On the 12th of May, gaming review website Polygon released a 30-minute gameplay video of DOOM. To call it horrible is an understatement.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yYp8ZeQ-I8]
The player’s performance is embarrassingly abysmal, quite literally on par with someone who has never played a first person shooter on a console before. It’s as though the concept of aiming, moving and shooting are alien to the player, as is reading environmental cues, processing enemy movements and attacks, and in-game navigation.
It’s not wrong to be bad at games. Every gamer has to start from somewhere. But this is Polygon, one of the world’s largest gaming websites. One would expect, and demand, a reasonable degree of skill from someone tapped to showcase the first 30 minutes of an eagerly-anticipated AAA title — itself the spiritual successor of a title that defined the game industry.
A gameplay preview is supposed to showcase the best of the game: the mechanics, the controls, the story, the enemies, the objectives. Viewers want to know what to expect if they buy the game. Instead, this video showcases the worst gameplay ever recorded on YouTube — it says more about the player and the company than the game itself. If a gaming ‘journalist’ cannot even play a game he is assigned to cover without making himself look like a noob, how did his content even pass the editor’s desk? If a gaming journalism site can’t assign a competent player to play one of the most eagerly-anticipated games of the year, what kind of gaming journalism site is it?
The icing on the cake, though, is what Polygon did after the video was posted.
Or rather, didn’t.
Polygon disabled comments on the video, and took away visibility of the like/dislike bar. On the main website, Polygon said nothing about the fiasco, never mind that parody videos, Tweets and critique posts are floating about the Internet. Instead of addressing the issue, it seems Polygon is intent on sweeping the disaster right under the carpet, never mind that the Internet is forever. In doing so, Polygon has doomed its credibility.
During the GamerGate saga, Polygon spread the usual social justice drivel about harassment, showing that they were against ethics in gaming journalism. Polygon banned users for disagreeing with a review and with Anita Sarkeesian. Polygon cried racism when reviewing The Witcher 3, a game set in a universe based on Slavic mythology, for not featuring non-white characters (because Azer Javed doesn’t count), and misogyny, when the most powerful beings in the game series are all women. Now Polygon can’t even hire staff that can play a game, and won’t make amends to the gamers it has disappointed over the years. Polygon has been fully converged by Social Justice Warriors, and now it can’t or won’t even uphold standards of competency.
Polygon is doomed. It just doesn’t know it yet.
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