5 Reasons Cracked.com Is About To Kill Your Family
by John Walker on Dec.11, 2013, under Rants
No one loves making things up more than lazy people, and therefore something something people think Cracked is staffed by murderers and Nazi robots. Well, I’m here to tell you, based on things I’m writing at the moment, that those people might be more right than anyone realises.
I’ve written for a website, as a writer, poster, editor, deleter, scheduler and writer. My work hasn’t won a Games Media Award, but I’ve been around the block, and I can’t help but notice that these days you can’t browse forums about Cracked.com without pretending you’re reading about how they all time-travelled from the Crusades, the blood of Muslims still on their tunics, to write propaganda for North Korea.
So are we heading for an explosion? Short answer, yes. Long answer? Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesssssssssssssssssss.
#5. They Kill Pandas For The Noise It Makes
Not to stereotype here, but we can safely assume that everyone at Cracked.com just adores the sound it makes when a bullet or blade slices through the flesh of a panda. It’s not the sport, the challenge, just purely the aural pleasure it brings them as they steal the life from those beautiful creatures. The younger the better, too, with Cracked staff often found crouched outside of zoos where reports of a panda birth have reached them.
#4. The Management Have Gone Insane, And That’s Making Editing Impossible
Let’s say you’re putting on a child’s birthday party, for some reason. Maybe you have a child you love. Well, you can probably be sure that the management staff of Cracked will turn up, chainsaws circling above their heads, as they scream something about how the Dark Lord Morbidor instructs that all innocent life must perish. And to fund this, the budgets at Cracked are out of control. One article on Cracked might have cost upward of EIGHTY TWENTY HUNDRED THOUSAND MILLION DOLLARS. And these costs are stifling all other articles on the site, and indeed on the whole of the internet, as all hastily written bitter rants have to compete with these figures. Even those on a blog written by some guy in his spare room, for some reason. And then there are those guys writing on their blog in their spare room, who can do it for cheap, and how is Cracked.com supposed to compete with them? By spending a millionty more money of course! This all makes sense, and someone’s got to fuel those chainsaws.
#3. Cracked Articles Are Written By Chinese Slave Children In Manacles
Although I’ve never written a Cracked article, nor ever been to their office, I can speak with some authority when it comes to the way their articles are written. Generally a Cracked editor gets driven to the offices, for free, in a platinum-coated Mercedes, where he’s carried aloft the shoulders of Filipino boys, and taken to a room built of gold and caviare. Here he is given wads of banknotes and golden jewellery, while maiden nymphs fan him with rose-scented palm fronds. As he is fed with truffles and cake, an unseen army of enslaved Chinese children are forced to type up pithy lists of search-result-catching topics. Should they not be sardonic enough, the children are beaten to death. Of course, you’ll see people writing positively about Cracked articles – that’s no surprise when every dollar bill in America contains Masonic iconography, depicting the faked moon landings in Dallas, 1963. Why else do you think 9/11 happened to happen on a Tuesday?
#2. You’re Always Buying Flan
Every human being alive has seen an Outbrain link to a Cracked article promising the funniest subject imaginable, only to have the article contain two decent ideas awkwardly dragged out to six or seven parts. You may ask yourself why they’re allowed to get away with that – isn’t it false advertising? Or fraud? Well, SEVENTY FOOT TALL KILLER CYBORGS FROM SPACE.
In the world of writing for Cracked, octopuses control the oceans, bending the watery reality to their will, forcing all other lifeforms to ladder breakdown particle hyphen topography. They’re killing us. They’re all killing us. They’re controlling our minds, making us do what they say. Can’t you see? Can’t you see that everything is a lie, and we’re their puppets? They own us, they make the decisions that decide our daily lives. Everything they write is a trick, and they’re unravelling the internet!
#1. Cracked Writers Are Monsters And They Eat Newborn Babies
All things are the same everywhere, and because one place is bad, everywhere in the whole of everything is bad. I once ate an apple, and it was all mushy and unpleasant, and so all apples are mushy and unpleasant and the whole of the apple industry is doomed. Cracked have published one dreadful, poorly researched and madly fictional article, and therefore all their articles are terrible and their website is doomed and so is humanity. But look, here’s my Kickstarter!
December 11th, 2013 on 21:26
I love you. Please kiss me.
December 11th, 2013 on 22:07
This is Dave from the cracked article, and I want to respond to this.
First off, I actually do hold RPS in high esteem because you cover things that need to be covered.
That being said, I wrote this article for Cracked months ago. My draft was 7 reasons, and fairly even-handed. To address the “poorly researched and madly fictional article,” it was extremely well researched, and I had links citing every statement and in addition I had it vetted with friends and colleagues I had acquired through the years working in games.
It’s true I’m a “nobody,” but most people working in games are nobodies. For every Creative Director with his name in bold on the box (or website, whatever), there are hundreds of guys just doing their best to make their piece of the game good. And make enough money to pay rent, support a family, etc.
Because cracked is a HUMOR SITE, my article was edited to be funny, and accessible. And then it was edited again. Because it wasn’t funny and accessible. Because I’m not a comedy writer.
As for plugging my kickstarter, yes of course. I spent several weeks putting together a well-researched article, taking opinions from around the industry. It went through like 12 drafts over several weeks before I even handed it into Cracked. For which I was paid $100. So of course I’m going to promote my project. That’s the point.
As I said, I am a nobody — just a guy who makes games. I don’t have 125k youtube followers (some of which, by the way, do get directly paid by publishers to review games. that is a fact.). I don’t have tens of thousands of twitter followers. I’m not a celebrity, so my humble indie project isn’t get going to get front-page anywhere except for indie sites (and RPS, which you guys are really awesome for doing).
But Cracked did a pretty reasonable job of taking a researched factual article (that was only funny to game developers) and making it palatable to the mass market, without dumbing it down too badly.
Oddly enough, their job at Cracked is to generate traffic (which can be converted into dollars any number of ways). Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s also how gaming press sites keep the lights on. And I think the nature of press/publisher dynamic (which is expressed in a number of ways) absolutely does gamers a disservice. My observation is simply that it causes a lot of the issues seen at the consumer level — and it’s those same issues which I see journalists such as Jim Sterling rail against. Which is why I pointed him out as an exception.
December 11th, 2013 on 22:34
I can not take this statement seriously as it is written on one only page.
December 11th, 2013 on 23:23
999,856,78 views
December 12th, 2013 on 04:09
6 reasons why the world and everything in it is hopeless
8 things you hold dear that will betray you
20 bullshit things you hear people say that everyone says all the time
Feel happy? 48 reasons why happiness is your brain lying to you
12 reasons to just fucking kill yourself
December 12th, 2013 on 05:47
Worked as an intern for Cracked. Can confirm numbers 5, 3 and 1.
December 12th, 2013 on 07:14
To be a true Cracked parody article you’d need links to three more list articles at the end of this one :)
December 12th, 2013 on 13:47
Hi John
Are you planning to respond to Dave? Huge fan of both this blog and RPS but this response comes across as kind of petulant. Dave seems to have offered a well-intentioned riposte; I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
December 14th, 2013 on 09:46
Dave – this piece was purely in response to the absolute nonsense you wrote for #3. As other journalists suggested, if Cracked wants to publish complete fiction about games journalism, it seems fair to publish complete fiction about Cracked.
Your piece was a list of poorly disguised bitter attacks, and acted as if all games companies are identical. It was scaremongering and unrepresentative. So I wrote this. That seems fair.
December 17th, 2013 on 21:53
Seems to me that every headline listed in that original article could also be aimed at the movie industry right now, which is a) a much older industry b) bigger each and every year. And probably not headed for a crash. It probably wouldn’t be much of a stretch to publishing.
Regarding point 3 specifically, it also sounds a lot like the situation described in Bad Pharma, of medical journals only showing medical advertisements (and reps, and sponsored seminars with paid-for travel, etc. etc.). Is medicine heading for a crash?