I love David Jaffe because whether you agree with the man or not, he always has something interesting to say. This time Jaffe decided to take a few moments to talk about the growing trend of personal opinion being injected into news stories on many gaming websites, in what Jaffe says is his final time complaining about the gaming press.

Here, Jaffe put a post up but if you don’t want to click said link you can just watch the YouTube video below:

If the video didn’t work for you, Jaffe says this:

All he was doing in the first two thirds of the story was saying “Jaffe says this” and then gives a quote of exactly what I said. It’s like that[s] really great.

He isn’t wrong, you know, but a lot of people will simply roll their eyes and ignore what’s being said because it’s David “Go fuck your mother up her jiggly ass twat” Jaffe (I still love that quote). While some websites, such as Gamasutra and Gamepot, continue to report the news as news, a lot of gaming blogs like Joystiq, Kotaku, even BG favorite Destructoid, has a tendency to slip personal opinions into their news stories. Which is fine, so long as you make clear what your site is about and how it goes about its business.

Case in point: Us. Before the decision was made (by me) to try and steer away from the daily grind of gaming news in favor of more original, in-depth content, we slipped opinion into just about every news item that we published. All we did was take the next step, the natural progression from posting opinions in news items: turn BG into an opinion site.

That’s something else I want to touch on, real quick. Online journalism, for better or worse, is the natural progression of journalism as a whole and I believe that it’s time that we start to take the responsibility that will soon be thrown upon us seriously. Whether people like it or not, online journalism is the future, and if we don’t acknowledge that and take it seriously, the future of news will be websites like TMZ, where news stories will be poorly researched and “insider sources” will be some guy who shot them an email.

Now, I don’t want to put any words in Jaffe’s mouth, but if he read this I think he would agree.*

*God in Heaven I hope somebody gets that I’m just fucking around…
**The story title? It’s a quote from the video.

The real story here is that Jaffe talked about the challenges and benefits of designing and operating an online community within a game. Specifically, Jaffe laments on how some games give entirely too much control to the game host and how that can actually ruin the online experience for some gamers.

I’m with the man in saying that a lot of people who tend to host games make some pretty boneheaded decisions. Fortunately, the beauty of most online services is that once you’re on the main lobby you can pick and choose which games you want to join.

…I’m doing that opinion thing again, aren’t I?*

*Bwah hahahaha!

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