Note: TotalBiscuit had a couple of key points in tweets, I appended to the end.
One of the questions that I’ve seen over and over is simple: “Why doesn’t Gamasutra apologize?” I admit, I probably would have buckled by now, and apologized. But they’ve resisted. Why? The answer is simple.
Journalistic integrity.
As an example, I realize that many people are critical of Leigh Alexander’s ‘Gamers are Over’ article (and the imitators that followed). I have, in numerous places including on Radio Nero, described the article as mindbogglingly stupid – I actually think she was getting at a good point, but failed in execution. I do think she’s got a caustic personality. But man, does she have some awesome motherfucking journalistic integrity. Why?
Because journalists believe that you do NOT edit, retract or apologize for your editorial opinions based on financial concerns.
Think about the New York Times. It’s a very liberal paper, and serves a very liberal audience in NYC. It has some pretty conservative columnists on their editorial board, who get worldwide exposure because of how important the paper is, and I’m sure that most of the population of NYC hates what they have to say. And I’m sure that the liberal colleagues that fill those newsrooms hate those columns too. I’m sure there’s a LOT of tension at times, and that the Christmas party gets a little tense once the eggnog starts flowing. I’m also sure that every one of those liberal newswriters would defend to the death the right of that conservative columnist to print his opinion piece and stand by it, even if the readership rioted and the advertisers pulled out.
Because of motherfucking journalistic integrity. That’s what it means.
Sure, you retract news stories if you get the facts wrong. But retracting opinion pieces because the opinions are unpopular – it’s not in their DNA. You live with the opinions you stated, and every now and then you get your nose rubbed in them if you got it wrong. You don’t go back and pretend you never thought it. It’s hard – I have some stuff I regret here on this blog.
Which brings us to two interesting news stories. The first is one I believe to be one of the finest display of pure-cut hypocrisy to yet be entertained by this catastrofuck. It’s called #OperationVoxPopuli. The argument is that Vox (the parent company that owns Verge) should be boycotted partially because Verge dared to be critical of Intel’s decision to abandon advertising for Gamasutra. Yes, apparently, to the guys running this, journalistic integrity means no Vox site should criticize Intel because Intel gives them money.
That is actually the exact opposite of journalistic integrity.
As a way of example, let’s replace ‘Vox’ with ‘Gamespot’ or ‘IGN’ and ‘Intel’ with “Warner Brothers Shadow of Mordor” or ‘Activision’s Destiny’. I think we can all agree that IGN should feel FREE to criticize – even be ENCOURAGED – to criticize Destiny, and that the suspicion that AAA publishers can in fact buy better reviews with a larger than average advertising spend is EXACTLY what #GamerGate critics like myself and Leigh Alexander actually WISHES the cause would orient towards. Because it’s, like, actual corruption.
Which is to say, Vox criticizing Intel while cashing their checks is textbook journalistic integrity.
Rumor has it that this move has been so ill-received that it’s caused a serious rift in the ranks, and that the founder of the idea is claiming that he just put it out there as false flag to see how the opposition reacts. Because it’s apparently a lot easier to believe this tinfoil hat crap than to believe that you somehow stumbled on the heartfelt belief that Gamespot should be giving Destiny perfect review scores because they pay the rent. Integrity!
So let’s go to a place where Integrity is actually being tested: the Depths of Mordor. I mentioned previously that youtube commentators are the most important emerging voice in games journalism and this time, two video personalities broke the story. TotalBiscuit (who is considered recently pro-gg) reportedly broke the story, but I found the story via Jimquisition, who actually read the demands out loud (he is considered anti-gg). Jim gave TotalBiscuit the nod for telling him where to look. Here’s what Jim said was in the agreement.
There was a concerted effort to not give out the code unless you could abide by terms that would control your content in a number of overbearing ways…
[The contract says] Maximize awareness of the Shadows of Mordor video game during the “Week of Vengeance”… Persuade users to purchase the game…. requirements include one life stream and one YouTube video and one Facebook and Tweet in support of the video….
Videos will have a strong verbal call to action, a clickable link in the description box for the viewer to go to the game’s website to learn more about the game, to learn how to register and play te game. Twitch stream videos will have five calls to action. Videos will be of sufficient length to feature gameplay and build excitement. Videos will promote positive sentiment about the game. Videos must not show bugs or glitches which may exist…. Do NOT mention Lord of the Rings or Hobbit movies, characters or books….
Videos must discuss the nemesis system. This really should take up the bulk of the focus, such as how different the orcs are, how vivid their personalities and dialog are… video must include discussion of the action and combat that takes place within the game, such as brute force finishers, execution moves and wraith powers. The company has final approval on the YouTube video… at least 48 hours before any video goes live. You have to make changes based on the company’s direction.
(Errors in transcription are all mine. Recommend you watch the movie to see all I trimmed out.) Update: PS4 reviewer @Duckols says there were no such constraints on the console version.
Now, obviously this is designed to make all these YouTube personalities exist less as actual journalistic entities and more like bought-and-paid for wings of Warner Brothers marketing department – and maybe that’s true, though I do have to give props to Jim and TB for standing tall. But there’s another layer to this – WHY does the company do all this? Surely they must know that reviewers could just wait a few days.
Because of day one press.
The press and reviews that you get in the first few days of release is HUGELY important to publishers and developers. It sets the tone and trajectory for all of the other reviews. And game sites and youtube channels desperately want to be among the first to review a game, because they know that those reviews will get way more eyeballs than if they are the 20th, the 50th or the 100th to show or review the game. These two interest collide in a way that results into something that is at least QUESTIONABLE.
This is a pretty significant story, and, if accurate, one that directly ties into games corruption – a real hot topic right now! Even better, it’s a corruption story that zings the up and coming Youtubers that are stealing from the classic media! Surely the one of the big boys would cover it. Nope. Google reports no mention on Gamespot. IGN. Kotaku. Polygon. Though, hey, Polygon did have that awesome kissing vs. killing article, and by awesome, I mean “You’re trying TOO FUCKING HARD. Also, there are only so many buttons on the controller.” So yeah, let me say it: TotalBiscuit, Jimquisition, GamesReviews.com and GamerHeadlines are about the only sites out there who thought this was worth your time. Give these guys some credit for some journalistic integrity.
What surprised TotalBiscuit was how little his gaming audience seemed to care about it. It surprises me too, given that everyone and their dog wants to assure me that #gamergate is about Journalistic Integrity, not slut shaming or feminist bashing. Instead,24 hours after Jimquisition released the video, the pro-gamergate reddit ‘kotaku in action’ has it buried down on page 3.
“Reading a few forums (yeah I know my mistake) about this whole Shadow of Mordor brand deal thing boggles my mind. There are literally people saying “I don’t know what he’s complaining about, if he wants it early he has to give something in return”. – TotalBiscuit
Look, if I were a #gamergater and cared about actual journalistic integrity in games as much as they purport to, I’d at least demand some answers. I’d be aiming the angry mob at demanding confirmation of these requirements. I’d be trying to find out what OTHER games this particular marketing company shilled for and looking at those. I’d be taking a hard look at early YouTube videos and seeing who made videos that matched these requirements, and try to figure out which YouTube video personalities are basically purely on the take. I’d be pushing personalities to establish disclosure rules for financial rewards and editorial content restrictions such as this.
If there was some sort of central organization driving for journalistic integrity, this would actually be quite possible and possibly quite fruitful. But it’s not. So at most, we’ll see a couple of days of anger about this, while everyone will focus on the REAL outrages: whether or not the press is corrupt because someone who is neither the press NOR a dev compared #gamergate to ISIS and whether or not Anita Sarkeesian is lying when she said she played games when she was 5.
Update: TotalBiscuit added this feedback in twitter, challenging my narrative.
@ZenOfDesign @JimSterling @leighalexander @voxdotcom oh btw that quote about the forums I said, that’s from NeoGAF 😉
— TotalBiscuit (@Totalbiscuit) October 8, 2014
@ZenOfDesign @JimSterling @leighalexander @voxdotcom I actually had a ton of my supporters up in arms over it, unsurprisingly.
— TotalBiscuit (@Totalbiscuit) October 8, 2014
@ZenOfDesign @JimSterling @leighalexander @voxdotcom also there have been clear disclosure rules since 2010, mandated by the FTC
— TotalBiscuit (@Totalbiscuit) October 8, 2014
You’re trying way to hard man. TB was directly talking about neogaf, not KiA, since that forum was criticizing him for over blowing the issue and trying to hurt a game they like.
I mean I get you try to knock GG every chance you get, but even you admit the major websites didn’t talk about this. GG did, maybe not enough to your liking but much more than zero coverage the traditional press gave us.
I’m pretty sure my article makes it clear that EVERYONE except for TB and Jimquisition dropped the ball on this one. And I can tell you, Twitter, the Escapist, 4/8Chan and KiA are where most discussion on GG happens, and it’s gotten all the coverage of a wet fart.
Would you think the lack of major coverage might be in part due to gamergate itself?
In the regard that any criticism of youtubers (such as previous articles regarding corruption) have been seen as proof by certain people in gamergate that traditional media is “out to get” youtube personalities that support them. Such as Boogie or TB.
I’d also argue that, because it was only in terms of the PC version, many major sites were simply not aware of it. Most of their review copies are console titles, and plenty of them do minimal PC coverage at best. I’d also argue that few writers follow TB (or any youtubers unless they are a specific fan) due to his somewhat controversial nature – so may not have picked up on his comments.
Just a few thoughts.
I really can’t find a reason that makes sense. As I mentioned in my article, it would seem that Polygon and Kotaku would have a LOT to gain from covering this story. Not only do they earn some anti-corruption cred at a time when its important, shining the light on some of the ethical problems of the streamers only helps them, from a business standpoint.
TB announced this about a week ago (I believe). There certainly was enough noise there for a real journalist to notice it and dig deeper. And… the first one that did was outside the games industry, Erik Kain of Forbes.
Called it.
Kotaku covered the potential corruption/shadiness of the Shadow of Mordor thing and what happened?
A bunch of gamergate folks started in on their comments (and responding to them on twitter) saying it was just a smear piece against Totalbiscuit et al.
It’s like gamergate has become totally predictable at this point. They are, in fact, making it harder for mainstream sites to now report on any corruption that isn’t directly to do with themselves as GG people just shout “deflection” or stick up for youtube folks that have supported them.
If you notice, there’s a comment in the article that says they waited for two days to hear back from sources. This happens fairly frequently. Something breaks or is alleged, and it may take 24-72 hours to get a statement back about it.
This is always a source of tension. Do you run with the initial rumor or do you take time and source the statement? It’s entirely possible that it took Kotaku a week to conduct their own research, interview the various people mentioned, reach out to the PR firms with a crafted list of questions or statements, and then realize they weren’t going to get anything back.
The thing about corruption and integrity is though that it doesn’t need to be exlusively about big or small things, as there’s enough place to look at both and we actually should look for both.
But you’re right in that a lot the tag is only really about kicking people on the other site of the fence, which is a damn shame.
Integrity is one thing. But there’s another thing. And that’s not wising up on being called out on having posted something quite stupid in a critical moment. And i’d call that being boneheaded.
Ms. Alexander shouldn’t be fired because of her piece imho. She shouldn’t even need to offer an appology. But i’m demanding that at least accept that they might have done something stupid and deal with the accusation about them and not bury their heads in the sand, like they do.
But there’s a point to make that the whole series of posts, as mindboggling as they were, are also one of the signs that these sites are lacking in quality, which is one of the major points Gamergates was trying to tackle.
Because one of the goals of journalism is and should be offering readers enough informations to come to a well informed oppinion. And you can only help them coming to such an oppinion, when you try to offer more then one angle.
Imho that’s basically why well accomplished magazines have often people from both sites of a fence writting something for them.
For example the Time was to my knowledge giving Hoff Sommers a place to report, but also some feminists which oppinions greatly deviate from Hoff Sommers.
And offering more than one angle makes it a lot less likely for consumers actually screaming for the head of the paper – eeven though the might still froth from their mouth and call for the head of certain writers.
But that’s not what these sites are trying to do. They’re currently circling and trying to take potshots on the indians who in retun circle their wagons and take shots at them.
And i don’t know if i came across that way, but i’m really annoyed by these journalists not being willing to engage in discussion and a bit more openly discuss where there might be problems. As i said before, opening up to discussion would have most likely ended the whole thing a long time before.
And that’s why i’m giving you, the Escapist and so many others really kudos for engaging in discussion.
And i also have to give kudos to you and John Henderson (and some tohers) as you both allowed me to lighten a bit more up about Anita Sarkeesians work and realizing a bit better that i was judging her unjustly.
Hi!
I’d love to hear your take on the differences of gaming press out there and how that affects the types of ties the journalists can and need to have.
As in, there are journalists writing reviews on upcoming games, intended to be read by consumers, who make purchase decisions on games based on these writeups. I can see how full disclosure is needed here. Second, there are people writing about the games industry, including how games are made, what the trends are, what’s happening at the studios etc, where the primary audience is people working in the games industry. The latter type of articles requires deep connections in the industry and not disclosing sources is actually required in some cases (when protecting the sources is needed).
I’ve seen very few comments make the distinction and it occurs to me that most of the action during GG has been directed at the latter type of press, where the requirements for disclosure are very different from game review media.
I do feel that this is one of GamerGates biggest problems. There is too little nuance and the criticism they lever against Leig Alexander can not be used universally. There isnt much doubt that gaming press coverage in many instances can be done better, its more not agreeing with the methods and reasons used by GamerGate. I am sorry, but targeting specifically one website for an opinion piece is not how you get taken serious by the public.
The use of the term ‘nuance’ is good. At the end of the day, the failure of Leigh’s article was a failure of nuance. She was TRYING to say ‘hey, some serious shit is going down and all the bad gamers are totally feeding this shitty stereotype and making all of us look bad.’ She failed to say that, but more to the point, she tried to use nuance at a time when the conflict of #gamergate blew up and the only points possible became what could fit in a tweet, and the context was lost. At that point, selected lines taken out of context were easy to weaponize.
The problem really is that naunces don’t work well, if you want to make an emotional and strong point, something she most likely wanted to make. Especially when one herself is already emotionally very invested, something she seem to have been.
Part of the problem, Demon Investor, is that everyone’s emotions were really high at the time, including hers. I’m really not making it up when I say that the entire game dev side of things was actually FREAKED OUT by what was going on with Anita, Zoe, Smedley, the Swatters, etc.
I can imagine that.
A lot of errors were made on the GG site because of freaking out about those mass bans/deletions on reddit. And i think that’s not really a comparable scare to Smedly and personal threats towards friends.
I think there are a lot more qualified people then me trying to differntiate and work out what ties journalists should or shouldn’t have.
What i can point to is that i don’t believe you have to be friends with people you report on – which is much less of a problem when you solely report on games.
(Emotional) Intimacy is something problematic as it will change your view. While being polite, checking facts, being fair (for example by first contacting Crytek to give them some heads up and allow them to adress something before you publish it) and keeping promises is something completly necessary.
Now regarding different audiences, i don’t think you can divide gaming sites that easily. Maybe i’m a strange guy, but i’ve read GDC talks from valve, scientific abstracts about MMO monetization or blizzards ‘treasure hunting’ and also some gamasutra articles. And other than technical aspects, which i don’t know much about (even though the basics are often simple enough to get), i don’t think it’s something just developers are interested in.
So i don’t think one could point out a single gaming journalist site which has more developers as readers than pure consumers.
“So i don’t think one could point out a single gaming journalist site which has more developers as readers than pure consumers.”
Fair point! But I guess you get the gist of what I was aiming at – the type of journalism and the topics that are being written about are different, and the types of relationships needed to author these stories vary.
Getting a dev to talk to you for an hour in GDC is HARD. It’s a busy conference and the interesting people have incredibly busy schedules. So the journos have almost no other chance than be buddies to some degree with the people they’re writing about, or they don’t get the story in the first place. A lot of what Gamasutra does is this type of reporting, and at least the people in the industry know that the writers are all more or less insiders.
OTOH getting a pre-release of a game to report on should be a process that doesn’t require a deep relationship and especially shouldn’t require kickbacks for “good” reviews. While reviews can’t and shouldn’t be objective (they’re opinion pieces after all), they can be free from what people perceive as corruption, and this seems to not be happening in a lot of the cases. I’m finding the revelations on supposedly indie YouTube reviewers especially interesting.
I get what you mean and i’m realizing i’ve missed a bit what you meant and was oversimplifying in my last post or even thinking.
So please let me try again a bit.
There’s a line to tread between by journalists between gaining some valued informations by being friends and offering mostly unbiased (or better said non false) informations towards readers.
Just as an example, if you publish an oppinion piece on how great Segas way of conducting business actually is, you’d better not only doing so, because you’re big friends with so many great Sega guys. Otherwise the sole information (with a disclaimer!) is that a Sega fan thinks Sega is great.
Which wouldn’t be corruption or anythiing, but really not of much value.
Other than that you’re right in that the subject of what you report on have also impacts on what connection you should have towards a person or said thing.
The Shadow of Mordor contract is really interesting and somewhat alarming. What i also thought was alarming, even though i’m not sure if the story was legitimate, was how seemingly some page didn’t want to report on customer/forum accounts of EA having been hacked.
Actually, Gamasutra is mostly content written by devs and for devs. I wrote for Game Developer magazine (the precursor for Gamasutra) for years, focusing almost exclusively on broad design issues. While I was doing that, I was also working on SWTOR. (I rarely discussed SWTOR or Bioware games, and each column had a disclaimer pointing out this relationship).
Gamasutra’s big drivers are things like postmortems and the like all written by devs. Games news and commentary written by non-devs isn’t really as important to their core vision.
They have TONS of controversial op-eds, but they are usually controversial in the terms of saying shit like ‘you should pick up your customers and shake them for loose change!’ And people are always yelling at each other on the site, because game devs can’t agree on anything.
Well there’s a bit of a ‘which hat do you wear?’-issue here. If you label yourself directly as developer or business insider and disclaim that the following piece is only your opinion then it’s still something a bit different from calling yourself journalist and doing the same.
But i really think it’s harder to define what good journalism is or better said writting a handbook on how to be a good journalist, then pointing out how someone has failed to be good for at least a moment.
[Sorry beforehand for the following more or less off-topic thing]
I don’t read gamasutra all to regulary, last piece (or better said transcription) i remember going into that direction was one of the guys from Blue Byte(/Ubisoft) writing about LoLs monetization per player compared to World of Tanks monetization per player.
Which again isn’t all too controversial if you realize he wanted to make a point about how one might not reach such a huge user base and therefore needs to get more money per player to be scuessful.
But to me it also seemed the transcript wasn’t all ot great as it seemingly wasn’t getting all point across all to well.
And again i’m loving being able to read such things now and then.
“The thing about corruption and integrity is though that it doesn’t need to be exlusively about big or small things, as there’s enough place to look at both and we actually should look for both.”
Very true! But if there’s insufficient time, resources, and/or inclination to look at both, as appears to be the case, the big things have to be considered the higher priority. Yet here we are.
Something i compeltly agree upon.
It shouldn’t become a deflection though. And that’s happening because a lot of deflection comes form the fact that people see different things as being wrong.
I see the core issues as inherently deflecting.
The number of people saying ‘we’re not going to worry about Shadows over Mordor because we haven’t killed Leigh Alexander’s career yet’ is… astounding. Really. Alexander’s career is an op-ed written more than a month ago. In practical terms, it has almost no actual consumer impact. It’s just a grand misprioritization.
It is in some ways. I don’t think that Leigh Alexander is of such importance as a lot of people make her out to be.
But in the same moment people who wrote articles (like Leigh Alexanders), must realize that they only can be part of a discussion with people who feel slandered by them, if they adress that feeling beforehand. And while i know Gamergate would have to apologize for a lot of things, it simply can’t as a whole movement, because it’s unlikely that every individual would apologize and single individuals saddly can’t apologize for such a movement.
The number of people not caring about the Shadow of Mordor story really seems to be depressing. And i personally don’t get how one can say that this wouldn’t be something to discuss.
“And offering more than one angle makes it a lot less likely for consumers actually screaming for the head of the paper – eeven though the might still froth from their mouth and call for the head of certain writers.”
Didn’t Gamasutra actually offer another editorial counterpart later in the same day? I might be thinking of another site.
“And i don’t know if i came across that way, but i’m really annoyed by these journalists not being willing to engage in discussion and a bit more openly discuss where there might be problems”
But they have. You just don’t see it, largely because your ‘side’ tends to go into a frothing rage at the sight of Leigh Alexander. But here: A list of ethical concerns in video games:
http://leighalexander.net/list-of-ethical-concerns-in-video-games-partial/
I’m not aware of any other Gamasutra article.
““And i don’t know if i came across that way, but i’m really annoyed by these journalists not being willing to engage in discussion and a bit more openly discuss where there might be problems”
But they have. You just don’t see it, largely because your ‘side’ tends to go into a frothing rage at the sight of Leigh Alexander. But here: A list of ethical concerns in video games:”
For me her list is mentioning too many topics not gaming and consumer specific enough for me to really wanting to discuss that with gaming journalists. I’m personally neither fond of discussing labour markets, nor intellectual property laws with your average gamers and game journalists, i’ve seen enough german tech journalists and gaming journalists not getting the differences of those rights, to know that it’s only irritating.
Also i don’t think engaging in discussion means ignoring peoples wish to discuss ones article.
Honestly, as someone who identifies with GamerGate, that actually *IS* what I wanted to see. I hearby tip my hat to Ms. Alexander. I will have to read thru it later.
Mind you, just from skimming I can say that I don’t agree with all her points, But she is responding with something about the ethics issue, as opposed to condemning all of pro-GG as misogynists, which is about 90% of what anti-GG folks have done.
I think this highlights why many cant support or agree with GamerGate. Its a pro-corporation attitude we cant afford to have when important issues like Net neutrality are fronted by big companies. We need more coverage like TB and Jim Sterlig does to really fight the problems with our hobby.
Another point is as a mob they cant nuance the criticism enough to get real change. It can only come out as problems with “ethics” and “corruption”. Thats way too general. The tools they use are way too blunt and cause collateral damage to the weakest in the industry.
RE: The TotalBiscuit quote.
As he informed you via twitter:
” TotalBiscuit @Totalbiscuit · 41 mins 41 minutes ago
@ZenOfDesign @JimSterling @leighalexander @voxdotcom oh btw that quote about the forums I said, that’s from NeoGAF ;)”
Now, NeoGAF is I believe anti-GG, its forums populated by those holding anti-gg sentiments and attitudes. It would appear this at best apathetic acceptance, at worst active support for publisher driven manipulation, is an attitude rooted in the anti-gg sentiment.
Certainly Gamergate argues for transparency/disclosure/factual reporting and is thankful for the integrity shown by TB and JS.
I’ve added TB’s twitters to the end of this article.
I’d just like to point out that the whole Mordor deal to me seemed to be aimed at Youtubers and that the responsible PR-agency operated on “Well they are only lets-play’s”-assumption we’ve come to expect from AAA companys.
If they actually sent the same agreement to “propper” old-media reviewers it wasn’t wildly reported and i think people would’ve been much more outraged at that.
Except for TB most large gaming channels are let’s play and i think that colored how people saw the “Scandal”. With the whole brand-deal and disclosure bruhaha over the last few months atleast enthusiasts who follow these things just have come to expect this behaviour from PR agencys – not much outrage to be had over something you’ve been outraged about before 😉
That’s not to say we should let them get away with these things but trad.media should’ve made much more of a ruccus about this if the same agreement was sent to them. People have very different standards on Re-views then on content made for entertainmen.
Yeah, I keep coming back to the fact that when I have tried to bring up the corporate influence that could lead to the big gaming sites doing unethical things in the name of their bottom line, the GGers don’t seem particularly … interested. It makes it extremely hard to see them as reasonable or focused on anything that isn’t taking shots at women for daring to do things within the industry that don’t fit GGers’ preferences or opinions.
My impression as well. There’s this weird “corporations are good, people are evil” disposition – here’s a quote from a GG:
“All Intel wanted to do was to organize pro-women projects, and social justice warriors called them sexist”.
The reason we aren’t particularily interested isn’t because we aren’t actually interested, but because we need to fight on only one front at a time. If the journalists actually had basic ethical standards and performed their jobs AS journalists, rather than as an arm of various companies’ PR departments as hype machines, then these things would be sussed out and decried as they properly should be. If the main games media (who didn’t even bother covering this when TB first came out with it, just more media silence by and large) did their jobs, we’d never even have this sorta shitty thing happening.
As for you, Damion: No. That’s NOT journalistic integrity, that’s closer to EDITORIAL integrity than anything else… and even that is a far cry. http://pmintegrity.org/pm_docs/codeofintegrityWDedit1_000.pdf brush up on the meanings of the terms, please.
Also, fuck Roguestar and his Operation Vox Populi shit. If you’d been paying attention there’s a lot of us who are heavily against it.
I acknowledged the complaints against the Vox Populi shit, although most of the complaints I’ve seen have been because of some sort of conflict of interest between RogueStar and Gamasutra. Which I actually think is bogus, but I have not really had the time or inclination to dig deeper on this angle.
He had a blog with them that they apparently shadowbanned him for (and it only appears in archive) which is what he wants to get revenge for. I want nothing of that, and many others don’t either.
I would say that that is good instincts on your part, as a distant observer of it.
” If the journalists actually had basic ethical standards and performed their jobs AS journalists, rather than as an arm of various companies’ PR departments as hype machines, ”
Which seems to be exactly what GG wants them to be. “Oh noes they gave this game I was so hyped for a bad score BURN THEM ALL!”
As Damion points out in this very article, the fact that they write critical pieces about games that purchase advertising on their site is a *good thing*.
I’d love to see actual critique of games, rather than massive hype cycles for games that they then reverse their stances on within the year about. Same with actually reviewing the games with an eye for objectivity (and don’t start with that crap some people do, to the tune of “we can never be truly objective so might as well not try!”, please.) instead of going “this offends my feelings so I’m going to give it a lower score” or whatever non-rational reasoning they have is.
Well there two parts to your argument.
The first part is that you most likely wished they’d use a different set of criterias to judge a game upon. Which means you don’t want them to integrate “social justice compatibility” (used for a lack of a better word) as a criterium.
The second part is that they should use the same criteria for every game or maybe just every similar type of game.
The second is something i’d call being objective. The first would be the focus of an review.
Having said that, it’s quite hard finding a set of criteria that can be applied to every game you come across or which really captures nicely why one might find Terraria to be vastly superior to Starbound.
That is a valid criticism.
Part of the problem of course is that pro-GG *does* include some true honest-to-god misogynist s***lord types. The way GG is organized there is no way to really exclude those folks, at best other pro-GG people who are there for the primary issue can do their best to call the bad apples out.
The other half of the problem is that the ‘spark’, and the primary complaint that started GG was how feminist/gender-politics topics were being addressed, including criticism of the above misogynists.
Chiefly being journalists were a) casting too wide a net, identifying too many folks as the bad apples and b) shutting down discussion/criticism that didn’t match the authors viewpoint.
So coming in, that was a focus issue. The fact that the response from the anti-GG side has mostly been along the lines of mass forum bannings & accusing GG as a whole of being just a series of ‘misogynist attacks’ kinda cemented it.
I do agree on the general issue of journalistic integrity being about the freedom to stand by opinions, even if they’re controversial. But at the same time, it seems far from clear that insulting your audience or customer base in order to make your point in a more inflammatory manner is a demonstration of such integrity. I think it’s akin to clickbait – technically not a breach of ethical standards but a really scummy thing to do anyway.
I don’t think that Leigh Alexander should apologise for expressing the general view that maybe gamer has become too vague a term due to the increasing diversity among people who play videogames. That seems rather sensible, especially when applied to target demographics. Saying that you’re targeting gamers with your game is as pointless as saying you’re targeting readers with a book.
But I do think that she should apologise for the way in which she presented her idea. It was insulting and inflammatory.
I’m also not convinced that the dichotomy between pro- and anti-GamerGate is as clear as you seem to imply, particularly given the wide variety of people involved in it. Calling out George Reese for his bullshit tweet does not make TotalBiscuit pro-GG. It makes him anti-bullshit. And speaking out against the idea of a true grand conspiracy does not make Jim Sterling anti-GG. It makes him anti-consipiracy-theory. These are positions that both pro- AND anti-GG people, as well as relative neutrals, should all support.
I just wish we could blanket condemn the bullshit on all sides of this debate and get on with discussing the actual issues. Everybody should be against harassment and in favour of journalistic integrity.
Journalists should be making efforts to disclose potential conflicts of interest, back up opinions with facts, and not deliberately spin things in a way that inaccurately represents whatever they’re reporting on.
Critics of journalists should accept that they are free to have opinions and to write about them, and accept that it’s ok if they criticise something you like. The whole point of a free press is to let them
And everybody on both sides should just stop insulting and harassing each other. Attacking GamerGate as anti-feminist can only result in radicalising the moderates within the movement. And harassing people who calmly criticise GamerGate can only result in those people writing off your movement as a bunch of arseholes. Being calm in your criticism, and ensuring that it is backed up by facts and sound reasoning, is the best way to achieve whatever your goals might be.
TotalBiscuit immediately linked an ‘I support #GamerGate’ gif right after complaining about George Reese. Previously, he’d been more wishy-washy neutral about it.
It’s really hard because there are people on far edges of this debate doing their best to keep the Perpetual Outrage Machine going.
I think you miss understand something an opinion is fine. Slander and character assassination whether it be on a single person or an entire group is not.
It’s one thing to think harassment is bad and express that it’s another thing to call an entire demagogic a bunch of a bunch of misogynistic basement dwelling neck beards.
You don’t meet harassment with harassment This kinda libelis behavior would normally get someone fired I have no idea why you idiots still have jobs.
If she called a person by name these things she’d be legally committing libel . Yet calling thousands of people these things is perfectly ok ?
slander pieces are something you retract and apologize for and usually fire the person who wrote them.
She can have what ever opinion she wants we don’t care that’s no our problem.
First of all, the New York Times would never have to apologise for calling their core audience “hyper-wailing shit slingers” or whatever the line was, because they’d never be stupid enough to do that. Second, why should Leigh and co have to retract their articles in order to apologise?
Third, the kind of apology I’d want wouldn’t so much be for the opinions expressed in the ‘gamers are dead’ articles, but the subsequent collusion, censorship and refusal to engage with dissenters that served to ensure that those were the only opinions being broadcast on their platforms, and most of the media for that matter.
Gamasutra is primarily a site for devs and industry folk, so her article wasn’t aimed at gamers to begin with (from a readership standpoint). Not to mention the line you quote, which is the line everyone seems to quote, is just after she says that the gamer demographic has changed (so it now includes all ages, races, cultures, genders) – and the old guard of gamers, who still troll each other, swear at other gamers and act badly (which she does point out in the articale are a minority) are the ones who are now over.
This is why I struggle to take gamergate seriously. As most of them don’t even bother to fully read the articles they are meant to be angry about. Did she use fruity language to describe a small subset of gamers? Yes she did. But somehow that has morphed into the gamergate truism that she was attacking ALL gamers regardless, of race, religion or gender. Which is simply not the case.
As for collusion, what collusion? If sites want to stop angry forum/comment based rants then they are perfectly free to do so. Just as some sites (like the Escapist) can choose to leave their boards up. Lest we forget the very early days of gamergate, when most topics were closed down, purely revolved around false rumours pertaining to Zoe Quinn (which were disproved at the time) and had nothing to do with gaming. Hence why most sites clamped down.
The fact they have chosen to continue to ignore gamergate since then, even as the goals have allegedly changed, is probably due to the fact that they know how the internet works. Any site that keeps such discussion open is liable to face a ton of arguments (both for and against), swearing and issues. Most of the time its just not worth it, and I speak as someone that has actively moderated forums in the past and continues to do so.
Frankly I’d also argue against your logic that pro-GG people couldn’t share their opinions. As I’ve seen a ton of twitter posts, youtube videos, articles and so on that would suggest otherwise. The fact that GG people can’t go onto sites they claim to hate (and allege are corrupt) to tell them how corrupt they supposedly are (with no evidence) is hardly censorship.
Admittedly Gamasutra’s not the best example because it is written for (but not exclusively read by) the industry. But my point still stands for everyone else who picked up her little ball of hate and ran with it. Hers was just the most incendiary article.
And frankly I’m sick of tired of the implication that I can’t read because I was insulted by articles that had the agenda of turning the label ‘gamer’ into a derogatory word. If that wasn’t the intent, it was certainly the attempted result by the SJW anti-GG brigade.
Finally, not engaging with Gamergate IS what’s keeping the protest going.
This is the thing though, they weren’t turning gamer into a dirty word. They were merely saying that the minority group that word used to apply to (in terms of who games were specifically made/catered to) had changed. ANYONE can be a gamer now, from all walks of life, even if they don’t think of themselves as such.
I wouldn’t say you didn’t read it if you did, but clearly the vast majority of gamergate haven’t or they wouldn’t keep on making false claims about what many of the articles actually said. The worst thing I can say about them is that they had provocative headlines and adult language. After that any offence people have taken is either because they’ve misread the point or not read at all.
As for engaging with gamergate, what’s the point? I mean at this stage who would you even legitimately talk to? (I have a long post below this one about some journos already trying).
TLDR: There are so many voices in GG, that all want vastly different outcomes that it is just impossible for anyone to sit down and talk reasonably. I’d also argue that a number of journos have been smeared with zero evidence so what would they have to talk about? The fact that they are ethical anyway? The fact there is no evidence otherwise? If that happens then they’d just be called liars and there would be no progress.
Journos don’t engage because the evidence against them is non-existent. I mean it has been nearly 2 months of yelling from GG people about corruption but what have they actually found? A google group, some tenuous links where people know one another, a few crude remarks in peoples old social network history.
I don’t think it helps when some people in GG clearly have their own agenda either. Why engage with people that are trying to settle grudges with sites they feel have wronged them (like the Rogue example someone mentioned above)?
Gamergate will end like these things always do. People will grow bored, some fresh controversy will flare up elsewhere etc. I’m surprised it has lasted this long, but the reason it has done so is mainly down to a drip feed of sensationalist stories from pro-GG people or stupid remarks (like the dell one) from anti-GG people. Other than that the actual “campaign” to counter corruption has done precious little.
I’m confused why people keep repeating the mantra that people in the games industry and games journalism need to engage with gamergate. That they are circling the wagons etc. Mainly because I have seen plenty of people in games journalism (and external folks too) trying valiantly to speak to gamergate.
Scott Nichols, Jason Schreier, Greg Tito, Jenni Goodchild, Jenn Frank, Rami Ismail, Krystian Majewski etc etc
These people (and no doubt some others) have all, at various points of gamergate, tried to reach out and answer any questions people have had. Scott in particular opened up an ask.fm service right after the Gamejournopro list was published (as he was on it) and said people could ask him anything.
He responded for days answering every question, but eventually stopped as gamergate people just started insulting him, saying his answers were lies, saying he only cherry picked certain questions (the first day he started he was posting for 10+ hours straight). Same is true of the others. They try to be reasonable and then just get shouted down as a “shill” “concern troll” or have gamergate people tell everyone else “do not engage”.
In the face of that it’s impossible for most journalists to maintain their patience/professionalism long enough to have a rational conversation, as pretty much every discussion is disrupted by gamergate people crying foul or warning other people off. As a result the journalists just back away from the conversation over time, as they are just not getting anywhere. Even if they did want to debate – who would you talk to? Gamergate is hundreds of people all with different ideas, biases and opinions and some of them are quite clearly simply in this event to stir up trouble and settle old scores (and that goes for pro-GG devs and journos too). I’ve seen people state that they will not stop GG until certain sites are no longer in operation, or until certain people are fired, neither of which are a realistic goal.
In terms of larger sites reporting on gamergate I’d simply ask where is the benefit? Unless they fully side with gamergate then they are going to get nothing but abuse. I’ve seen plenty of fair minded pieces (such as the early forbes or slate articles) still called out as being full of lies, fallacies or whatever other buzzword GG folk have stumbled open. Those are articles that tried to show both sides, so what hope do sites have?
RPS did a very thoughtful piece explaining their position, that they already have ethics policies in place (and John Walker is one of the biggest anti-corruption advocates I’ve seen in journalism) and that they didn’t believe they had to do anything else. Yet they are still lambasted by GG, their advertisers targeted and criticised. And this for a website that has no proven ties to any corruption or ethical breaches. It boggles my mind.
It also mystifies me that such focus is on Leigh Alexander. You can demonise her article all you want, but frankly it had plenty of good points and the real problem is that 90% of gamergaters didn’t even read it – instead they just got outraged by it because they were told to be outraged (or saw the, admittedly, controversial headline). The fact that the authors of the other 10 pieces on the subject are not facing the same demands for apologies to this day is telling. Leigh sticks up for herself, you can take that either way, but she is entitled to her opinion and the only gamergate engagement she gets is random people butting into any conversation she has to call her racist and sexist (with no evidence). How is she supposed to react to that?
At present gamergate is purely getting by on the “controversy of the day” (such as the ludicrous comment from the dell guy) as there is still no real merit to most of their claims. It has been 6-7 weeks of talking about ethics and corruption, but what ethical/corrupt issues have they brought to light? Yet the Mordor one is paraded in front of them and most of the response is “not interested” or “we’ll deal with it after this journalistic corruption”. The fact that they are chasing the mythical beast of corruption that they can’t find or prove, and choose to ignore an actual example seems to highlight that they have their targets and that is it.
Their poster boy Nero has run out of articles to publish and merely subsists on tweeting back and forth with GG people, and pushing his radio show. The fact that his past and present racist, anti-feminist and transphobic opinions are swept under the rug by GG folks while the same traits amongst any anti-GG people are dragged up (often from years, or in one case ten years) ago to prove how awful they are speaks volumes. Therein lies the problem. GG is so changeable in terms of its opinions, so hypocritical in how it approaches everything and so blinded by hatred of certain people that it will never achieve anything truly helpful to the games industry. The actual “victories” they proclaim are little more than damaging sites that seek to help devs anyway, or people with thoughtful voices leaving the industry while they proclaim “the dominoes are falling”.
It’s a crying shame.
Hi Damion, do you think it’s ethical for Leigh Alexander to run ‘Agency’, a consultancy for games dev? It doesn’t appear at Companies House Register. So I don’t know how they pay their taxes. https://twitter.com/agencyforgames
Mike Bithell obviously liked the work they did for him on ‘Volume’ so he designed their PDF brochure. Or maybe he did it for the award ‘Thomas was Alone’ got at the Bafta game awards that Leigh was a jury member? (I highly doubt that is the case – what i’m asking is – is it a conflict of interest for Leigh to run this business and be on the Bafta jury?)
http://leighalexander.net/tale-of-tales-sunset-and-agency/
http://www.mikebithellgames.com/volume/
http://leighalexander.net/about/
Mike Bithell liked his interview promoting ‘Volume’ with Cara Ellison, in Rock Paper Shotgun, so much he now supports her on Patreon.
http://www.patreon.com/user?u=66811
Should a dev be paying a journalist? Is it ethical?
I’m sure ‘content creators’ like Cara and Matt Lees aren’t using Patreon to avoid taxes. Maybe you could ask them?
I would, but it would get called harassment probably.
Finally, i’d like to say i’m a massive fan of Bioware since I first played Buldur’s Gate way back and pretty much played all their titles since. Thanks for the thousands of hours of entertainment. Keep making great games and i’ll keep playing. Johnny.
forgot link to RPS article with Mike bithell and Cara Ellison
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/08/13/stealth-tactical-heisting-mike-bithells-volume/
“Mike Bithell liked his interview promoting ‘Volume’ with Cara Ellison, in Rock Paper Shotgun, so much that” 146 days later (that’s almost 5 months) he subscribed to her Patreon? Or maybe he just likes her writing and subscribes because he wants to read her articles? If she wrote a book and he bought it would that be a problem? If she wrote for a magazine he subscribed to would that be a problem? If she published a magazine and he subscribed to it would that be a problem?
“Is it ethical?”
Is asking a game dev to investigate something and then sucking up to him ethical? Is implying lots of wrongdoing without any explicit evidence ethical? Is only targeting people who have liberal views ethical?
Hi Richard, I don’t have the answers to your questions. I don’t work in the games industry but Damion does. He writes his thoughts here and leaves the comments open for discussion.
I had some questions relating to integrity and ethics, but Damion is free to delete or ignore my comments as this is his house and I respect that.
It was not my intention to antagonize you or anyone here and as it’s the first time I’ve posted on zen, I thought it would be nice to leave some positive feedback for Damion and the Bioware team. Politeness and manners and all that good stuff. Johhny
Hey, Johnny –I want to stress that I cannot speak for these cases in particular. However, there is definitely what I would call an abundance of tinfoil hats going around, and a lot of smoke and not a lot of fire.
As a general rule, awards juries should (a) have people who recuse themselves if there is a clear conflict of interest and (b) should have deep jury pools so that someone who sneaks through can’t damage it too much.
Also, as a general rule, it is not uncommon for journalists to have other gigs on the side in the games industry because, well, you can’t frigging support yourself on a job in games journalism. Many, MANY of the journalists are freelance, and margins are EXCEEDINGLY low. No, I don’t think there’s a problem with Leigh inherently having a side business that consults with game companies, either . There might be if she wrote news or reviews about something she worked on and didn’t disclose it. Keep in mind that the amount of work done in consultancy is often VERY little, like maybe writing a pamphlet or a strategy guide. You can’t do a shit ton of work and still have a journalist job.
Here’s something that’s a little — more cozy. It is now frequently common for AAA game companies to hire game reviewers to do ‘mock reviews’ – i.e. they hire these guys to write a review 6 months before the game comes out, so they can see how a real press guy might cover it. Then they can make adjustments. The mock review never sees the light of day, and part of the deal is that everyone agrees that that reviewer can not actually review the game once it goes line. A little hinky, but clean, and not a bad way for a game journalist to earn a couple of extra bucks between article gigs. Right?
Well, even that can be abused. Say that there is a journalist out there who HATES bungie and ALWAYS gives Halo games shit reviews. This is now a solveable problem! If you’re doing PR for Destiny, you just hire that guy to do a mock review 6 months beforehand, and toss that puppy straight into the trash can! Now, he’s legally bound to not tank your metacritic score!
(Note: used destiny for illustration purposes only. I have no idea if they’ve done it, but I have heard of it happening).
So yeah, journalists need side jobs. They really benefit from doing side jobs in the industry, both because it allows them to build contacts and keep the industry in their central headspace -in theory, they’ll write better games articles because they understand the industry more fully. But it’s not unreasonable for consumers to expect that connections between what they’re writing about and what they’ve worked on to be disclosed.
Just to speak to the “low rates” comment.
Online journalists often make less than a tenth of what print journalists used to on a per-word basis. Good journalists — really good ones, at very established outlets — can do better. But bloggers starting off or smaller pubs do even worse. If you aren’t established at a major publication, you’re almost certainly wearing a lot of hats or writing a lot of content.
Thanks for the reply Damion. What you said about mock reviews was a real eye-opener. Very clever but very shady. If that’s not known by the wider gaming population it should be because it sounds like a pretty rotten practice that in the end will only damage the reputation of the games company itself. Definitely a short sighted strategy.
I thought about what you’ve said and decided to disable Adblock for Gamasutra (The only GG blacklisted site I read).
I empathise with the journalists having to produce high volumes of work for little pay and as a layperson don’t know all the complexities and politics of the industry but I do think it’s long overdue for some of the top brass at these games websites to stick their head above the parapet and put all this to bed rather than leave their writers hung out to dry. Where’s the leadership and back bone?
If they have an open mind, a bit of honesty and humility, they couldn’t make things worse.
(I had presumed these sites had subeditors, but given what you said about the low pay I doubt they employ any.)
I should probably disclose at some point that I wrote at Gamasutra for many years as a design columnist, but I support their cause because I think they are an invaluable resource for game designers.
My understanding is that most of these sites have relatively small permanent staffs. Like, maybe low double digits. I could be completely wrong, but I’m pretty sure we’re now in the age of mostly outsourcing on demand
Here is the Kotaku story that talks about Metacritic, and it talks a bit about using mock reviews to keep the metacritic score high.
http://kotaku.com/metacritic-matters-how-review-scores-hurt-video-games-472462218
If you liked today’s article, you may also like this one I wrote a few weeks ago.
http://www.zenofdesign.com/this-is-the-worst-games-media-ever-except-for-all-the-ones-before/
Every online publication I’m aware of keeps a core of steady hires and a cadre of freelancers on board. It’s not always clear which is which — some employees may be regular, even daily contributors, yet still freelance.
From a management perspective this shouldn’t matter — freelance stories should still be edited and passed through the same standards process and held to the same criteria. But the pressure to publish as quickly as possible does tend to influence decision-making as does the need to drive page views.
I’ve looked at Metacritic and it appears to me to be a flawed design. It doesn’t accurately summarise the datasets it works with.
It uses a weighted mean to calculate the Metascore and requires a minimum of just 4 critic reviews. So if a game gets 90 from three critics and 10 from the other a game would have a Metascore of around 70.
Take Alien: Isolation for example –
http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/alien-isolation/critic-reviews
It has a Metascore of 80 based on 22 reviews.
The dataset consists of –
93 92 90 90 90 90 90 85 85 85 85 85 80 80 80 80 80 73 70 65 60 59
There are 5 review scores at 80.
12 review scores above 80.
And 5 below 80.
The mean average is 81.2 So however they’ve weighted it has turned the mean average into a Metascore of 80.
I think even a basic Median or Mode would provide a more meaningful statistical summary. In this case the median would be 85. It’s a multimodal dataset of 80, 85 and 90, which taken alone, would have a mean of 85.
The two lowest scores in the dataset (59 & 60) are from IGN and GameSpot. According Alexa.com these are by far the two biggest games review websites. (The third biggest is PC Gamer and gave the 93).
Both IGN and GameSpot are ranked much higher on Alexa than Metacritic*. If reviews on these sites directly influence game sales then Publishers and Dev would do better to aim for good reviews from primarily these sites.
It will be interesting to see how well Alien sells (especially in North America).
*Metacritic is featured on most games’ pages on steam
Maybe journalists and consumers need to discuss the current problem of monetization a bit more. Ad-Blockers are a problem, then again data mining is for quite a few people also some sort of problem (not even mentioning viruses).
Don’t know if you saw this, but Mike Bithell himself answered you here:
http://mikebithell.tumblr.com/post/99559721112/on-request-for-info-on-my-integrity
Thanks Osbo, I did not know. I’ve replied to him there.
Johnny,
In fact, publishers are known to set minimum Metacritic scores against bonuses for dev teams. So if the title doesn’t score, say, 90, you don’t get crunch time bonus pay. Game devs have spoken out about this before.
This indifference toward the WB stuff once again proves the point.
They are not interested in ethics, they are interested in hating.
It’s impossible to properly “hate” a AAA publisher. It’s not personalized enough. It won’t read your tweets. It won’t be hurt by them.
And that explains why their leaders/heroes are Milo and Adam: they have perfected the art of hating, of perpetuating the stream of outrage. Self confessed assholes, proud of their assholery
They don’t want integrity: they want Gamasutra, RPS, etc to suffer. Hence them targeting their advertisers (Intel, and now nVidia).
Hence the terrible, hateful tweets Milo sent Leigh earlier this week.
Hence the incessant trickle of outrage porno he feeds them (the video in which a father claims his son thinks he’s an awful person because he plays video games is particularly powerful in that matter; oh, and kudos for this guy’s parenting skills. Seriously, don’t watch it.)
Good for TB and the others reporting that.
Maybe the big sites are afraid that if they say something about Mordor, all their readers will be like “OMG I could be watching videos instead reading boring words?!!!”
Yeah, no.
In case you haven’t noticed we are busy with something else right now. What you are doing is called fallacy of relative privation.
You are not entitled to us doing exactly what you want, when you want it, to your specifications.
Sure. I can sure tell you when you’re being wrong and misguided, and it sure seems like a lot of people agree with me. If you want to relish being wrong, so be it.
So, here is the thing.
Pay attention to what people do, and not what they say they do.
#GamerGate says it isn’t about misogyny, it’s about being against corruption.
But when a case of blatant and very real corruption arises, a response of “no, sorry, busy because people might email one another and someone bought a game from a developer with their own money” tells me that #GamerGate isn’t about corruption at all.
I look at what you do, and this is *damning*.
There’s a thread on the story on Gamergate’s Reddit HQ that has 267 upvotes, how is that ignoring the story? Besides which, the corruption that Gamergate is focused on is the corruption that the media refuses to report about, that they had to uncover themselves. TB and Jim Sterling has done a good job of getting this example out there.
Tb uncovered PR companies doing shady shit, which we condemn, but it’s the PR company that’s to blame for the draconian contracts- which other YTers have come out about in the past and *surprise surprise* do their disclaimers and otherwise obey the laws and regulations, like Proton Jon or Pro Jared or TB himself when he’s done paid promotional content (Advertorial, I believe he termed it?). Sure, there’s a few bad eggs in the bunch, but guess what? If the games media had done their job, on the 29th when TB revealed it, or even sooner if they’d been in contact with him on this, it would have been made much more widely known. But it wasn’t, until yesterday, when Erik Kain did his piece on it… and we’d already been talking about it for the past week.
If I offer you a bribe, then I am culpable for offering the bribe. If you take it, you are culpable for taking it.
The fact that Publishers are paying PR companies to offer payola for good reviews does not somehow absolve those who take the money of any guilt.
The problem with this is that you’re conflating concerns about ethics in games journalism with collusion between games media and games developers. I don’t care much about that. It’s a reality of the industry. The Mordor thing was interesting, but it is not the focus of Gamergate–or at least not mine.
I’m concerned about games journalists colluding with eachother. I’m concerned about them attacking their audience and pushing narratives, denying people coverage who don’t fit into that narrative. Games news websites like Kotaku and Destructoid and Polygon SHOULD BE COMPETING, NOT COLLUDING, WITH EACHOTHER. They should serve as natural checks against bad behaviour of any one site. They are not. They are all acting in lockstep with the same biased articles and the same censorship of opposing viewpoints.
I’ll care about what game DEVELOPERS do when this shit gets fixed. Not before.
The YouTube streamers are acting as reviewers, that makes them just as much “game journalists” as a reviewer writing for a more traditional format (and the fact that a web site is now a “more traditional format” is fascinating).
Articles are a pretty different and differently-distributed medium.
Why? Why is a review in prose form held to a different standard than a review in video form?
Games journalists are, in fact, allowed to communicate with each other, and do so in the real world all the time. Fox News has this principle.
It would be different if that collusion were coming from the government, or game devs. It would also be different if there weren’t a million game sites who DIDN’T have people on GameJournoPros
As a journalist:
The fastest way to ensure no one gives a shit what you say is to walk into a room of your peers and say: “Ok, everybody, here’s how we’re going to cover THIS!”
Yeah, professional acquaintances talk. I guarantee you, not one journalist in the games business has the klout it would take to shove everybody else into doing things his way.
The collusion you claim does. not. exist. And the reason you don’t see many journalists paying attention to it is because everybody who actually works in journalism knows that writers for rival publications are frenemies at best. In very rare cases you may actually make a friend who writes for a different site than you do — and even then, you won’t find yourselves agreeing on everything.
Nobody likes being told what to think — but the people whose job it is to inform the public what THEY think really, really don’t like it.
When PR/marketing people do shady things to get their game coverage, they are doing their job. This is what they’re employed to do. If they’re doing it in shady ways, it’s only a bad thing if journalists and others allow them to succeed.
Games journalists and news sites are supposed to be advocating for us. They’re not. That’s why I care.
The press are supposed to express *their* opinions in opinion pieces. The fact that they don’t agree with *your* opinions does not mean they aren’t doing their job.
Reviews and editorials are *opinion* pieces.
For more traditional investigative reporting, they should investigate those stories they feel are worthwhile and report them honestly.
That’s their obligation. Not to tell you nice things about yourself, or to argue for your position on something.
I think if the entire ‘press’ shares an opinion, we have a problem. I think if the entire ‘press’ refrains from covering stories that paint people they’re connected to in a negative light, we have a problem.
The solution to that “problem” is to form another media outlet. Problem solved.
Hell, the grocery store me carries a newspaper that seems to exist because the publishers of it think the mainstream press doesn’t cover enough crazy conspiracy theories. So for all of my “secret international conspiracy to undermine America” needs, there it is.
Cool then. They don’t. Problem solved.
Instill shocked people are bringing up more or to attack GG. And letting professional websites off the hook. GG is a twitter tag. Even if I brought it up it would dissapear in the ether.on the other hand websites which crow about how they really are ethical and stand up for consumers don’t give a shit about the issue. The people who collect a paycheck have so little credibility that it’s left to random users and YT to blow the whistle.
The status quo GJ industry you guys love so much is shit, and shadow of Mordor just proves it again.
The issue, as I see it, is more that Gamergate the movement is ineffective at dealing with these issues. If consumers are not being protected the best thing to do, rather than have a hashtag, is to have a proper consumer advocacy group who can help with these issues.
The point with SoM is that it’s an illustration that gamers as a demographic have a *lot* of problems facing them from the industry, and Gamergate, while I can sympathise with elements of it, is currently an ineffective tool to deal with the problems it espouses right now, along with stuff like SoM
Imagine if a consumer advocacy group was calling out Kotaku et al. right now, I think, if it was properly done, it would have them scrambling to report on it.
The problem is GG isn’t a consumer advocacy group. It’s anger towards one element of the industry. The truth is it’s not GG job to watchdog publisher actions. That game journalists job. They are literally paid to do that shit.
The fact that they refuse to go after publishers is pretty shameful. Even now in light of this controversy the websites are spinning this story as it’s it is YTubers fault, and not the publishers.
It’s both.
The publishers for offering the money. The YouTubers for taking it.
“The truth is it’s not GG job to watchdog publisher actions. That game journalists job.”
Yes- but that’s really only true if that is the purpose of that particular media outlet. You have to realize that not every gaming news outlet does the same thing. Many sites are just reviews, so you won’t see them do that. Some sites contain editorials on top of the reviews, so you may or may not see it, if the person writing an editorial feels like talking about it or not (and even then, the editorial may not represent your opinion). If there is a site dedicated to this sort of thing, then it would probably definitely shine a light on it.
But in no way is a every gaming news site obligated to do that, in the same way that the YTs are not obligated to do that (whether the reporting is print, web, or video makes no difference).
Honestly, as a dev I really only read Gamasutra, and maybe look at other sites for humorous stuff (I stopped ready reviews in the late 80s when I caught on to how full of crap all of it was), but if there was a media site that had more in-depth reporting and dedicated some time to stuff like this and more serious news, I think that that would be a pretty serious win.
I feel some in GG want to go after the big guys but are help back by others with the constant excuses of “Going after people with money would take too long” or “We’re after journalists not youtubers” (ignoring that more people go to youtubers instead of journalists these days and there have been more cases of youtube corruption than journalists corruption) which I think is telling about GG.
Also far too often they seem to be caught up in rabid anti-feminism anf conspiracy theories than are silly. And despite what they #notyourshield doesn’t shield them from harm when some of the most vocal people (Sargon, KOP, Thunderfoot, Milo) are pushing things that are deeply disturbing to the outside and giving the whole thing a worse name, worse is the people defended clearly transphobic remarks by Milo and driving out a transwoman who called him on it. On a related note people allowing Adam Baldwin to work them into an angry mob to after innocent people not once but twice is just making things worse.
If GG wants to be taken seriously they need to go after the actual corruption (corporations doing things like what WB did) and stop letting anti-feminists, transphobic people, and conspiracy theorists speak for them or in some cases over them. I think the only way that would happen is if they did your idea of forming a structured organization.
I agree with some of this, GG has an issue where folks who had an existing agenda against feminism have attached themselves to the movement.
This would include Christina Hoff Sommers, Thuderf00t, MundaneMatt, and the InternetAristocrat.
… I don’t think it would include Milo, although his motives are suspect as well and he is getting entirely too much of a bullhorn.
On the other hand, while GG is not a criticism of Feminism, it is a criticism of a *very specific* group of people (the implicated journalists), all of whom happen to be feminists.
More to the point, the criticism of those *specific people* is in part of how they (unethically) express their feminism in regards to their profession. Even more to the point, the incident that ‘sparked’ GG, the ‘gamers-are-dead’ articles, was a prime example of the perceived problematic feminist bias.
In other words, the hot button issue coming in out of the gate was gender-politics related.
The vast majority of GG criticism has also been to label the movement as being solely motivated by misogyny, keeping the focus again on gender-politics, as GG-ers spend an inordinate time defending themselves from that accusation.
The problem I have with this argument is that most of the anti-feminist rhetoric is vastly overinflated compared to what journalists were writing. Yes, Leigh Alexander wrote something inflammatory, but most of Sarkeesian’s work is a measured look at how tropes and stereotypes are used to depict women in the same classic postures and ways. You don’t have to agree with everything she says or every example she uses to see the pattern, and the entire point of Tropes vs. Women is to *point* out the pattern.
This isn’t new. To pick one of the things she talks about, the death or loss of a wife or daughter is regularly used as motivation for a male character. Women are routinely butchered / stolen / raped / harmed to illustrate how bad a world is, how evil things are, how much trouble the heroes are in.
Now maybe you view that as intrinsically problematic because of the view it expresses about women. Maybe you view it as just lazy storytelling. But I can tell you that I see it about 30/70 (towards lazy storytelling) and I was tired of the trope *long* before Anita Sarkeesian came along and did a video about it.
I’ve been playing video games where the goal is to rescue a damsel in distress since Donkey Kong hit arcades and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with someone saying: “You know, this constant trope is both offensive in some of its uses *and* a really lazy way to engage players.”
A lot of the journalist critique on these topics wasn’t claiming that ALL GAMES ARE MISOGYNIST, but called for a look at how tropes are used and employed in gaming because the end result can actually be *better* games. As someone who has been playing PC titles since Ultima IV debuted in 1987, I’m a fan of that idea.
You missed my point, Which merely to say that there are fairly good explanations why GG has such a continuing focus on gender-politics, other than being ‘an attack on women’.
The most relevant objection to me being that the *opposition* is making it all about gender-politics. If you are being criticized from only one angle, a lot of your talking points are going to address that angle, regardless of it’s actual importance to you, unless you follow an active policy to not-engage, and disregard that angle. A policy of disregard will never happen with GG because of the nature of the movement: grassroots, no leaders, no set membership.
See, I agree with your assessment on misogyny in games COMPLETELY.
We need more games to go beyond these very tired, very negative tropes, we also need more *positive* treatment of women.
But that progress gets SHUT DOWN when no real discussion can happen on the issue.
Asking why, for example a female character with a great deal of agency, but a highly sexualized appearance isn’t acceptable for example, is not necessarily driven by obvious misogyny.
The person could be playing devil’s advocate; they could be trying to understand where exactly the boundaries are on depicting something as ‘sexy’; they could be a content creator who deliberately created such a character and intended it as progressive; their personal viewpoint could place a much higher degree of importance on agency than appearance.
And yes, they could also really be a misogynist trying to derail the discussion. But it is unreasonable, unfair, and (to me) unethical to assume bad faith out of the (gamer)gate.
And the unethical-ity of it is magnified when the person making that assumption is operating in a profession built around the concept of neutral, objective reporting.
On the subject of Anita Sarkeesian:
I see her as mostly irrelevant to GamerGate specifically, other than as an example of the opposition making the ‘its all misogyny’ claim. She was mostly part of the events that led UPTO GG, rather than a person of interest for GG itself; and she is not a journalist (I would classify her the same a TB: a critic) and definitely not subject to the criticism being leveled at folks like Ben Kuchera or Leigh Alexander.
But I wanted to touch what you said about her in your reply anyway, because you are right. She has absolutely been the target of misogyny, and her work is unfairly condemned.
The recent death threats to her were especially unjustified, my understanding of the situation was that she did nothing other than release the next Tropes video, and got inadvertently caught up in the fuss involving Zoe Quinn.
And I have actually started working my way thru the Tropes videos, so far they are one-sided, but they are reasonably well researched, and I haven’t seen the alleged cherry-picking of examples yet.
The production quality of the vids is obvious, and makes the kickstarter-scam rumors look absolutely ridiculous.
I am honestly ashamed that I bought into the hearsay as much as I did. I would *strongly* encourage other folks who have dismissed Sarkeesian to watch her videos and decide for yourselves, as I am doing.
Again, I see the anger focused on Leigh Alexander or Ben Kuchera as fundamentally out of all proportion to the statements or actions of either. I worked with Ben for several years when we were both at Ars Technica. We were not close — we covered different topics — but at no point did I see any behavior or proposals from him that would justify some of the utterly unethical things he’d been accused of doing.
I have no personal knowledge of Leigh Alexander, and I agreed that her stories were written to inflame — but the *degree* of the response has overwhelmed what anyone might consider reasonable and gotten hung up besides.
Journalists, including game journalists, have conversations with each other. It’s what they do. It’s part of being a journalist. It’s not evidence of malfeasance.
Are these articles relevant:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/07/16/a-storm-in-youtuber-heaven/
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/219671/Pay_for_Play_The_ethics_of_paying_for_YouTuber_coverage.php
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/220950/YouTubers_Yogscast_taking_revenue_share_to_promote_Space_Engineers.php
There only 5 tweets on the yogscast with the gamergate hashtag.
The entire premise of this piece is fundamentally flawed.
http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/an-article-on-shonda-rhimes-rightly-causes-a-furor/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
The New York Times ran into a situation very similar to this recently and they DID back down.
The New York Times published a piece that was poorly written and edited, and was interpreted by readers as insulting, inflammatory and peddling tired stereotypes.
The NYT didn’t stick their fingers in their ears. They didn’t claim that the readers were too stupid to understand the true meaning of the piece. Instead of blaming readers for missing the point they acted like adults and professional writers and blamed themselves for their poor communication.
“The readers and commentators are correct to protest this story. Intended to be in praise of Ms. Rhimes, it delivered that message in a condescending way that was – at best – astonishingly tone-deaf and out of touch.”
You could writer the same thing about the Gama piece almost verbatim.
When you fail to report about the troubled production of Bioshock Infinite because a friend of yours works at Irrational, is it still journalistic integrity?
Source: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/211139/Irrational_Games_journalism_and_airing_dirty_laundry.php
I think I read an article that asked just that. Oh yeah, it’s exactly the article you linked, where Leigh asked it herself.
Dear god, if a journalist wrote a story anytime a drunk developer at E3 told him that his game and/or studio was seriously fucked and never ship — there’d be no room for game reviews.
Standard Operating Procedure in the games industry is to generally NOT report significant stories until an event actually happens. For example, writing about it when the studio closed was legit. Kotaku writing about Brad Wardell when he countersued his former employee was legit. Something happened that elevated this story above rumor.
If you report every rumor you hear over drinks, you’re not going to have many people talking to you over drinks anymore. I wouldn’t have faulted her if she’d run it, but in most cases in this industry, that story wouldn’t have happened until there was a true cause.
Personally i don’t know what the fuck this is all about or how i should react to it. The “events” that has lead up to this point are all so mindblowingly stupid and illogical i just don’t know….. You have twentyeleven sides arguing their own case and opinions but not with each other. I mean, just who the hell is everyone arguing with here?! You have accusations, arguments and counter arguments that have fuck all to do with ANYTHING of relevance going around! What we have here isn’t a discussion, what we have is a shit ton of people screaming randomly at AIR!
But the most pathetic thing about this mess is that it started with a sad jealousy drama….
This has got to be THE worst overreaction in the history of the internet…
Seriously guys, what the hell are you doing?
‘Because of day one press.’
The root of all evil in reviews 😉
I find it hard to believe that Leigh Alexander has refused to retract her statements on the basis of Journalistic integrity. He does so because she believes every last word of what she said.
Probably true, but what she said isn’t what people is saying she said.
I think youre full of shit. Bioware Austin makes crappy games anyways.
Go shave yourself.
I read your interview on The Escapist and I have to say, I didn’t care for you very much. (I will discuss why in private, but not in public, that’d skew what I’m trying to say)
But…then I read this. Even though I disagree with a few points you made (and I don’t want this to become a treatise, so I’ll refrain from which, as it’s personal opinion), I think it’s a very well-reasoned, even-handed take, and that’s honestly what I’d like to see these days on the subject.
So…thank you. Thank you for being a little more even in the whole mess. And for taking a stand for journalistic integrity. I still find a lot of the debate to be two massive echo chambers with speakers pointed at each other, but you defined exactly what I wanted to say to an extent.
And, while we’re not eye-to-eye on this, I want to say I greatly respect what you said here.