He has a point though. The author chose lawyers as a comparison point. Why? Manual laborers work long hours. People with two or three part time retail jobs work long hours.

Lawyers have a different set of qualifications and requirements than game developers do.

I think that this is sort of missing part of the comparison in that it's meant to compare similar highly demanding jobs which require a specialized education. While labor is incredibly important and I respect the hard work, it's a different skillset entirely that doesn't have the same prequisetes. I would suggest the comparison is between professions with the same demanding hours and same demanding prequisetes, not just the hours. It's not to diminish other jobs with long hours, it's just they're not the focus of the comparison.

(To further elaborate, my very first job was picking flat stone at a quarry, since it was popular for home gardens at the time and machines couldn't get the stones easily without breaking them. Long hours of hard work in the dirt and mud plus many split knuckles and crushed fingers. Still, I was able to do it as a 15 year old unsupervised and with no training. It was useful and hard work, but not really the same as the IT I do now, the majority of which is watching progress bars.)

I think your point is a little hard to discern. Who do you think educationally game programmers are more similar to: Manual laborers or Lawyers? Other than the regulation of the latter, I think it is clear they are more similar to lawyers. Serious game programming requires fairly extensive knowledge in multiple disciplines of computing particular graphics and rendering, AI, at least some basic algorithmic knowledge and competency with programming that is much more technical than "make yet another web app in a hipster JS framework," to just be honest it. There are many people in the game development industry with MS degrees and even some PhDs. This I think is more similar professional "status" than brick laying, I think.

Wait really? I assume you're talking about gamer gate obliquely: I'm not a gamergater (to be honest, I still barely even know what it means) and I had a vague sense of Kotaku that more or less aligned with "gaming tabloid". That's just based on having read a couple pretty dumb things from them, and the fact that every other Gawker property is pretty much a tabloid.

Your experience with them may be negative, but the general social memes about Kotaku are one hundred and ten percent fostered by the regressive parts of the gaming community that don't like that they give people who have the temerity to not be white, cis, and straight a platform. (And 'ekianjo's body of work on Hacker News makes me disinclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.) I will go to bat for Schreier specifically, but there's a reason why they had Patrick Klepek and his Scoops around, too (until Vice came knocking, anyway).

They are legit. Maybe now Waypoint edges them out as they seem really dedicated to doing good investigative stuff (Klepek and others), I dunno, but it's pretty much those two and Eurogamer doing the heavy lifting in the "widely read" spaces.

In reality, one of the things that actually got Kotaku a bad reputation back in the day was the endless, gratuitous stream of scantily clad chicks on the front page, many not even vaguely gaming related. It turns out that doing that whilst lecturing your audience on how they're all evil misogynists who're objectifying women wins few friends, especially if you then try and smear the people who don't take your publication seriously because of it as evil bigots who just can't handle your social justice awesomeness.

(Also, since this obviously pissed off people on the feminist side of things too, something really weird happened: people started arguing that obviously the gamer complaints about Kotaku not being about gaming anymore were really just misogynists trying to undermine feminism, because if they really cared about it being gaming-focused there was far more unrelated cheesecake than feminism and social justice posts. Except the unrelated cheesecake posts were a huge part of what created that idea about Kotaku in the first place; they'd been had!)

Yea I mean, I don't know anything about what Gamergate thinks, and I don't have as low an opinion of Kotaku as you're saying that GG does. Ive just never had any exposure to as _high_ an opinion as you have of them and was curious about it. Not really a domain I know much about, to be honest.

I have a high opinion of some of the people who work for them more than I do the outlet itself. I don't read it on a daily basis. But when news breaks that actually holds up, it basically comes from Kotaku, Eurogamer, or (lately) Vice/Waypoint, while the sites started by or pushed by folks who get thirsty about those three--the Reaxxions, ha ha ha, of the world--are mostly just angry whineboxes.

> people who pay attention to the state of the games industry, Kotaku's reporting is as highly regarded as anyone in the field

Checking today's Kotaku headlines:

> That Time We Got To See Mario's Dick

https://kotaku.com/that-time-we-got-to-see-marios-dick-18198...

Yeah, my claim about it being a Tabloid is completely unsubstantiated, sorry.

Huh! It's like there's a difference between filler stories, which are part of the modern views-based economy for news sites, and reporting. Can't for the life of me figure out why you'd elide that.

(There's a reason why, in terms of general news, Buzzfeed, of all places, is well regarded for investigative reporting. And it's because other stuff pays the bills.)

Yeah, but this is a bit dramatic right? I mean, you can find many trivial stories on NYT or probably even more in the Washington Times; it doesn't mean these are garbage sources like the Inquirer.