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Editorial The Media Entertainment Games

The Integrity of Game Journalists 27

Posted by Zonk from the who-can-take-what? dept.
ScoobyScooby writes "An interesting story went live on Games.net yesterday in response to a 'letter from the editor' penned by Dan Hsu of EGM. In his letter he accuses a number of publications and publishers of being essentially buying coverage and vice versa. A Games.net editor responds with his own take on things and the resulting comments and discussion are worth investigating. Are veiled accusations about improprieties really helpful at bringing gaming journlism to a more respected level? Or, do such accusations hurt more than they help? The Blame Game: Where Do You Keep Your Integrity?" GameSetWatch has commentary.
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The Integrity of Game Journalists More

The Integrity of Game Journalists

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  • Back in the late '90s (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @04:27PM (#14258644)
    At a tiny game start-up where I worked in the late 90s, one of our beta testers let us in on this dirty little secret. The big game publishers "buy" reviews of their products by purchasing sufficient advertising. Of course it's never officially acknowledged, so as a start-up you can't just call up and ask how much advertising you need to buy to get a review. They'll just insist that's not how it works. So unless you're already on the inside, you can't get in. Not surprisingly, the game didn't get reviewed in any U.S. magazines.
    • I think it more happen like this.

      "Well, mr. Reviewer, you know I've got this bunch of ad from your magazine, giving you a great deal of money...., and you know I'm begining to be short on money with all the developpement of our next game... and I fear that if it doesn't work well I may loose a great deal of money, and I was thinking of removing those ad, you know, just to make sure I've got some money left....., but you know maybe we could do a deal."

      "go for it"

      "Well, if my next game would happen to h
    • Did you send testing copies to the various publications?

    • Re:Back in the late '90s (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Like Anonymous Coward #1 I've been there as well.

      It's not just magazines, the major 'professional game reviews' websites operate the same way these days. Call them up looking for ads and you get standard banner rates, or overpriced sponsorship packages. After you spend enough on several campaigns they'll start to offer such perks as guaranteed index placement for articles/news about your game, etcetera. This applies even more if you're representing multiple titles - like any major publisher does. Buy enough

  • Is this a suprise? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sehryan ( 412731 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @04:28PM (#14258653)
    Really, did anyone not know that this sort of thing was going on? I mean, just look at the coverage of the three new consoles, and you can easily tell which "news" site is being paid by which manufacturer.

  • What? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by vertinox ( 846076 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @04:35PM (#14258708)
    FTA:
    More importantly, when you begin questioning someone's journalistic integrity, does that make you any better than the person you're accusing? The answer: no.

    What? You mean, if we state that it appears that someone has a particular bias towards a certain product because we suspect they appear to be getting kick backs that we are no better than them?

    Even if we have proof?

    I would think that if had knowledge of such behavior that it would be in the best interest of everyone to know about this..
    • Oh, so I have no journalistic integrity? Well, duh, do I look like a journalist?

    • Re:What? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ShakaUVM ( 157947 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @05:22PM (#14259232) Homepage Journal
      >>What? You mean, if we state that it appears that someone has a particular bias
      >>towards a certain product because we suspect they appear to be getting kick
      >>backs that we are no better than them?

      Exactly. The ability to expose bias (or just plain old sell-outs) in the media is one of the critical components to running a free press. Flogging the messenger is the wrong thing to do.

      For example -- I played a RPG back in the day called Olympos or something. It was literally the worst RPG I'd ever bought (some freeware/shareware games were worse, but not many). On the Baldur's Gate forums (before BG1 came out) a guy posted a question: "Hey, before BG comes out, has anyone played this game, Olympos?" I (and about five other people) responsed with withering criticism of the game. A sole person responded saying they LOVED it, and it wasn't nearly so bad as everyone was saying it was. The forums showed the IP addresses people posted from, and I noticed that this guy was posting from the same regional ISP that the Olympos people used (I had traded emails with the company trying to resolve one of their numerous bugs.) I posted on the forum my suspicions that the person was a plant from the company. People flamed him. He wrote back a scathing "How Dare You" email, then suddenly people were flaming ME. All I'd done was note that the only person in the greater United States that liked the game had been from the same podunk ISP as the company, not said the guy was absolutely a member of the company, simply a suspicion, and yet I was the person who ended up getting attacked. It's an interesting social mechanic, and I don't doubt something similar is going on here.

      As long as the SCOPE of the suspicion is not deceptive (i.e. as long as the author doesn't say he has stronger evidence than he actually has), and he simply posts his evidence and lets people draw their own conclusions, I think that's the proper way to root out weasels, bought reporters, or people posting under fake identities.

      • Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by easychord ( 671421 )
        But if at that time you were an employee of Bioware it would have been harder to trust you. Maybe you were making things up to sell more copies of Baldurs Gate?

        Thats absurd of course, but one magazine editor trying to make his publication sound more honest than the competitors isn't always the best person to listen to. A lot of games reviews and opinions are slanted, but can you really trust anyone in the industry to tell you which ones to believe?
        • >>But if at that time you were an employee of Bioware it would have been harder to trust you. Maybe you were making things up to sell more copies of Baldurs Gate?

          Indeed, and if people had reason to believe I was a Bioware employee, it would be the correct thing for them to do to point it out.

          The problem is when we work to shame people who point out potential bias problems, if they have been honest in their reporting.

  • Take your pick, corrupt or incompetent (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @05:20PM (#14259209) Journal

    Black & White. The original game. Glowing reviews and yet some time later virtually everyone acknowledged that the game kinda stunk. To much micro management, bad interface making it hard to do your task (praise or punish your pet) and generally just not worth the scores it got.

    So explain it dear game reviewer who gave this game and others like it such high scores? I can think of three reasons.

    • You were bought, wether directly, through advertising deals or by being invited to exclusive launches and going all gooye I don't know
    • You are incompetent, you did installed the game, played it for ten minutes and spend the rest of the day jerking off.
    • or perhaps this, you weren't so much bought as unwilling to be the one that the great "XXX XXXXX" has made a bad game and that perhaps "XXX XXXXX" is not the gaming god everyone claims but just another developer who can screw up. I note that most of the reviews that have you wondering if the reviewer actually played the finished game past the first level come from the big companies/names in the industry.

    Frankly I don't care anymore, wod of mouth is worth far more to me. Friends will tell me about games and luckily as an EU customer I usually can wait for the time it takes for worth of mouth to start taking effect because games are released a few months later anyway.

    Game review sites are little more then ways to keep track of release schedules and beta signups. Judging wich game I am going to buy has stopped long ago.

    Oh and game companies that want to know how best to get a good review of your game? Playable demo. If your game is good a well done demo can create far more excitement then the best bought review.

    • A demo can also make a game look better than the final product. Certain aspect of gameplay just doesn't seem worthwhile? Leave it out of the demo. Buggy level of the game? Dron't include it, or even skip over it and put in the really cool levels.

      Something that I think Blizzard did an amazing job with the Starcraft demo was actually making it a different storyline than the game. Instead of including the first few missions from Starcraft itself, the demo had a different campaign titled Precursor which ended o

  • Wait... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Somatic ( 888514 )
    Are you telling me that IGN's 9.0 review of Carrot Top's Mad Kareoke Jams was somehow tainted? Cause I was about to send the author hate mail for being such an idiot... but if he was just being a capitalist, that's different.

  • Driv3r, lest we forget. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by easychord ( 671421 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @07:19PM (#14260087)
    Driv3r controversy [gamesindustry.biz].
     
    This report makes the online review sites sound more honest than print media which I don't think is all that true these days. (Yes, web sites with massive flash ads every 5 pages and their software bundled with games, I'm talking about you.) It was fun watching the people from the UK's biggest games magazine publishers getting caught in their lies in the forums though.
  • Observe the following list from Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel's The Elements of Journalism (Three Rivers Press, 2001). Note #4 and #5. 1. Journalism's first obligation is to the truth. 2. Its first loyalty is to citizens. 3. Its essence is a discipline of verifications. 4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover. 5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power. 6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and complaint. 7. It must strive to make the significant interes
  • ... Or the "society page" folks: games pubs need access to a group that in turn needs them. There are strong financial pressures for folks to be buddy-buddy. And the journalists will argue that the Sports and Entertainment audience demands and even expects the journos to be in cahoots with their subject. After all, who reads the sports pages? Sports fans! They don't want an impartial assessment of anything. They want opinionated bits of blather by moronic columnists coupled with "behind the scenes" peaks at
  • Discovered this one in the same way as the original commenter.

    There are certain UK stores that stock games in a "top 10 chart" arrangement. These charts are calculated by sales on a weekly basis - with one exception. Several publishers like to have their game "debut" at number one in the chart, and they can, with the simple expedience of paying for it. So, if you go into Game two days mid-week, and the number one game is not the same on the second day, you'll know why...

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