It’s Exhausting Trying To Read Video Game Website Headlines

Every morning I wake up, grab my phone and scroll through all the video game news that went down while I was asleep. And increasingly, as I scan headline after headline, I have absolutely no idea what it is I'm actually looking at.

Like what am I, someone who knows enough about video games to be reading news sites about video games, supposed to do with this?

Most headlines featured in this post ran on a video game website in the last week

Reader, can you unpack this puzzle? Calling it 9/10 means nothing, it could have been rated that by anyone. Saying it's from the "XCOM devs" helps narrow things down; that's Firaxis, who are also stewards of the Civilization series, which are strategy games. Only it's not Civilization. This story is, in fact, about Marvel's Midnight Suns, one of 2022's biggest PC releases.

Please know I only went through the hassle of deciphering this because I'm writing here about these kind of headlines. Any other time I'll just move right past them, sighing. And these days I do a lot of sighing, because it feels like we're seeing more and more headlines like this from more and more outlets.

It would be easy to just call this clickbait, but I think there's an important distinction here. I'd define clickbait as an older, more nefarious tactic that, instead of piquing someone's interest--something headlines have always done, it's their job--would be out to con the reader. Clickbait asks a question the story doesn’t answer, sensationally misleads or even outright lies to the reader. IS THIS THE LAST GTA GAME?, YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT TODD HOWARD SAID, etc.

Annoying headlines like the ones featured throughout this post are, I think, part of a more nuanced tactic. They’re opaque: Headlines that talk around something instead of talking about it. That point to a space occupied by a game, platform or company instead of simply naming the thing itself. Headlines that are driving us mad when all we're trying to do is read some news. They don't lie or mislead so much as fail to present enough information to be able to do anything like that in the first place.

The goal is to hype the post without actually saying what it's about, so that you're compelled to click the link not to find out more, but just to find out what it's about in the first place. Similar to clickbait, I guess, but a more refined, contemporary implementation of it, given most people have evolved a natural revulsion to the old Daily Mail-style tabloid shock. 

What is this game and when is it coming out? Who knows!

I've got some more to say on this, but before we go any further, I want to stress some things:

I don't want to pick on the sites responsible for the quotes headlines throughout this post, because these are just a few examples I plucked from countless. I had to get examples from somewhere, though.

I don't want to specifically pick on video games websites either, because if you read any kind of news website in 2023--whether tech, cars, music, politics, whatever--you'll run into headlines just like these. I'm only talking about video game headlines in particular because that's why we're all here!

Not every website does this, and few websites that employ the tactic use it all the time. It's clearly becoming more prevalent though!

I definitely don't want to pick on individual writers or editors, because I know loads of them and nobody wants to be doing this shit.

Which I know because...I have written tons of these headlines myself. I'm as guilty as anyone else.

Basically, I didn't write this post just to shit on people. The world has enough terrible Twitter accounts devoted to that as it is. I wrote it because, as someone responsible for so many of these headlines, I figured I could also explain how this all works. And, while I was at it, try to make this a bit of a mea culpa as well. Dear readers, I'm sorry, forgive me for my sins, etc etc. Please also forgive the joke of hiding the actual point of this post inside a post complaining about posts hiding the actual point of the post.

Everything I'm going to say here is based solely on my own experiences in the field, and how they evolved over time, but I'm 98% sure you could describe the same process across most sites, swapping out the subject matter, and it would check out.

The "popular game" is Roblox, which is played by over 200 million people every month

These murky headlines started popping up when the overall goal of many websites was to simply attract new (or "unique") visitors, partly through emerging social media platforms, partly just by getting visitors to a site to click on a story they might otherwise not have clicked on. The basic premise, at least for me at Kotaku, was that sometimes you'd be writing about something cool--maybe a genre you're into, maybe a new game from some beloved developers--but if you used the actual name of the thing, nobody would know what it was. And by extension, wouldn't click.

So you'd write around it. "This New Metroidvania Game Looks Great", or "Indie Street Fighter Competitor Announced". You weren't explicitly naming the thing, but hopefully you'd be appealing to people who would be into the thing if they'd actually heard of it. Which is what you were trying to do by writing the story in the first place. It didn't hurt that you'd be generating more clicks in the process.

As time went on, though, and the foundations of the online economy began to slowly wash away, the screws turned ever tighter. Through the last decade people stopped going to websites, preferring to stay on social media and scan various news feeds. Headlines were no longer part of a site's structure, they were things designed to exist apart. And so they started getting vaguer. Muddier. Increasingly desperate to grab your attention.

These headlines stopped being about promoting something and became about hiding something instead. The more you could blur the lines, the more you would hope to lure fresh people (and through them fresh advertiser dollars) in. You wouldn't write "TeamCre8 Made A Sci-Fi Game Inside Fortnite", because that might not interest people who didn't know who TeamCre8 were. Instead you'd write "Some People Made An Entire Sci-Fi Game Inside Of Fortnite" (which, understandably, would often make "Some People" pretty angry that you weren't naming them!).

A divisive graphics settings! As IGN more helpfully report, it was just chromatic aberration

I usually did not like writing these headlines, but then, nobody was making me, either. Nobody from management ever ordered me, no editor ever directed me to. It was just something I did, compelled by an unseen hand, while tons of peers I'd never met or spoken to were all doing the same thing, because we all felt the same pressures tugging at our livelihoods. "Sure, we could get 10,000 views if we use this game's name, but if we talked around it maybe we'll get 20,000?" 

You can see then how this isn't any one person's fault, then or now. It's something broader, a systemic failure of the entire online media industry, faltering as it is forced to compete with itself on terms that reduce everything it produces to its flattest possible form.

I have sympathy for some of these headlines. But I don't want to excuse them too much, because the whole point of this post is that it still fucking sucks. And it's getting worse, all the time. Every day I wake up in the morning, get on the internet and feel increasingly like Batman trapped in an elaborate puzzle room by the Riddler. Like to actually understand what it is I'm being fed across various platforms I'm going to need to decipher some ancient runes then rotate some giant stone statues until they're all pointing at the sun, unlocking a dark room that contains a chest, and inside the chest is the actual point of the story I'm looking at.

Just tell us the thing! Not every single post has to be a huge viral hit on Google's news feed, or someone's Twitter timeline. While I understand each outlet's desire--or more like need at this stage--to do this, not enough consideration is given to the reader, their attention span and, not to get too dramatic, their dignity. Turning even the most innocuous story on your website into an impenetrable puzzle box might help juice a few extra pageviews in the short term, but it is also exhausting, and readers deserve better. 

When's it set? What's it called? This asshole isn't telling you any of that!