Not to be rude or anything, but you're being hypocrytical there. At one moment you're asking for people to have an open mind to accept different viewpoints, then you're critising Edge for portraying different viewpoints.
Yet, I was critising EDGE for being contradictory in terms of its attitude from one issue to the next without justification or detailed reason. If the magazine could explain and justify why it hails and condemns different viewpoints in such a rapid fashion, then perhaps I could get a better handle on these differing attitudes and understand them more. But either the time, space, knowledge or consideration isn't there to do that at this moment. It's all subjective to opinion though... But then, we are in a thread debating why the hardcore is being chastised by the media right now. Even EDGE said itself in the opening of its most recent issue, that after they heyday of the Playstation boom ended, interest of the mainstream died away to a certain extent. And this lead to a disturbing thought in my mind... Is that a valid reason for why specific sectors of the dedicated community are being witch-hunted in the media? Do we have to be alienated and isolated as a cause for holding back videogaming, and preventing it from achieving mainstream recognition once more?
Hmm. That seemed a little like the blame game to me. Sorry, but that's how it came across.
I'm not trying to justify what Edge is saying, or their current quality, but I've always seen them as a magazine who will give both sides the the same arguement , and letting the readers decide on which opinion they want to go with. Isn't this giving readers an opportunity to be open minded?
I agree that diversity can be a good thing when it's backed up by substance and depth... Yet I feel EDGE doesn't delve quite deep enough. Which is slightly disappointing when you consider the quality and accuracy of its journalism elsewhere in other articles. To be fair, there is only limited space to cover things in, and the relevance and importance of other pieces have to be taken into account.
Nothing ANY magazine prints should be taken to heart. They are merely there to provide you with information. Portraying only one opinion is very narrow minded, and is something that no magazine should do (although there are plenty out there that do this, specifically platform specific mags).
"The mainstream isn't the hardcore's enemy, it's its saviour, and the faster it grows the safer the things we cherish about gaming become."
Hmm. That sounded like one of those good ol' ending generalistic testscreen soundbites to me. You know... Like the ones EDGE poke fun at elsewhere in the mag. To put it simply, we don't know if the mainstream is the hardcore's enemy or if its saviour. None of us have a crystal ball where we can predict the future and see how it turns out. This line of thought, from my point of view, is another example of EDGE opening a can of worms. Will they explore this prediction later in the future to see if the mainstream has saved and helped transform the dedicated community? Or will it be another one of those sentences/paragraphs opening up another unexplored line of thought in a few months time? In my view, we simply don't know enough right now to say whether further mainstream implementation of this medium will be its creative saviour or not.
Again, I feel that certain worm cans are opened which are never looked into with any significant degree.
Oh, and as for taking things to heart... I don't think all that many do with EDGE anymore. Certainly over the past few months, the GamesTM threads have been choc-a-bloc full of different debates and topics of discussion which have made those threads the magazine focus of these forums. I think people here, myself included, were using EDGE as a current example of the present trend to bash those who don't altogether embrace the mainstream.
But why should we feel morally compelled to for the sake of the medium? People shouldn't feel in the wrong if they don't particularly want to head in a direction others are bashing them for not going.
It's all about choice.
And sure, EDGE has displayed a variety of that. But as the most respected Western publication on videogaming, I feel they a responsibility in a sense to portray things in a more accurate, specific and consistent fashion than they have been doing over the past few months. When people look back in a few years to get a retrospective view of the medium's history, it's very likely that EDGE will be a focal resource of determining what was worthy of coverage during that period. At least in the UK.
Misrepresenting certain gaming demographics by tarnishing them with the same brush will provide a simplistic and incorrect potrayal of the dedicated gaming population at large today.
Those are my feelings.
Comment