Again, you are trying to suggest that it would not have been possible for MyGaming to foresee that some of the community members would be offended by this and I simply don't agree with that. If you order the possible offended parties by amount of members religion will be one of the largest groups.
Fist of Jesus
- Thread starter MetalSoup
- Start date
Again, you are trying to suggest that it would not have been possible for MyGaming to foresee that some of the community members would be offended by this and I simply don't agree with that. If you order the possible offended parties by amount of members religion will be one of the largest groups.
FarligOpptreden
New member
Is this discussion still going? I thought it would've died down by now...
Avatar
New member
Please don't guess at what I'm trying to "suggest" or "imply", I really am writing exactly what I mean.
I am sure that the MyG staff could have guessed that it could be a controversial and possibly offensive subject. What I was suggesting was that:
* Many different thing offend many different people.
* How offensive should something be before a warning gets appended?
* Who decides if something is offensive enough?
* Who will run the poll to get the list of subjects that will carry a warning label?
I find Tim Noakes very offensive, should the Huisgenoot carry a warning label when they run another story on him?
The suggestion that a warning should be given smells of a nanny-state, and is exactly contrary to Mister 44's message of tolerance, imho.
Graal
New member
The responsibility for not reading material that offends you lies with yourself. It is pathetic to expect a news publication to put warnings on anything that could possibly offend people. This isn't Kindergarten and MyGaming isn't your keeper. We're all adults and we can all look after ourselves.
I get what you are trying to say. But I disagree with you that every single item can be found offensive because they simply don't have enough people who feel the same way about that particular thing. There needs to be a critical mass before something can really be deemed offense-worthy.
Saint_Dee
The Phantom Poet
If there are still points worth discussing and there are people willing to discuss them then I see no reason a discussion/topic should die down...
That's all good and well in an ideal world where everyone gets offended by the same things, but that isn't remotely how things are. So where does the line get drawn once a publication decides to embark on cherry picking their potential stories or enacting "selective publishing"? Would they do it by the numbers? Is something less offensive if only 5 members find it offensive vs say 100 members who find another subject matter offensive. Wouldn't that 5 have the same right to be considered by said publication if the publication was willing to consider the 100? Which is where we get into the sticky territory (dangerous IMO) of readership/viewership (or whatever type of audience) hierarchy.
And that is a place no publication should ever put themselves because some groups are going are going to feel marginalized, and sure it might not happen the way I put it, but the fact that the potential exists is risk enough for any news publication to avoid a cherry picking process IMO.
qornea
Much write, very gaming
Are you suggesting that you had absolutely no idea that an article headlined "Fight zombies with Jesus and his powerful fists" would depict...Jesus fighting zombies with his fists?
I still feel that the popular construct for something to be offensive requires at least a certain amount of people to feel the same way towards said item, this requirement will prevent everything from being offensive. Maybe that's just my opinion though.
Fair enough. I find the game offensive in itself but I don't approve of the shameless click-baiting by MyGaming. It's a nothing-story about a nothing-game. Would we have missed anything if the story was never published? Except for these 25 pages of posts?
Graal
New member
What would we have missed had MyGaming not covered Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel? Or Shadow of Mordor? Or Watch_Dogs?
Since when is a gaming publication covering games considered click-baiting?
Or is it only the case when it's games you don't like?
qornea
Much write, very gaming
Same can be said about, say, penis gaming peripherals, or gamer porn facts.
As for nothing-games getting "coverage", we have some riveting rock simulations and...Sharknado: The Video Game?
As you can see, this kind of thing is nothing new.
I think the headlines for these articles were also pretty clear on the content they carried. Articles like the one covering Hatred were far more click-baity, and deserved a run-down of what to expect in the article itself.
Aside from the load of other stuff we carry, sometimes we cover stories that *we* think are funny, or will get people talking, as well.
I like to think that adults can read a headline and make a call for themselves on whether the content suits them and their world view or not.
I understand your position. But I don't agree with it (and I'm Christian, too, if that means anything in context). And that's fine. People can disagree - it's a wonderful, free world (for now).
Jan
Grand Poobah
You are quite within your rights to be offended by something. Just like an atheist who believes all religion deserves vicious mockery might be within his rights to be offended if we decided not to cover the Fist of Jesus story because of the controversy it might create.
While it is tempting for us to make a call on what is and what is not worthy of coverage, it isn't really for us to decide. Not anymore, anyway, thanks to the Internet. If we make the call, it immediately introduces bias and since there is plenty of analytics coming from our audiences nowadays there is no reason to make the call based on our personal preferences/beliefs/experiences any longer.
For now, we use a measure related to the success of the site (clicks/hits/reads and unique visitors/browsers) to help inform what we should and should not cover. The web has democratised the decision of what is and is not newsworthy, for better or worse.
Obviously the data isn't always concrete and we do make border-line calls, which we then learn from.
"Click-baiting" is one of those weasel terms I think needs a proper definition before arguing about it. In my mind having a deliberately misleading headline is click-baiting. In this case, the headline was not misleading in the slightest.
Obviously the headline is colourful to give an article the best chance of success, but its other purpose (in this case) is also to make it clear what the reader should expect when they click.
For some of the intelligent discussion that has come from this thread, courting controversy was absolutely worth it.
Saint_Dee
The Phantom Poet
I guess we'll have to leave it at disagreeing with each other. One thought I'll leave you with on the point that a certain amount of people denotes what should be offensive, you should consider that the demographics aren't even in terms of groups represented on the site and potentially any viewership. To that end here's a hypothetical scenario (I'll use a self-censoring Myg as the base of the scenario). 4 games are on the way; game A, much like Fist of Jesus, has content that could prove offensive to Christians (for lack of better ideas I'll say it's a similar archetype as Fist of Jesus), game B on the other hand could potentially a gay man, while game C could be offensive to a woman, and game D to a black man or woman.
In all four cases, the games could be offensive to some of the people in each group, while some might declare it isn't offensive. Based on just numbers (mind you, this is my layman's assumption which could be wrong, but it is the easiest assumption), there will be more numbers from one group and less numbers from other groups. Say 25 people speak out against game A and its news coverage, 6 decry the coverage of B, 7 for C, and 4 for D (add arbitrary numbers for those in each group who won't speak up). Now, what I can say is that there will be potential reach for each potential article on these games. Does the nanny state Myg publish either of these stories? Do they publish the ones likely to offend the least people? Do they decide this purely on numbers? What message does it send to the other groups?
Personally there is no good answer for the above scenario; way too many factors to consider, which is why a non-nanny state Myg would probably cover all the games. I can't imagine the crap storm that would come with using numbers as an indicator of whether subject matter is sufficiently offensive or not in order to not cover it...
Yeah, it has been an interesting discussion for the most part.
All of your subjects though are items that can easily be deemed offensive - ie they have reached the critical mass on MyGaming or in SA or world-wide. It is important to cater to your audience as well. Certain audiences might be more tolerant of certain things than other audiences.
If I were to say that Lara Croft's eyes offend me in the new tomb raider because they are far too piercing and appear to look directly into my dark and corrupted soul. I doubt that that particular "offense" will be able to gather enough support to be deemed offense-worthy by anybody. This is why I disagree with the statements that everything can then be deemed offensive and we should all just sit in the dark listening to nature in order to not offend one another.
I think I've said everything that I wanted to say
