of indie itself is informed by narrative. We have this prevailing idea that indie started in 2008 with games like Braid and Super Meat Boy and this was reinforced by movies like indie game The Movie. But as others like Bennett Fadi have argued, indie started at the inception of our media. Small teams or even individuals than birthed large corporations. Also, there is the construction of the myth of the heroic creator, although this has happened before with so-called art tools. So is indie game The Movie propaganda? I mean, you tell me. The point is our perception of our own history is mediated by narratives and these narratives are generated by the media, which we then transmit uncritically. Again, we are complicit in this too. The fourth part of manufacturing consent is enforcers or flak. It is gamers themselves who seem compelled to enact this. What is a hardcore gamer? What is a casual gamer? And why is this even a question? Hardcore gamers play difficult games, right? They keep up to date about industry news. Casual gamers just play a mobile games and don't have the same nuance and understanding of the medium. Why this gatekeeping though? Why the exclusionary rhetoric? Culpability in the construction of this image is distributed though. Hardware manufacturers sell to young men and adults because that is their main demographic. And couple this with the military industrial origins of our medium and you have a recipe for a present day. Hence, they cultivate the image of the edgy mature gamer, the technophetishist and we buy into this because our ego is appeased. Then we get strange discussions. That's not a game. That's a walking singlet. That's not a gamer. They haven't played X or Y thing. I understand the medium even though I have never designed a game or read a book about the nature of play or have contributed anything meaningful to the industry at all. Journalism outside of games intersects with journalism inside of games in interesting ways. And this also manufactures the gamer. Video games are causing violence, said the mainstream media for the longest time. Games are addictive. They are developmentally hampering our children. Gamers are then portrayed as cave dwelling anti-social miscreants who are cultivating perverse instincts because of the simulation afforded by games. To some, calling yourself a gamer is a matter of pride. For others, it's a source of abject embarrassment. Then journalists inside the medium fight back against this, trying to highlight all the good that games do, reporting on things like charity drives or the sense of community games and gender. Journalists are not a monolith. They are individuals with different incentives, biased, sure, but they often fight against one another. In his talk, the medium is the message. Jonathan Blow argues that the financial incentives of our medium are actually stifling the creative instincts of designers. Predatory monetization schemes, loot boxes, these are sold because people buy them, and then this gets implicitly instantiated as good design. He uses the example of how the advertiser model in TV created short-form content that was superficial and cheap, where a subscription-based model yields more artistic freedom. Interestingly enough, the same is true of journalism in some sense, and this overlaps with manufacturing consent. When news was a subscription-based model, it could serve the interests of its viewership. It didn't have to worry too much about advertiser revenue. The incentives are all aligned, as opposed to the sensationalism that accompanies yellow-letter journalism. Now, functionally, as much as you want to separate editorial and news in games' media, the outcome might always inevitably slant towards advertisers, who in many instances are the very industry itself. No real criticism of industry practices because that might anger advertisers. No real political content because in games, polarization decreases profits. No academic transfer of ideas, well, because that's boring, and gamers don't want that. Sometimes servicing your viewership is not just giving them what they want, but what they need. So journalists may be able to inoculate themselves if they are independent, crowd-funded, don't take sponsorships or look for access, and hence don't need sensationalism or headlines. If they are not concerned with the flak they receive from the industry and others, they might be free. A journalist who cares what others think of them will probably always engage in self-censorship. Here's another issue, though, and it ties back to our discussion about the distinction between journalism and criticism. Objectivity is not neutrality. What does this mean? Journalism is not about saying, look, climate scientists have one opinion, climate denialists another. No, journalism is not neutral. It is objective in saying it's 99% of scientists versus 1% funded by fossil fuel companies. The truth often takes sides. It doesn't sit back and parrot information with a vacant stare. What's funny, though, is that media, in an attempt to seem objective, uses neutrality as aesthetic coverage. We are manufacturing authoritativeness and authenticity now. Why do you think news reporters speak in that horrible monotone? This language of neutrality is the same thing that plagues journalism and criticism. Nine out of 10 seems objective, even though the writer gives no explanation, no framework as to why. I'm just reporting the news, says the journalist who spreads rumors, not realizing that jobs are at stake, and there is a journalistic code of conduct that asks us to minimize harm. Like mentioned, people conflate journalism and criticism, expecting neutrality masquerading as objectivity when they are actually demanding critical perspective. Truth, beauty, and understanding. Decentralizing news and journalism is good in one sense. We are not subjected to corporations. But in another, it leads to the abolition of any journalistic standards that has created an anarchy of absurd and ill-informed opinions. So what is the solution to this? We can't reframe the incentives of corporations that seek profit above all. Journalists don't know enough about the medium, both academically and development-wise. In fact, most of us don't. Alternate funding models and more literacy about journalism and its function might help, sure. But is this simply a band-aid for a bullet wound? In his book, News Games, Ian Bogost argues that games as a medium can help do journalism itself by representing ideas and stories systemically. An example he gives is cutthroat capitalism, a simulation to help represent the issue of piracy off the coast of Somalia in the 1990s, which uses procedural rhetoric to show how circumstances make it somewhat rational for pirates to act the way they do. Given institutional failure, the problem of pervasive poverty, the history of colonialism, and how easily we are all corruptible, seemingly irrational acts can seem somewhat rational. As fascinating a vision this is for the future of games and journalism, we can apply the logic in the book to journalism and games itself and, ironically, yield the same answer. Institutional forces make irrational and destructive behavior rational in our medium. It isn't just the fault of journalists that journalism often fails, as much as it is all our faults for being complicit in a system that necessitates it. Then again, maybe we can manufacture a different version of the game and then the present one. We see glimmers of hope. There is a genuine anti-corporate manipulation ethic present amongst even so-called reactionary gamers. Gamers care more and more about crunch and do whole companies to account, at least in words, when labor practices are perverse. Gamers want change, but are at a loss as to how to fight against the forces of consumerism and sensationalism and a society of control. The journalist then, under this view, can have an active role in facilitating this impulse in the gamer, who ultimately wants a better media without getting distracted by the incentives that might corrupt that vision.