I have an interesting relationship with the game industry. Though one of the world’s largest game publishers employs me as a quality-assurance tester and I contribute to an independent game project in my spare time, I do pretend to be a member of the games enthusiast press on occasion. On a technical level, you could say that I’m caught in the middle of both the game-critic and game-developer camps, possessing some stake in both.

And while you could consider my involvement in each group relatively minor, it’s still difficult to be a part of one without ignoring or compromising the other. Whenever I feel the need to be critical of a game, the developer in me gets defensive. On occasions where I feel proud of the project I’m working on, my internal critic berates me for not being more evenhanded with my praise. Finding a balance between the two has been a challenge these last several months, and every time I think I’ve reached a middle ground, I worry I may have to give up one aspect of my gaming career to be more true to the other.

To be fair, it’s not like I’m knee deep in the artistic or coding aspects of game design, and I don’t head up a respectable enthusiast magazine or website. I’m a bug finder who practices journalism from time to time. But even from my minor level of involvement, I can see the conflicts that naturally arise when you muddle press and development.

But what's the conflict if both groups are ultimately working toward the same goal of producing great games? It has a lot to do with the way all of us (player, journalist, and creator) pit the industry press and the development community against each other. In reality, it’s no different than the relation between the press and other industries, but problems arise when you consider that the livelihood of each party rests on the other. At times, it makes for an incredibly tense battlefield.

The gatekeepers

Whether you’re a blogger or a full-fledged game journalist, you have a tacit responsibility to be true to the people you’re writing for. This holds true even if your modus operandi is to have someone pay you to play games. And this, unfortunately, is a reality despite the difficulty of breaking through the crust of the field. When you’re writing for other people -- as you should be in this biz -- you should be trying your damndest to give them what they need.

If it’s a game review, you want to let them know if this product is worth their time, using whatever metric. (I don’t solely mean game scores here.) If you’re reporting news, you should try to find the most informative, entertaining, and enlightening nuggets of info for your readers. Even cheat guides and lists carry the burden of relevance and duty.

The press should ideally work alongside game developers, acting as gatekeepers and disseminators of information in the way they best see fit. But the nature of the industry acts against this relationship. That is the problem. In a world where Metacritic's aggregate scores carry far more clout than they rightfully should, several negative reviews can strike a deathblow against an entire development team's livelihood. Granted, other factors are in play -- a little, old thing called “sales numbers” comes to mind -- but it’s hard to ignore the role of the pen (or the cursor) in determining the fate of a new title. Word of mouth travels fastest when the people with the biggest voices shout the loudest.

It’s understandable, then, that some developers have an antagonistic relationship with the press. Friendships between developers and journalists are common, but in the end, a writer has to serve the reader. And developers have to make their projects monetarily viable. It’s a difficult situation, exacerbated if either party burns a bridge in the process.

When you consider how much time and passion developers put into what they perceive as a winning product, hurt feelings often seem like the only likely outcome.