It's Eric Woodward (dotcom)

With a view 9 years on, I have decided to banish this piece into the dustbin of history.

I still have my doubts about the whole purpose of “video game journalism” (especially as it relates to YouTube), but I feel like this is one of those times where the bullshit around the topic (mostly by the hateful MRAs and their disgusting apologists) has made even the #GamerGate tag itself toxic, and I don’t want it anywhere on my site.

David Wolinsky has a great article on Unwinnable capturing his thoughts on the whole “ethics in game journalism” / #GamerGate thing.

It’s time we retire the term “videogame journalist.”

Most writers in the field need to accept that they, too, are marketers unless their approach or something else in the landscape shifts and changes.

Part of the problem, as he sees it, is that videogame companies aren’t driven to do PR with journalists that might give them serious criticism (a.k.a. bad reviews). As a result, traditional “videogame journalists” have to choose between being a PR puppet for the game companies, or not being at all.

Part of the reason for this all-or-nothing attitude are the YouTube streamers, whose undeniable popularity means that they are getting courted more and more often by the game companies in lieu of print / online journalists. For example, look at Pewdiepie, and his 36-million followers:

Thirty-six million subscribers means roughly anything he puts online is more popular than Nirvana’s Nevermind (somewhere around 30 million sales) or Michael Jackson’s Bad (also around 30 million).

Think about it. An audience that size, bigger than the population of Canada (a country), and they are all paying attention to one person’s opinions about videogames. That is staggering on a basic human level.

He hits on a lot of different notes, and it does tend to run long, but it’s an overall great read for anyone that wants to move beyond the black-and-white #GamerGate in-group / out-group fighting and into a serious discussion about marketing vs. journalism, and what ethics in gaming can (and should) be.

Over at Wired, iFixit’s Kyle Wiens (@kwiens) points out that #DMCA abuse extends well beyond preventing you from jailbreaking your PS3 and into the world of… farm machinery?

In a particularly spectacular display of corporate delusion, John Deere—the world’s largest agricultural machinery maker —told the Copyright Office that farmers don’t own their tractors. Because computer code snakes through the DNA of modern tractors, farmers receive “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”

It’s John Deere’s tractor, folks. You’re just driving it.

I find this particularly worrisome with regards to the #InternetOfThings, and the possibility of forced vendor lock-in on even the most trivial of items (“I’m sorry, sir, you’ll have to call a certified Moen plumber to fix your leak.”)

Welcome to the future. Fight to make it better.

The great Remy Sharp (@rem) wrote a piece about what it means to be a web developer, as opposed to an engineer, and the difference a title does (or doesn’t) make. In the end, he settles on the title of “web developer”:

I don’t know why I thought it was uncool to be a “web developer”. Perhaps because it’s utterly vague.

What “web developer” does mean to me though, is this:

Someone who writes code for browsers. Likely from the school of view source, is comfortable with drop-in libraries, understands standards and best practice techniques. But mostly, a tinkerer.

I like his definition (especially the part about tinkering), but I think that it’s incomplete, being merely functional.

I suggest that the term “web developer”, by its definition, carries a philosophical imperative: to develop the web. That is to say, a web developer should visualize how they would like the web to be (as a whole), and build their own projects in a way that reflects that vision.

This is something I’ve tried to do myself, both in my professional and personal projects (albeit with varying degrees of success). To me, being a web developer means that I should use responsive design principles, ensure accessibility, and follow the standards wherever possible. It also means using only open source software, be it in the server stack, the service layer, or even as a client browser.

As a web developer, I want to participate in a decentralized web, and would rather use a self-hosted, fully-open social media platform than a corporate data silo. Likewise, I support the use of standards-based communication protocols (IRC, e-mail, etc.) over proprietary solutions. Finally, as a web developer, I believe in a more secure web, and support initiatives like HTTPS everywhere.

All in all, I think this definition adds an air of legitimacy to the “web developer” title. As I noted in a comment: based on this criteria, one could say that Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the definitive Web Developer (a title he himself uses, as Remy pointed out), and that’s not bad company to be in. In fact, I think I’m going to go get some business cards with “Web Developer” on them.