(although that new intro’s shit, innit; hoh!)

I would say journalist are not parasitic but commensalistic. (How do you spell that?)

I would experiment to test this theory, but I fear “Sinister Tosser” would not go down well with the hypothetical ladies.

How do people get these things so badly wrong?”

Well, when your whole worldview depends on you denying reality, you get pretty good at coming up with rationalisations for stupid shit.

KG

That’s pretty much everyone in the world, surely? Parasitic surely means that they directly harm or detract from that which they depend on to survive. I wouldn’t call critics parasites even if they did nothing but slag games off – demanding higher standards is arguably a good thing for games at large, even if it means the death of some bad ones.

Also, what Perilisk said.

In other words, all critics and satirists are in some way parasitic. In our little corner of the world, if we didn’t have games to mock or analyse, we’d be sitting here and twiddling our thumbs.

KG”

Coming from someone with a biology degree, that seems like a terrible analogy. Critics (and even satirists) help customers evaluate where they can spend their money wisely, and build a culture of trust that would probably not be possible in a direct relationship between seller and customer, particularly with the way some in the industry treat their customers right now.

Every customer who avoids getting burned buying a terrible game due to an honest, well-written review is a customer who is more likely to spend money on (good) games without hesitation, as opposed to holding back for the next Blizzard release, abandoning the industry altogether, or latching on to the dubious practice of “trying before you buy” which I suspect allows the “customer” remarkably higher purchase standards than might exist with merely perfect foreknowledge of quality.

While reviewers are terrible for the individual games that don’t deserve a try, I think they’re a net financial benefit to the industry as a whole. Mutualistic symbiotes, in other words. So, you know, don’t be so hard on yourself.

(I found the video pretty funny. I don’t read Ctrl-Alt-Delete, so didn’t recognise the pretty specific digs – I thought the ‘miscarriage’ reference was just an imagined, truly horrible plotline that webcomics could never descend to. When I discovered that actually, such a ‘comic’ actually existed, and was every bit as crass and unfunny as I imagined it? Blimey.)