That said I don't think I've seen many literary or movie reviewers play the pity game (despite some of the same undercurrent of "bunch of incompetent assholes living large on press events and viewings" existing) and being so transparently insecure of their validity to the masses/readership at large. I'm not sure why. I'd like to believe it's because they're all ascended teens/fanboys in a way, but really the same can be said for some famous movie critics. Maybe just the lack of that veneer of academia and high culture...? Or because book reviewers didn't have Twitter and just whined and got roasted in their more exclusive milieu ?
They want to be "part of the conversation" and this is tied into the need to justify games as "art" and thus worthy of the "conversation" boosting their own status as thinkers. The constant need to step outside their niche and talk about everything and have "deep thoughts" is all part of this revealed preference. They don't even actually like games as games and play as little as they can unless it's "important", games are the platform to elevate themselves and their own thinking with. Patrick's
God of War article lays all of this out perfectly, he admits that he still doesn't know what he actually thinks about
BioShock Infinite because he was too distracted by the need for it to MATTER and be IMPORTANT and HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY that his ultimate thoughts are about what he thinks the story says to him personally on reflection of critical blowback and literally nothing else. Giant Bomb's effectiveness is that they cast off this pretense and that's why Patrick and Austin had to leave, they don't want to deal with the games too much other than when games are "relevant" to their own upper class millenial niche of society.
Their larger problem is that they have nothing to say, not even about the subject they're supposedly discussing, let alone beyond that. That's why all gaming journalism is entirely replaceable except for those people, and this is why they hate YouTubers/streamers, who establish themselves as personalities. There's ultimately more people who are going to say "I want to know if [streamer I like] thinks this new game is fun" than people who say "I want to know how Patrick Klepek's insecurities about being a father are triggered by the random moment voiceovers in
God of War and nothing else about the game."
It's absolutely the same in other forms of criticism, but they've been around long enough to have that separation, to have the establishment of the different forms. You can have Gene Shalit, Roger Ebert, the local newspaper guys review of the newest movies, and more academic forms of criticism like On Cinema At The Cinema. Gaming simply isn't old enough yet. The people "maturing" were the immature people five/ten years ago (see: Patrick) and they're hitting a crisis of irrelevancy because their main audience is
also maturing out of a 24/7 fandom wankery. They can't move on because they don't have anything else. The kids on YouTube or whatever can be more flexible in chasing whatever is the "new form" and also have the advantage of resources, and the time to evolve, to outpace the old hands. If they don't find a niche, either Game Informer or Giant Bomb, or somebody like Schrierer who has found the "development history" angle to write
actual books from, they're literally just producing content to produce content. Look at Patrick's contributions to Waypoint, they're the same as everywhere else he's been (except Giant Bomb arguably) except they're desperately trying to sound more progressive, more relevant, more meaningful, more important. (While still turning around and going HEY LOOK AT THIS FUCKING NEW TRAILER YALL, SHOOTBANGS!!)
There's not a problem with any of this, and there's at least some audience (although as you note, game journalists are uniquely contemptuous of their audience because their audience ultimately doesn't treat them as seriously as they want to be treated) but it will always come off as hilariously phony and desperate until they actually figure out the
why of the motions they insist on going through. Where the millenial
game journalist is somewhat even funnier is their refusal to see what others have done before and insist on reinventing the wheel always. Better, more experienced hands have already done "serious" games criticism, have already done "games coverage for the aging gamer" and "games coverage for gaming parents" and everything else. Where they have no interest in any of this, or really anything regarding gaming, is that it's not really what they want, they want to be like every other writer throughout history and enter into some kind of high class lifestyle of intellectual salons with games as their unique contribution to the "conversation" but their problem is that whole world has been democratized a hundred times over, and then the internet came along and blew the barriers away and democratized it utterly and permanently. The millenial struggle in regards to this is that we lived in the world before this happened and became mainstream. We
remember a world where not only was print gaming journalism financially viable, that even someone like Dave Halverston could self-fund multiple iterations of the same magazine for years on end, but we "remember" a world where Scary fucking Larry could run ads for his $2 per minute 1-900 number in
GamePro and people actually called it.
