Today, several of my colleagues at TheGamer were laid off. I’m certain that each and every one of them—with their immense talent and unwavering positive attitudes—will go on to do great things. I’m not worried about their long-term prospects, but one needs to understand that a sudden layoff creates a lot of stress, uncertainty and anxiety in someone’s life.
Rent (or mortgages), medical expenses, groceries, loan repayments and so on — these are near-universal experiences. Games media is a cowboy industry; no cushy redundancy payments are waiting for someone on the other side. One day you have a steady income, the next day you don’t. This can, and does, happen to plenty of workers across every industry.
Here’s what I don’t understand, though. Almost every survey commissioned on the subject has found that financial anxiety is exceedingly common in the vast majority of the population, across both Europe and the United States. If that’s the case, why do I see such a stark lack of empathy for people affected by layoffs in games media?
A perusal of any social media thread on the topic always devolves into the same untrue, callous and inane talking points. I’ll make this clear: there are very few, if any, major gaming media sites that use limited language models to produce content. The trenches of social media are currently full of smarter-than-thous who label everything AI, proving, ironically, that they can’t actually tell the difference at all.
Others take a different approach, arguing that the journalism is poor, so these people deserve to be laid off. The perceived poor quality of journalism is simply a matter of economics — when advertising revenue is a website’s main source of income, then high-traffic topics will be prioritised.
There are plenty of people in games media capable of high-level reporting and feats of investigative journalism, but what company will pay them for producing a couple of articles every three months? There’s also a high chance that these pieces will generate less revenue than whatever vapid topic that insatiable algorithms are pushing that day.
There are a few talented and well-connected journalists who do this work while supported by major publications. The conditions of gaming journalism mirror the conditions of entertainment journalism, sports journalism and even traditional journalism. The media is owned by corporations that need to turn a profit. Your local broadsheet is not full of riveting stories, but someone worked hard on them nonetheless — not everyone is Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, and not everyone is Jason Schreier.
With this in mind, where does the blind hatred (culture war nonsense aside) for games journalists come from? In real life, you would never lambast someone who worked diligently at their craft, and you would never rejoice in the misfortune of an honest person. Schadenfreude isn’t a new concept, but these days, everyone needs to get their own personal jab in on folks they have never met before and won’t ever know. It’s honestly quite sickening, and I can’t help but feel these adversarial attitudes are part of why depression, alienation and hatred are constantly on the rise.
In a world where the ultra-rich are exploiting the vast majority of the population without consequence, and people are being genocided for merely existing, you are celebrating the downfall of someone who… just didn’t quite enjoy the new Assassin’s Creed as much as you did. Hey, I paid €70 too buddy, we’re in this fight together.
At the end of the day, I don’t really care. We’re in an age where faceless commenters can and will continue to peddle hatred without a shred of self-awareness. The internet is humanity laid bare for everyone to see, and while I believe there’s an infinite capacity for good in people, a lot of people would rather show their casual contempt instead… and accepting that is very sad.
Jack Coleman 