 Man, today we're going to be talking about video game journalism, everyone's favorite topic to talk about in the world of video games, and it's interesting because there have been times where I have been considered a video game journalist, specifically in all my years working at Zelda Informer, reporting on news, writing editorials, creating unique video content, a lot of people viewed me as a video game journalist, and in fact when I go to events like E3, I literally sign up as a member of the media member of the gaming journalism community. Now, I don't have a journalism degree, I have no interest in getting a journalism degree. In fact, writing is my least favorite thing to do in college courses. I hate writing classes. Unless it's creative writing, something about telling a story in a way you want to tell it, always interested me in creative writing, which is why maybe I wrote some theory editorials on Zelda back in the day that I really, really enjoyed because you got to tell a story from your perspective. Anyways, we're talking about video game journalism today because it's arguable whether I still participate in video game journalism. At Nintendo Prime, I obviously still report news, so I'm still doing a lot of the things I did at Zelda Informer. I know of a YouTube channel which is kind of like the new medium people like to enjoy or ingest their news with a little personality. And there's a lot of ins and outs and whether that's more appropriate than just straight reporting. But something happened today that reminded me why video game journalism has such a bad reputation. Jason Schreyer over at Kotaku put up a piece about Horizon Zero Dawn. And yes, I realize it isn't a Nintendo game, but this is relevant to all gamers out there that consume video game journalism. So he puts out a piece on Horizon Zero Dawn talking about all of the clever ways that Horizon makes the game look so good at a development level, right? So Horizon's a very beautiful looking game and obviously it must be using tricks because there's no way in heck a PlayStation 4 with the hardware it has could really render everything like that 100% of the time. It's even true for games like Breath of the Wild. There is no way that Wii U or Switch has that world fully loaded 100% of the time. There's obviously clever tricks in play. One of the tricks is a thing where he put up a GIF from a video, right? There's a Horizon Zero Dawn, the making of video that's been put out there by the developers. And in it, it shows a character's line of sight moving left to right. And I'll put a throat up in here in this video so you can get a look at it yourself. And what's happening is that parts of the load are deloading and new parts are loading as the perspective of the person controlling the camera moves. Now this happens all in real time. So you don't notice these loads sometimes or most of the time. Sometimes you do it's called poppin. But for the most part, you don't notice these loads. And it's very common 3d games have been using it for a long time. However, it's not really common knowledge with most gamers, I would say I don't think there's a lot of gamers that realize as they're playing a game that everything is dynamically loading and deloading behind you, that the whole world isn't actually loaded all at once. That would just be crazy. So it's just a very interesting GIF. And on the surface, this is a very innocent article that just talks about this, it does a little promoting of his book down in the comments because Jason Schreiber wrote a book about game development. And obviously dives deep into the horizon, the making of film, and goes over a few other tricks and stuff it does. But we're going to focus on the line of sight loading and unloading. I think the official word for this is called LOD or level of detail. There's a lot of little tricks in play here. But what makes this a point today, a point of conversation is something polygon did. And polygon used to be a site I respected because it was made up of a bunch of journalists from all over the web that kind of left publications like Kotaku, like IGN, like GameSpot, because they felt like journalism wasn't being done correctly. So polygon kind of built itself up to be like, Hey, we're going to be a bastion of gaming journalism integrity. If you've been following a polygon for a long time, you know, this isn't true. And Kotaku is not without fault as well. I don't think Jason Schreiber himself is at fault. But Kotaku has done support things in its past that I feel have mostly been corrected under Stefan Tatilo, the current editor in chief there. But anyways, so the controversy here is that Ben Kuchera over a polygon wrote up a piece saying that developers are mocking that Kotaku post about game development and saying that it's a bad look for Kotaku. And it's really a bad look for the developers. And he puts up roughly, I don't know, tweets, tweets, tweets, tweets from four different people. One name Matt Gamble, it says I'm not sure Kotaku understands how games are made. Chris Wilson responded, Hi, yes, I saw that gift. And I went, Yeah, okay, to frustum culling. That's the official term for what they're talking about. And then Dan Star Wars from at game design dances. Instead of actually rendering a human person on screen, the game composes models of 1000s of tiny triangles. Then Simon Roth says, if you think that frustum culling tech and horizon looks cool, you may want to hear about other games that use it every 3d game since 1982. Dan Marshall then comes out about the subteam like three design game devs in a row and get ready for multi combo. Anyways, the point is that a bunch of people came out, not a bunch, that's really exaggerating. Basically, for supposed game developers, no name game developers that hardly anybody knows. And this isn't a discredited that maybe they work on big teams, maybe they're an indie developer. I have no idea. I don't know them. But the reality is they're not very well known. And those four people basically were mocking Jason Schreyer and Kotaku for putting up this story about frustum culling and how it's extremely common. And to be honest, I've been following video games for a long time. I've been writing about video games for a long time. And I kind of knew some of the base concepts behind this, but I didn't even know what was called frustum culling, right? Like this is a new thing to me. And I feel like it's cool to educate gamers on how their favorite games are made. It doesn't matter if this has been common for 30 years. People don't know this at a consumer level. And it's really interesting for those who want to get more in depth in the game development without becoming a game developer, they just want to learn what goes on behind the scenes. Now, this piece on its own is kind of innocent. But it's the fact that polygon decided that these four no name developers were enough to write this entire editorial, sounding like there's this huge controversy from game devs over this article that Jason Schreyer wrote about culling and you know, whatever what does it call it again? I already forgot the name frustum culling and level of depth and all this stuff like this is huge controversial topic that game developers hate. And that's not true. It's just for random game developers that said something not people you know, it's not Shigeru Miyamoto, you know, it's not it's not anybody of note here. There's not a single like, like notable game dev developer here that's mad at Jason Schreyer over this. So the reality is that polygon used an instance of actual reporting at Kotaku that was good and overall beneficial for gamers and turned it into a controversial piece about devs hating what Jason Schreyer wrote. And it's stupid. It's so stupid. This is why video game journalism has such a bad reputation. And it's why I have such a hard time trying to relate myself and call myself a video game journalist, because I don't want to be associated with this kind of crap. This is creating controversy to create kind of controversy to get clicks. Game developers in general have no issue with Jason Schreyer's thing. The game developers here that do are very minor in nature. Like if I click on Matt Gamble here, just glancing at his Twitter, he is a game developer. He's worked on RPG tycoon living the deal. And he's a film director. What goes up milk and honey, still successful at avoiding getting a really job a real job from Brighton England. And thing is, I'm not trying to diss what this guy does for a living. And I'm not trying to diss what any of these guys do for a living. But they don't understand the appeal of such an editorial. And they don't understand what's going on here. And Polygon is the blame for all of this because I feel like I don't want to hurt freedom of speech. Matt Gamble and all these other guys that they put out there, they have more than enough right to say what they have to say and have these bad opinions. But Polygon did not have to take this Ben Kutura did not have to take this and blow it up in this big attack piece that acts like devs are just crapping on Kotaku. Now, Ben Kutura in this piece does say how silly these complaints are. And, you know, he this is his own words. The humor is that a site with a gaming focus showed a small detail about how games actually work. And renders were interested in developers are greeted this with derision, because it's common knowledge to them, other developers were a bit more adult about things. And it goes on with Dan Marshall, who actually said some nice things about the piece and how we can need to understand that consumers don't know this stuff. So reality is that this is a non issue. Jason Schreider created a very interesting piece, looking at how Horizon Zero Dawn is able to do what it does. And a lot of this stuff is explained in the Horizon Zero Dawn development video. He's just summarizing that video. But it blew up into this big thing because Polygon wanted it to blow up into a big thing. And I always feel like I need to apologize on behalf of Polygon and I don't work for Polygon because this is just a terrible piece that while it does not crap on Jason Schreider and Kotaku directly by like saying, Oh, he was bad for making this piece. He made it seem like there was a controversy around the piece that doesn't actually exist. Game developers are not upset about this piece. No one's upset about this piece, except for a few known name people that are hardly worth writing an entire article about. I mean, look at the title of this article. I'll put a link down in the description says developers are mocking a Kotaku post about game development and it's a bad look. And it's a bad look for those developers. That's what what the piece kind of summarizes. Oh, it's a bad look for developers. But if you just read the title, it sounds like it could be a bad look for Kotaku. And it's making it sound like developers like the title isn't lying to you because these are actual game developers. But it makes it into this story. It doesn't need to be it's kind of like how people recently, like the Wall Street Journal went after PewDiePie by acting like he's anti Semitic and maybe he's done some really poor tasting jokes. But I watched the video I watched PewDiePie's responses all the defense videos and I went back and actually watched the videos they claim are anti Semitic. And yeah, it was blown out of proportion. It wasn't as big of a deal as they made it out to be. But because they wanted to make a big deal because they wanted to draw in those clicks, they made it this controversy that it never was. And that's what Polygon is doing here. There is no controversy surrounding Jason Schreyer's piece. And they're making it sound like there is. That's why I have a problem with video game journalism and stuff like this is probably why you have an issue with video game journalism, where sites are just creating things to get traffic. And to be clear, I don't think there's anything wrong writing pieces to get traffic. You know, the whole reason that we create pieces, the reason I create videos, the reason that we write editorials and do the news is because we want people to view it, right? Why would we create something we don't want people to actually listen to, watch, read, etc. So we want them to read them, but only if they want to, right? Like, I don't want people coming to watch this video because they want to hate on it, right? I don't want people coming to watch this video because Oh, it's got a controversial title. I want people to read, listen, pay attention, because it's something they're interested in. And it's something they want to know more about. And that's kind of the way I view news. Nintendo Prime. I made a post sharing three screenshots from Sonic Forces the other day at Nintendo Prime. And the goal of that post was just for people who are interested in Sonic Forces to come take a look. If you're not interested, then don't look. I'm not going to make a big controversial title out of it. Like, Oh my God, these screenshots are like the most epic things ever. This is the best looking Sonic game of all time. Like, maybe it is. Maybe it's not. I don't know yet. I haven't seen enough to make any statements like that. But yeah, I think opinions stay out of news reporting. And in this case, this is just trying to create a controversy that doesn't truly exist, just to draw interest. And I guess I got it. I'm here talking about it. Other people have been talking about it. And I just feel bad for Jason Schreyer and Kotaku. And I know it feels we're defending Kotaku because they have done shady stuff. I'm not going to act like they're innocent. But it makes me sad. Because I like to feel like video game journalism is moving beyond this. And it still exists. And it's petty. And I just, we can do better people. We can do better. Anyways, this is Nathaniel Ruffeljantz from Nintendo Prime. Signing out.