Game journalism and ethics
June 1, 2014The Society of Professional Journalists is a meaningful and needed organization for any practicing journalist. I’ve posted their ethics policy below because it is such a well thought out policy shaped over the years by an important body of journalists.
If you’re a working journalists, no matter your subject, I highly encourage you join the SPJ.
Preamble
Members of the Society of Professional Journalists believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues. Conscientious journalists from all media and specialties strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty. Professional integrity is the cornerstone of a journalist’s credibility. Members of the Society share a dedication to ethical behavior and adopt this code to declare the Society’s principles and standards of practice.
Seek Truth and Report It
Journalists should be honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.
Journalists should:
— Test the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error. Deliberate distortion is never permissible.
— Diligently seek out subjects of news stories to give them the opportunity to respond to allegations of wrongdoing.
— Identify sources whenever feasible. The public is entitled to as much information as possible on sources’ reliability.
— Always question sources’ motives before promising anonymity. Clarify conditions attached to any promise made in exchange for information. Keep promises.
— Make certain that headlines, news teases and promotional material, photos, video, audio, graphics, sound bites and quotations do not misrepresent. They should not oversimplify or highlight incidents out of context.
— Never distort the content of news photos or video. Image enhancement for technical clarity is always permissible. Label montages and photo illustrations.
— Avoid misleading re-enactments or staged news events. If re-enactment is necessary to tell a story, label it.
— Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information except when traditional open methods will not yield information vital to the public. Use of such methods should be explained as part of the story
— Never plagiarize.
— Tell the story of the diversity and magnitude of the human experience boldly, even when it is unpopular to do so.
— Examine their own cultural values and avoid imposing those values on others.
— Avoid stereotyping by race, gender, age, religion, ethnicity, geography, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance or social status.
— Support the open exchange of views, even views they find repugnant.
— Give voice to the voiceless; official and unofficial sources of information can be equally valid.
— Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting. Analysis and commentary should be labeled and not misrepresent fact or context.
— Distinguish news from advertising and shun hybrids that blur the lines between the two.
— Recognize a special obligation to ensure that the public’s business is conducted in the open and that government records are open to inspection.
Minimize Harm
Ethical journalists treat sources, subjects and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect.
Journalists should:
— Show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by news coverage. Use special sensitivity when dealing with children and inexperienced sources or subjects.
— Be sensitive when seeking or using interviews or photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief.
— Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance.
— Recognize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than do public officials and others who seek power, influence or attention. Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyone’s privacy.
— Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.
— Be cautious about identifying juvenile suspects or victims of sex crimes.
— Be judicious about naming criminal suspects before the formal filing of charges.
— Balance a criminal suspect’s fair trial rights with the public’s right to be informed.
Act Independently
Journalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public’s right to know.
Journalists should:
—Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
— Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
— Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.
— Disclose unavoidable conflicts.
— Be vigilant and courageous about holding those with power accountable.
— Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests and resist their pressure to influence news coverage.
— Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money; avoid bidding for news.
Be Accountable
Journalists are accountable to their readers, listeners, viewers and each other.
Journalists should:
— Clarify and explain news coverage and invite dialogue with the public over journalistic conduct.
— Encourage the public to voice grievances against the news media.
— Admit mistakes and correct them promptly.
— Expose unethical practices of journalists and the news media.
— Abide by the same high standards to which they hold others.
The SPJ Code of Ethics is voluntarily embraced by thousands of writers, editors and other news professionals. The present version of the code was adopted by the 1996 SPJ National Convention, after months of study and debate among the Society’s members.
Sigma Delta Chi’s first Code of Ethics was borrowed from the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1926. In 1973, Sigma Delta Chi wrote its own code, which was revised in 1984, 1987 and 1996.
If game journalism and journalism ethics interest you, make sure to check out the stories I’ve been writing for the ongoing Game Journalism Mentorship program. Also, please feel free to discuss ethics and ethic policies in the comments. I’d love to hear from you.
Whats transpired has hurt all of us, no one with a stake in this in untouched.
No one can better tell you what you done then yourself, you know the part you and every other journo had in this debacle. With that said i want to tell you personally that i used to look up to game media with awe and inspiration, the way you used to speak on games and gamers made me proud to call myself a fan. I remember a time when game journalist where the first ones to stick up for us in a fight, when you’d rebuke any claim that gamers where just abunch of kids or nerds or only white. What happened to the gaming media that defended us from the jack thompsons of the world? What the hell happened to the game media that gave two shits about of how we felt and stood up for ethics and positivity? I know i suck at writing but please know you and every other figure i held in high regard cut me deep when you pulled this gamers are dead crap. Hurts seeing the people you respect wave you off with false claims of misogyny and buzzwords. People above me have great ideas for better ethics but just let me say this.
If you re-build the bridge you burnt, don’t expect us to be the ones to cross it, you need to come back to us.
To add an addition:
I know that most members of GameJournoPros don’t think the list is that damning specifically because they don’t think it shows active colluding/collusion.
However, I would argue that the peer-pressure tone/arguments exerted by some (I’m looking at Ben Kuchera) cross a line between “advice” and attempting to shape a narrative. While not all members agree and “collude”, the tone of some of these people clearly led me to believe that they were hoping to craft the narrative by influencing the other members. I don’t think there is any place for that in journalism and am dissapointed that only a select few participants identified the conversation for what it was (unethical and conflicts of interest).
Much has been already said here, but the thing I want to talk about are nuance, evenhandedness and public responsibility. To preface, I think journalism has a duty to public discourse, to keep it civil, functional and most importantly well informed. The very fact that GamerGate and other, smaller controversies in the past have taken place makes it abundantly clear that journalism has failed at this.
The only one of these controversies that I’m intimately familiar with is the one started by Jason Schreier’s Kotaku article about Dragon’s Crown, which was frankly a deplorable piece of writing simply because of how astoundingly uninformative it was. Setting aside whatever one might think about the art style of Dragon’s Crown, Schreier failed to represent what Dragon’s Crown’s art was like as a whole, or that the artist he was calling a “fourteen-year-old boy” was in fact the celebrated George Kamitani, who is (I believe) a very rare example of an artist as a company head. To this day I wonder if Schreier was truly unaware of these things – if so, he had failed to do even the faintest bit of research on the matter, and worse, inflicting his ignorance upon his audience, many of whom, myself included, initially took him at his word. Whatever Schreier wanted to say could have been expressed in a less inflammatory article or, God forbid, an interview that would have also served to inform the public, and everyone would have been happier for it.
The need for nuance and evenhanded reporting extends to political issues. The pieces written about Christina Hoff Sommers at major game sites were bizarre. I want to say that for a single video, she received more mainstream criticism in hours than Anita Sarkeesian has received throughout her career, but it would be exaggeration to call many of those articles criticism; some were more like dismissals. That Kotaku refers to Sarkeesian as a “scholar” (she has the same academic title as I) but but refers to Sommers, an actual scholar and former professor, as “conservative critic”, is an amusing detail that speaks volumes.
I am personally ambivalent about Sarkeesian’s work, but I think it would have been in the public interest for the major game sites to have brought up voices critical of her work to the mainstream; that this was not done made many feel that their voice was not being heard in the game media, serving only to radicalise them and making healthy discourse that much harder to have. In this case, game sites had the opportunity to give the floor to moderate, nuanced criticisms and leave the small hate-spewing minority to the margins; if that had happened, I think everyone would have been better off.
Finally, to take this back to games, I think evenhandedness is crucial when it comes to reviewing as well. Being a good reviewer or critic doesn’t mean being without bias, but it does mean being aware of one’s biases, using them at a tool to examine games and also trying to see past them. Professional game reviewing in itself involves its unique biases, one of which Mike Krahulik of PA brought up about how reviewers handled the original Assassin’s Creed; simply put, professional reviewers play games in a different manner than ordinary players do, often in a hurry to finish, which in some ways makes their perceptions useless to the consumer. Many tropes of today, such as the “Video games are Art” and “Citizen Kane of Video Games” show, I believe, that reviewers have a difficult time approaching and appreciating games for what they are. Personally, and this is purely an opinion rather than a strict issue of ethics, I think it would behoove professional journalists to play and write more about older games. It would ground them, make them less suspectible to hype and keep them from being distanced from the audience that they ultimately serve.
I have heard a great deal of things about the economic straits of game journalism, and how writing nuanced, well-researched pieces simply doesn’t pay. That might be, and the journalists who are stretched thin by financial demands deserve some sympathy, but the public is nonetheless in the position of having to consider whether gaming journalism is, in its present form, doing more harm than good. Insightful reviews and criticism of games is readily available from fan sites, and TotalBiscuit, a Youtuber, is doing a far better job being a reasonable, equitable voice in matters big and small than journalists. I find it disturbing that some journalists seem to think of themselves as thought leaders, when in its proper form journalists should, in my opinion, be public servants. If the present game journalism isn’t capable of upholding its role in enabling a healthy public discourse but rather keeps poisoning it, perhaps it should be replaced with something else.
This is what I want in gaming journalism:
No more writing about people you are friends with or have financial ties to. If you do write about them, then put it up front so everyone knows and they are able to read the article with the thought in mind that you may be leaving out anything negative.
An end to deciding who gets coverage (mainly applies to indie devs) based on your personal connections or ideologies. If you can’t or won’t give them fair coverage then direct them to someone who can.
Publicly available ethics policies available on all gaming journalism websites. They should be presented on a page all to themselves with a clearly visible link on the websites home page.
These ethics policies should be strictly enforced and all breaches should be investigated by an outside entity with no stake in the outcome so as to refrain from creating a conflict of interest.
Friendships between journalists and others in the industry should be watched to make sure they won’t lead to a breach of ethics or conflict of interest. Remember, as a journalist your number one priority is your readership.
No more accepting bribes and/or gifts from developers (including AAA) companies. If they have to bribe you for good coverage then they have no faith in their products and should really take a bit to reevaluate their production process and view on what the consumer would like. As a journalist it is your job to go to the story, not the stories job to come to you. If your company won’t pay for your travel expenses and instead relies on the developers for it, then you need to find a different company.
When it comes to reviews and ratings, leave your personal bias and views at the door. Listen to what the community wants to know. We want objective reviews based on the structural and mechanical merits of the game. We want to know if the physics engine works properly, if we are going to glitch out every couple of steps, if the control scheme is efficiently utilized, and how the graphics quality is among other things. When it comes to reviewing character design, do is so it is in relation to the other graphical qualities of the game. I want to know if the buildings look realistic but the characters look like cartoons. I don’t care if you think a character is to sexy, to brutish, to dopey looking, or to hideous. I want to know if the design fits in with the rest of the graphics in the game. The rating giving to the game should reflect those qualities and those qualities only.
Ratings can affect the financial aspects of many peoples lives and you have no right to control that with your personal biases. You might as well go demand the pope pay you a tax every year because you’re an atheist. If you do want to review the game from your own personal biases, do so in a separate piece that is clearly labeled as your opinion. Do this so everyone else has a chance to form their own opinions on the game.
I’ll say this to illustrate my point: Opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one and that’s okay. What’s not okay is for you to whip it out in public and rub it my face because then we will have a problem.
When it comes to awards shows: give the awards to the games that actually deserve it. Quit with “Let’s give it to game x because I don’t think they’ll succeed without it” mentality. When you hand out participation trophies to everyone they all think they should always get awarded for doing absolutely nothing. You kill the concept of a competitive market and devalue hard work. If you can’t handle failure every now and then, GTFO. You have no right to demand success be given to you. It is something you have to work for.
And lastly, if you don’t like the current games on the market, then go make your own. Quit complaining and just go put in the work to make some you’ll like. If there’s a market, people will come.
These are the basic positions of the journalist that they all need to be held to, agreed. I’d like to go further and ask for people to stop treating their readers like human scum, if at all possible?
This said, we also need to work with you journalists to kill this cycle where you are reliant on the publishers to feed you information. As journalists it is your JOB to report on them for the public, and we need to enable the freedom of the press in that manner- something we have been neglectful in primarily because of lack of impetus to do so. That they can attempt to blackball you as was done with Kotaku and Sony in 2007 is unconscionable and should be reported so public feedback can be used to push back against such bad practices. We’re here not just to consume the content you provide, but keep both you and the games industry you report on in line. We’re the hammer, as Damion Schubert said; You’re supposed to be the focussing lens for our response.
You could start by not having someone so openly in favor of one corporation write a review for a game that they publicly tweeted should not exist. Don’t know who I’m talking about? Then you do not know your staff very well.
By far, the most alarming aspect out of all of this is that somehow gaming journalists think the distaste for their antics and nonsense began in late August. One of you went on a disgusting, offensive, drunken verbal rampage on an E3 2010 podcast. One of you made a joke about Catholics being child molesters on Weekend Confirmed. Ethics? Maybe you could try not being completely offensive morons first, and then focus on the ethics. Notice what has not been mentioned – the events unveiled in late August. I never heard of the journalist involved prior to that, but I did laugh my ass off when he had the gall to write an article about what YouTube personalities (who are not, and have never been journalists) may or may not be doing wrong. Pot. Kettle. Black hole.
It must be very easy for you to tell yourselves that this is all the work of 4chan, Reddit, and some digital lynch mob. Wrong. Some of us have attended events and shook your hands. Some of us have actually been playing games for thirty years. Some of us used to read John Carmack’s .plan file in 1998, simply because we find the medium interesting. Some of us have repeatedly scratched our heads at the spectacular decline in gaming journalism since 2008. We did not magically appear on August 20th, and we will not vanish when the people you are throwing us under the bus for go find another imaginary injustice to cash in on with speaking engagements.
That the perception exists among gaming journalists that this all stems from the sexual indiscretions of a lousy gaming blogger that we had not previously heard of, is absolutely hysterical. Keep stabbing at ghosts and anons. We’ll keep emailing your advertisers with links and .mp3 snippets of every dumb, hateful, wildly ignorant, and patently disgusting thing you have been writing and saying for the past six years. You can kill the needless hashtag tomorrow. Six years of wanting to vomit at the moment of exposure to your horrendous bullshit is not going anywhere.
Sincerely,
Gamers Everywhere, emailing and using adBlock
My biggest concerns are the following:
The separation of cultural critique and game critique in terms of allocating reviews. I understand wanting to be able to talk about the cultural, sexist, dangerous, and so forth aspects that can be present in any form of media, however your analysis of those should be separate. When I look into a review, I want to see analysis of game mechanics, graphics and physics engines, is the story powerful, is it challenging, what are the flaws in the gameplay, and ultimately is it worth the cost. I do not care for the politics of the reviewer to be injected into the score of the game. Like https://www.christcenteredgamer.com/ if they wish to do a moral analysis of the game under review, there can be a separate section for analysis of morals and societal ills the game addresses [or fails to address].
The second issue, and honestly to me as someone who relies more on personal experience and experience of a few close friends to judge a games value the more serious one, is the deep collusion between both authors on hypothetically competing websites and the collusion between developers and those writers. For the first, this allows them to push whatever rhetoric they wish upon readers, without allowing for any dissenting opinions to spring forth [see Gamers are Dead, responses to Zoe post specifically]. Collusion between the developers and writers/reviewers can prevent legitimate criticism being levied at the game in question for fear of not being allowed to review further games of the developer.
While obviously friendships between authors, and friendships between reviewers and developers are not in and of themselves a bad thing, nor is communication about big issues, the problem comes when it is decided that there is a single agenda to push, especially one that alienates the consumer base, one that does not give the consumer base a chance to respond, and one which does not make it clear the relations that may have influenced the author. We want clear and open lines of communication, with honest discussion on all ends. That does not seem too much to ask.
Thank you for your consideration and the time spent to review our concerns.
Let’s put aside the conspiracy theories I blabber on about on twitter for a minute,
What gets me about recent games journalism is scope. If a website wants to write articles on games with their connections/connotations/conclusions to politics than that’s what the site should be for. More and more I see politics creeping up into product reviews. In politics nobody is ever truly “right” so it falls into the opinions category when you apply a political bias to your writing. I just want such writing labeled as such so I can respectfully go read a different article.
You don’t see politics popping up in magazines and/or journals and/or blogs related to RC aircraft. You just see a lot of articles about events, fun, and comparing products for what they are worth. A wrongful police arrest related to RC use would be appropriate for such a magazine sure, but it wouldn’t be on the front page.
To reiterate: opinionated and biased coverage of a game is fine if that’s what your site is all about. I just want it labeled as such so I can seek out more objective product reviews. Other people might be interested in pieces like that, but not me nor many others.
It’s simple:
More disclosure of relationships between devs, journalists and companies, and less clickbait journalism.
To start Brian, I’ll say that none of these are specifically aimed at you (obviously) as your stance in the Sony/Playstation Home story is one that I think all game journalists could learn from.
I’ll hit up a few details in what I am looking for:
Full Disclosure:
This means anything and everything. The problem of “closeness” in the industry is to the point where I’m not sure where it ends so I couldn’t possibly guess as to whether or not a journalist is actually disclosing “everything”.
From the SPJ Code of Ethics: Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived. Disclose unavoidable conflicts.
Obviously some journalists don’t do enough on this subject, but I think even those who are “turning the corner” aren’t truly following this step as they think disclosure solves all.
Going further, there are times when conflicts of interest are truly “unavoidable”. Such a COI might be: My brother married a game developer. This is unavoidable from the Journalist, but should still be disclosed. Taking this further, I dislike the idea that simple disclosure should be “enough”. If a Journalist is flown out to a developer and put up in a Hotel and whatever because it was the only means by which they could get a “review copy”, the proper solution is not to simply disclose this, but rather it is to not have participated at all.
This is why when Polygon updates their previously horrible “Patreon Guidelines” to indicate that all Patreon donations must simply be disclosed, I have no choice but to laugh. While I argue that Patreon donations ARE a conflict of interest, I don’t think anyone can argue that they aren’t, at the very least, a perceived conflict of interest. From the SPJ CoE, these perceived conflicts of interests should be AVOIDED, not just disclosed. To think otherwise is to not take ethics seriously (IMO).
To take this further (and is hopefully a point that you yourself need no preaching about), the right answer to PR pressure should always be to walk away. PR firm won’t give you coverage if you don’t agree to only use “positive” words (see recent youtube coverage)? You walk away. PR firm won’t give you a review copy that isn’t in the form of a giant Master Chief replica? You walk away. And disclose. I think the quickest way to alert your reader-base and gain their sympathy for a lack of coverage on a game is to let them know that shady-PR deals led to it.
While I have many others, there is one last one that I would like to touch on, and that is the subject of “Objective Reviews”. While Polygon maintains that these are impossible and that no one wants them anyways, I disagree, to an extent.
To put it in another way, while “somebody” would find value in a Call of Duty review written by someone who only plays racing games, I believe that such a review on a website that represents all gamers would be useless. Similarly, I think the same topic could apply in regards to political issues etc.
My problem with inserting personal-views into game reviews is that you alienate the usefulness of the review to only those who share the same views (well, kind of anyways). It’s a problem I have with the “individual reviewer” system that most sites use. While I think reviews that attempt to be as objective as possible will always be best (A review that talks about the quality of a shooters shooting mechanics instead of lamenting about how the thrill of shooting doesn’t compare to the thrill of racing is, I presume, inherently more desirable), I’m open to the idea of more subjective reviews under the following circumstances:
I, personally, would like for all reviews on Polygon to be held to a universal “guideline”. While Polygon may expect every reader to learn and follow individual reviewers, I think that websites need to understand that a review posted on Polygon is a “Polygon” review and not an “Arthur Gies” review. As a result I would be more inclined to accept subjective input on a game as long as it follows the “Polygon Review Standards”, so to speak. As an example, look at many of the Christian Game reviewers. They discuss objective qualities of the game, but also review the game against a moral guideline (the bible?). If Polygon held all of it’s reviews to the same standard, I think there would be less of an issue.
I’d also like to add that you should avoid developing an intimate or financial relationship AFTER you use someone as a source or review their game as well. Yes that’s hard, but journalism should be hard. I’m sorry, but that’s the only way trust can be formed.
Things I want to see:
-Fact checking, even in editorials. (this is the most important one for me)
-Not only should you not review the game of someone you have an intimate or financially involved with, but you should not even use them as a SOURCE. If for some reason you can’t recuse yourself, you must DISCLOSE this information.
(NOTE: I would define financial involvement as investment that includes potential return, or someone who you are financially co-dependent with (ie a housemate, landlord, child, or parent). If you donate to Patreon, or other crowdfunding THAT MUST BE DISCLOSED. And I also feel like all disclosures should be at the top of the article.)
-Remove review scores, especially from reviews that make no effort to be objective. Disclose at the top of the review how you obtained your copy of the game.
-If you choose to run a publication that does not do ‘objective’ reviews, you must go out of your way to publish reviews of the same game from authors with different perspectives/ideologies, and display them prominently on the same page (I remember when some game mags would actually do this). And you must NEVER delete comments simply for question the ideologies of the author or the review itself.
-Be consistent in your coverage of “drama”. Do your best to not appear as if you hold one person’s personal life more important than another.
These are the responsibilities of the both the publication AND the journalist. Journalists should be pushing these sites away from clickbait. Refuse to write clickbait headlines. Police each other and call each other out. Journalism should be a noble profession. If you want to be a real journalist then you must make sacrifices. Sometimes that means sacrificing a portion of your social life. Sometimes that means making almost nothing.
I think a lot of games journalists are honest people, but the bad ones screwed up the trust. The best things games journalists can do now is remove any doubt of misconduct. Disclose, disclose, disclose. It’s the easiest thing you can do. If you’re not sure whether something is worth disclosing… disclose it.
Ethics should reflect the role of the journalist
Protecting the consumer should be #1
Looking over the SPJ ethics code I really struggle to find examples which gaming journalists have not broken in the last 12 months and I’m not just talking about what has occurred during GG
I am not saying there are not ethical journalists, but as a collective they have failed and the disconnect and loss of trust from their consumers can not be better demonstrated than the massive surge in popularity of Youtube’s LP’s and game reviews.
If your consumers are going elsewhere for content you use to provide for them maybe you should pay attention to it, when consumers tell you that they do not trust the information and opinions being presented to them you should ask why that is and how can it be improved
I want gaming media to be beacon on what journalism should be and something that other journalists strive to achieve. I want media that I am proud of, not clickbait.
your* integrity.
One more thing to add to the list above. I believe that it is imperative that we continue the movement of inclusiveness in our culture while also allowing article writers to express themselves freely through their writing.
With that being said I would the key points I touched on above to be the standard for game reviewing as far as a point system goes however the person doing the review is absolutely allowed to say that he thought the game was garbage misogynistic propaganda to encourage the rape and murder of young women they are perfectly allowed to right their anti cis gendered male manifseto without affecting the score of the game.
I think anyone that works under the title of journalist and covers gaming media needs to get back to basic.
Journalists need to be above reproach when covering a story. Usually I’m all for people being entitled to a private life, however, when you take a position that requires integrity and the status of being above reproach to cover material in the least bias manner for the sake of truth, you often lose certain privileges to keep your integrity intact.
This includes having overly friendly to intimate relationships with possible sources. They are plenty of people to have relationships with in the world and the potential sources of a journalist shouldn’t be one of them. Feelings may compromise one’s journalistic integrity and form bias.
This should also apply to receiving free swag, nice accommodations, getting game previews before the release date, etc.
As for reviews… I think the reviews are more than welcome to critique from a social point of view so as long as that the author discloses ideologies or religious views that may bias the the critique and not affect the overall gaming score.
A social score could be created apart from gaming score in the similar vain to the current game rating system.
The gaming score should be about graphics, design, well written story (whether or not you agree with it), speed, controls, game mechanics similar to how hardware reviews often score electronics.
If a piece of hardware has a naked male / female on it. I think its relevant to make a note about this, but it shouldn’t detract from a score meant for things like price, quality, speed, capacity, etc.
Opeds… Since opinions pieces are stated with an elevated voice that could sway or polarize the audience published on a news platform, a place that should be more about facts than opinions, there should be more transparency.
Hopefully, this will force the writer to at least use facts to back up the opinion and to reveal any bias which may help avoid compromising the authors integrity and giving readers a feeling of betrayal later when the come across information that may call into question the integrity of the writer.
Also it may be in the best interests for the public that a person try not to straddle the fence of being a game journalist and a game critic.
Transparency. In a field where integrity is part of the job requirement, there shouldn’t be a private e-mail list, google hangout, or private meetings for like minded people to share things that may cause colluding.
It should either be a public list or the list shouldn’t exist in order to keep journalistic integrity above reproach.
TL;DR Avoid actions that may question you’re integrity. If you can’t do that, disclose all such actions.
1. Journalists aren’t allowed to accept gifts or money.
2. Journalists reporting on a game or product are not allowed to go to the developers offices to review a product. No VIP treatment type stuff.
3. You can go to industry parties but you are not allowed to right articles or review products for a company that you went to a party for or have close friendships or affiliations with.
4. At public events or stuff you’re invited to you are not allowed to review anything that you received for free from that specific developer. Like Ubisoft giving press free tablets. That’s a big no-no and if you accept it you shouldn’t talk about what it is you saw.
5. 5 point system for rating stuff. This was often a point of contempt in the past that would upset people because you can’t rate something objectively I would argue you can.
A. Is the Pacing good (Pacing referring to how smoothly the game played, were the objectives not expressed well were you cruising through the game and no all of a sudden you keep dying?
B. Do the Mechanics of the game bring something new to the table? Ex: The new Call of Duty allowing much more vertical movement and laser weapons do you think that this changes the formula or is something new.
C. Is there any Replayability? This includes Multiplayer.
D. What are the options menu like? Does it provide plenty of options to change your ability to play the game? Head phones option? Color Blind mode, screen adjustments etc etc.
E. Was the game bugged or glitchy? did you run into any issues with the game of something just not working or other problems?
Yes = 1 point
Kinda = 1/2
No=0
Thanks for listening to us. i understand now why you were drawn red and blue
for the cultural stuff the press threw up i completly agree with Jorge Cervera.
I would like to add to that statement that everything should be critizised from sexism to radical feministical ideas only that way can a satisfactory conclusion be reached
for the ethics stuff i really like your list my question is how to enforce it since well trust for selfpolicing is at an alltime low.
also no blacklisting of developers we do not want people out in the streets just because they stubbed the wrong toes.
Don’t review or give other positive coverage to people you have a close personal connection with.
Don’t refrain from reviewing or giving other positive coverage to people you don’t have a close personal connection with.
Don’t insult your audience.
Don’t coordinate with others in the games media to push agendas, construct narratives, suppress stories.
Don’t suppress stories that paint people you have a close personal connection with in a negative light.
Polygon is Polygon. Kotaku is Kotaku. RPS is RPS. They should have their own distinctive voices, motivations, and even to some degree their own ideological slants. They should be competitors. This does not appear to be the case.
‘Friends’ shouldn’t come into anything. If anyone gets preferential treatment, you are quite simply not a journalist.
I believe that gaming journalism needs to have a good think about the nature of crowdfunding approaches like Paetron and Kickstarter. If a journalist starts to ‘invest’ in a particular person or title, they are showing an enhanced interest in that person succeeding.
So if a games journalist has invested heavily in (say) Star Citizen, they’ll be personally invested in that title succeeding. They’ll have an interest in writing more articles about the game and also will have a more directly line to the developers through backer-only content. They’ll be less critical in pushing news about that second Kickstarter because they want the game to succeed (plus they’ve already invested $$$ in it). The extreme end is where the games journalist becomes an unpaid PR mouth piece – something that should be avoided.
We’re also moving into the position of paid games curation as well. It strikes me as odd that game sites are heading towards recommending titles AND providing a link that sells them where they make a cut. That seems to start heading towards a conflict of interest, since if you make money off the games you sell, then the incentive is to recommend more of them.
There really hasn’t been much discussion around mock reviews since the Florence / Wainwright blow-up a few years ago, but I’m not sure how much of a thing mock reviews are any more.
Most who are not young gamers seem to assume game journalists, in their current form, are still necessary. I think this is wrong because a) they never acted like journalists and b) youtubers have taken over their main schtick.
In this discussion, people have also been confusing reviews with opinion, to the point where some journalists have essentially declared objectivity dead.
For the most part, gamers don’t care that Kotaku posts another article about the sexualization of Medusa’s breasts in God of War. People care about reviews. These are reports that are supposed to inform consumers of games of the content and quality of a product on day 1. To do this, reporters receive privileged early access to games. Relevant questions include:
– Can anyone with a credible channel get early access? (No)
– Have reviewers been gagged from discussing certain aspects? (Yes)
– Have outlets been blacklisted for publishing negative reviews? (Yes)
– Have writers been fired for criticizing advertised games? (Yes)
– Are review scores used for purposes other than informing consumers, like the bonuses game developers receive? (Yes)
– Are reviews used to push a political agenda by docking points for subjective interpretations? (Yes)
The whole system is so obviously rigged at this point, you have to question it entirely. Shouldn’t there be more transparency in this? Shouldn’t game companies have more open policies about giving reviewers access? And in an age when there is no shortage of DLC and DRM, why have real “shareware” demos gone all but extinct?
On top of that, when you ignore the reviews, what you are left with is mostly…. bloggers. Not journalists. If you want in-the-field reporting on gamer events, an expose on unreasonable crunch time, news from academic research, or measured thoughts on interaction and game design, good luck finding them. The social justice warriors act like their brilliant critique simply isn’t being understood, when in truth, most people hate it because it’s shit and third-rate.
I’m honestly not positive that games journalism has anywhere to go but towards irrelevancy. Certainly there are some issues that can be addressed immediately, such as disclosure and recusal – take much of Patrica Hernandez’s work over at Kotaku for example – her hype pieces on the work of her friends, roomates, or erstwhile lovers is completely indefensible by any standard or metric of journalistic practice. In fact, this so egregiously violates any standard of propriety that it’s almost impossible to take the publication seriously at all since one must suppose that Stephen Totilo (EiC) didn’t just passively “miss” a few instances of this behavior, but actually thought it was *fine*
Ending these sort of practices has to be first. This also means cultivating a level of distance between journalists and their subject material, which in the case of the indie games scene is going to be both difficult, but also *extremely necessary* if you actually give a damn about the development of indie talent. As it stands right now, through blind nepotism and incestuous relationships, the entire scene has turned into a charity welfare system for “needy games” where “needy games” are often synonymous with “my best mates games” or “games who have a political agenda that I think needs press”. Both of these attitudes are completely self serving and do not serve the consumer or the developers working in this scene at all.
And finally, even if these things were addressed, frankly the caliber of the gaming “press” has been exposed as fucking atrocious. When people that their peers hail as their “best writers” fail at making simple ontological arguments, or conflate critical theory with qualitative analysis, it literally blows your fucking mind. A lot of the anger I think we are seeing from the public on the whole is because while they may not understand epistemology the way, say a social sciences professor would, all human beings understand it in principle and we certainly notice it when it’s lacking.
I really have no idea how you fix this last issue. Maybe stop hiring freelancers with creative writing degrees, or certainly get better editors. It seems too many people in this scene are concerned with being perceived as being “Writerly” instead of intellectually challenging, or they conflate intellectual challenge with just challenging societal norms (although I question if this is actually happening and instead what we are seeing is careful construction of strawmen to burn by journalists). Obviously, the former takes more effort and expertise on behalf of the writer to accomplish than the later, but it’s also the objective measure by which we value writing – as in your audience is not going to invest their time and intellectual capital into non-consumer review pieces that fundamentally fail the epistemological tests of their thesis without eventually getting pissed off.
I often think that many writers believe their audiences are stupid because they put too much of a value on ones ability to express themselves as a sign of intelligence (naturally, they are writers after all). They fail to recognize that simply because someone may have a limited vocabulary or life experiences, doesn’t mean that they cannot logically process causality. I see this a lot with people who are supporting #GamerGate right now, not all of them are incredibly articulate, but the notion of everything I’ve stated in this post is absolutely there even if they can’t express it using exact terms like I can.
Anyway, getting back to my opening paragraph – I’m not convinced that anything can be done here. I think what we’re seeing is just one in a long line of middle fingers given by the public to the press as it continues to tumble towards irrelevancy. Between the problems of an obviously diminished talent pool and a freelancer system that isn’t designed to cultivate intellectual talent, much like the mainstream press we’ll just see a decline into yellow journalism while people move to places like Youtube to connect with personalities that have more credibility. And while I appreciate the position that this puts you guys in, I can’t honestly say I’m sad over it.
To me the problem is that there’s a clique of game journalists who are trying to monopolize the ability to discuss issues.
I’m going to use Anita Sarkeesian as an example. The responses to her videos can be spit into three groups.
Group 1) Personal threats against Anita. These are horrific and morally bankrupt.
Group 2) Attempts to discredit Anita as a critic. For example, digging up a clip of her saying “I’m not a gamer”. I don’t like this either – it’s a textbook ad homenim logical fallacy. Arguments should be judged on their own merits.
Group 3) Actual rebuttals and counter critiques.
There’s an enormous range of actual rebuttals. To demonstrate the diversity – I have seen feminists criticizing Anita from an explicitly feminist perspective (then again, given the history of feminism that shouldn’t be surprising… I digress).
What should have happened is that journalists would have found the best rebuttals and given them visibility. People would then see these rebuttals and write counter-rebuttals, then counter-counter-rebuttals. So on ad infintium, and we’d have a proper discussion.
What happened instead is that game journalists lumped all three groups together and talked down to them as though everyone disagreeing with Anita was complicit in harassment. Unsurprisingly people don’t like being talked down to or accused of misogyny, so this behavior has been slowly but steadily sowing distrust and division for years.
I believe that said distrust and decision is a major factor that led up to the explosion that was gamergate.
I don’t mind if journalists agree with and want to support Anita.
I don’t mind if reviewers want to mark a game down for not being feminist enough.
But I think they have to accept and respect other points of view. They should not divide the world into “people who agree with me” and “neckbearded manbabies”.
Two short ideas. Throw away account, obviously.
First: acknowlege that you aren’t part of the gaming industry. You’re people in the press who have gaming as their beat. Entirely different.
So very many of the defences and grievances revolve around this idea that “they are a colleague and we need to be able to work and socialize with our colleagues”. That is wrong. Dangerously wrong. Game designers and political activists focused on gaming may be lovely people…but they are subjects, not colleagues.
There should be some distance, and instead there is a chummy and cozy clique.
The latter group can be especially difficult, since they are writers themselves much of the time, and often journalists privately agree with them. But they are exactly those people who “seek power, influence or attention” that the SPJ refers to. They are attempting to use that writing to change policy and polity alike. They are closer to politicians than journalists, and deserve some scrutiny.
(Even the ones you agree with. ESPECIALLY the ones you agree with.)
It doesn’t help that so many gaming writers are obviously angling for a job in the industry either. Every Journo who becomes a “Community Manager” or the like is another weight crushing your credibility to dust.
Second: yes, we’re all aware that there is no such thing as complete objectivity in either journalism or criticism. You can stop using that to defend yourselves now, we all get it. But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t Pronounce Factual Judgment on a difficult subject as a journalist, or provide quantitative and definitive scores as a critic, and then turn around and start rambling on and on and on and on about how it’s just your “feels” when challenged on your reasoning or justification. That’s disingenuous, dishonest, and plain dumb.
The scores, especially, are produced knowing that they are going to be compared and aggregated. That is why you produce numbers. That is what numbers are FOR. If you don’t like it, DONT PRODUCE NUMBERS. Kotaku doesn’t. Rock Paper Shotgun doesn’t. Polygon could ditch them tomorrow. The choice to use them is valid, but accept what that choice means.
Either way, you have a duty to be intellectually honest. Clearly explain your reasons and methods, and ground your writing in those reasons and methods. If your writint is supposed to be seen through a particular ideological lens, make it obvious, so that nobody is caught by surprise. If you are writing about a person or group, give them a chance to comment, and cite them clearly and fairly, without fear or favor. Taking potshots at a caricature makes YOU look like an idiot too.
And, finally, accept that there are going to be those that disagree with you of equal or greater intelligence and moral fiber to your own. Even the ones who can’t write as well as you can. Your flair with words doesn’t prove a goddamned thing.
It’s not enough. But it’s a start.
First off, I’d like to thank you for taking comments on this. This is something we desired for a long time. I had to catch some sleep before writing on this topic. I’ll be talking about ethics first, then briefly go over biased reporting/reviews.
I think for the gaming press to be taken seriously, it will need to first and foremost distance itself from the publishers, the game developers, etc. It’s all too common for their relationship to be too cozy. I haven’t forgotten controversies DoritoGate or the Kane & Lynch scandal. The press shouldn’t be accepting gifts, parties and etc offered by them. They have you by the balls when it comes to giving pre-release copies and frankly, that’s not an easy problem to tackle. But it’s pretty obscene that it’s common in the industry to have review blackouts because the non-positive coverage is banned before release.
As much as I’d like to blame the publishers for corrupting the press, it’s on the press to actually put their foot down and set a clear guideline of ethics and fight them industry-wide. From what I gathered, the movie industry sends pre-release reviews by the bulk, so there’s a professional distance between the producers and the reviewers. This is what you guys need to establish first and foremost. And if that means to do like Kotaku has announced to do – to focus on post-release reviews instead, I say – go for it. I may hate Kotaku but this is definitely not a bad direction to go to.
Now, I’ll go and tackle the meat of GamerGate – the conflicts of interest. The gaming press is in dire need of more transparency. It needs to remember than even appearance of impropriety is just as important as actual impropriety. I don’t think Kickstarter is much of an issue, not unless one funded the game massively but for an objective standard to be met, I think it’s important to at least disclose it when it happens. Yes, even if it’s something like 20-25$, mostly because I want an objective standard, not something subjective that can easily be twisted later on. Besides, it wouldn’t stop anyone from reviewing a game unless they contributed massively to the project.
However, the maze of Patreon links between journalists/writers and the subjects they cover has been a depressing thing to discover. This, to me, has to go. Funding a person is quite different from the equivalent of pre-ordering a game (Kickstarter). When you like the person so much you’re funding them a monthly salary or vice versa (dev funding you), the trust is completely broken. You can’t be neutral or objective on anything if there’s a financial interest in it not to be. You may think “But I know, this wouldn’t affect my opinion either way”. No, appearance of impropriety is just as bad, especially when it comes to financial links.
Some people will say a disclosure could be enough, I disagree with them because dollars are involved.
The next issue to tackle is relationships being failed to be disclosed. This has been a problem that has been talked about quite a bit during GamerGate. This needs full-on disclosure or for the person involved to recuse themselves, depending on the nature of the relationship. Let me cite one egregious example : Patricia Hernandez. Now, I know you’re not Kotaku but entertain me for a moment, Patricia had a close personal relationship with Anna Antropy (they lived together at some point). Yet she still covered her games, even going so far as to recommend readers to buy them. This is NOT OKAY. Even more not okay is that the same thing happened between her and Christine Love, except this time, she dated her.
This wasn’t disclosed. And when caught, it was disclosed retroactively with seemingly no consequences for Hernandez. And this is something that’s also important, if a writer fails to disclose a relationship, there needs to be consequences. Going back, updating the article and then going on as if nothing ever happened shatters the trust between readers and gaming websites. What’s to stop it from happening again?
====
This was the part about ethics. Now, I’d like to discuss briefly the concept of trying to review a game as objectively as possible. And no, I do not think it’s something silly to strive for. Oliver Campbell wrote an article on this – https://medium.com/@oliverbcampbell/the-purpose-of-a-game-review-and-how-to-write-one-with-minimal-subjectivity-c8fb78d3266 and it’s an interesting read. tldr; version is “Your job, as a reviewer, isn’t to tell the customer what to buy. Your job is to INFORM the customer of what they COULD buy, should they be inclined to.”
Also, if you absolutely must bring morality, sexism and those sort of things that are related to personal ideology into play, I suggest you take this from Christian reviewers, who do not let it affect scores by using a dual score system – http://i.imgur.com/tCBhkIu.png?1 . I think it’s really terrible for games to be marked down for political beliefs that your audience may not share, like the Tropico 5 review which got marked down for making the reviewer feel like a bad person. Especially in light of the abomination that is Metacritic scores being used to determine whether devs get paid bonuses or not. Personally, I’d love nothing more than to do away with scores but we all know this isn’t a realistic approach.
And that’s it for me. I didn’t really touch fair reporting or the lack of investigative journalism though these are also important things to strive for. The SPJ code does already cover this stuff quite well, so I’ve got nothing to add on the subject.
Again, I’d like to thank you for fielding comments on this issue, even if it’s on a personal level and not as a representative of Polygon.
I would like to discuss an article recently published on Polygon and I want to be as respectful as possible, even if some of what I say may not sound pretty, please wait until the end before reaching a conclusion.
http://www.polygon.com/2014/10/14/6979071/utah-state-university-anita-sarkeesian-threats
My concerns come when the level of the threat is gauged. After reading the article, I end with the idea that her safety could have been seriously compromised, had Miss Sarkeesian decided to participate in the event, especially in the second update when it’s said that security preparations were taken very seriously or that the level of threat present is rare.
On the other hand, there’s this letter from USU.
http://www.usu.edu/ust/index.cfm?article=54180
“Together, we determined that there was no credible threat to students, staff or the speaker, and that this letter was intended to frighten the university into cancelling the event.”
It’s shocking to me that state and federal law enforcement agencies didn’t consider there was a credible threat, but after Polygon reached police officials, this was never transmitted, or the author didn’t consider it was relevant to the story. It’s my belief that journalists have a responsability to avoid creating mass hysteria, among other reasons, because that probably was the main objective behind whoever sent the threats and validating these individuals can have a seriously dangerous effect, like creating copycats. I understand the writer isn’t in an easy position in a case like this one, since it feels heartless to “downplay” the suffering of others. But I feel I’m being told a substantially different story when I read “the level of threat presented is rare” on Polygon’s article (which could be a misleading choice of words) compared to the one I get after reading the statement from USU.
See… this is why some of us are fighting in this. Publishers being able to cut you guys off, that’s bloody disgusting. We want to (and need to) go after as well, but right now, the focus is on the media outlet (who attacked us in the first place).
In regards to journalism, what can we do to enforce the rules when EiC is complacent in the first place and the writers/journalists fear for their own employment? Subscription model failed (patreon is part of sub. model), the ad revenue model is failing us, industry paid model is unworkable, journalists can’t live on nothing, so definitely no free/hobbyist model. I’m afraid cutting out the middleman might become a likely possibility, a hybrid industry+consumer model might work, But that isn’t fair to everyone. Would having the site part of its parent company, thus making it liable, be a possible model? Escapist focus on more than just games, so they are a little diversified and thus not as tightly choked for contents. Will the same work for other sites? The lack of content might be one reason why certain sites are pushing out some stuff, masquerading as another.
I’ve already blown my top off at you over the editorial article. First and foremost, these ethics are something that should be applied to all your gamergate articles. The blatant misrepresentation of fact amid a very strong case to raise questions and demand an Ombudsman to be the one to investigate to verify the claim, is poor journalism. Do not be complacent with claims that carry a clear bias.
“Test the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error.”
A proper statement would be Kotaku claims that the relationship had no impact. This is yet to be verified by an independent investigation.
The reason I push for it even in the articles being published about #GamerGate is because the media not properly investigating results in essentially slander pieces. They appear to be directed towards discrediting #GamerGate in a bid to avoid the true issues.
In this case, all of this applies:
—Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
— Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
— Clarify and explain news coverage and invite dialogue with the public over journalistic conduct.
— Encourage the public to voice grievances against the news media.
— Admit mistakes and correct them promptly.
— Expose unethical practices of journalists and the news media.
— Abide by the same high standards to which they hold others.
But it appears that very little of this is actually followed in action. When it comes to denouncing harassment, #GamerGate is pretty much doing all it can do as a grassroots movement. Example is both the uncovering of the Brazilian Journalist harassing Anita and how /war/ on 8chan was flooded so the info was 404ed. Not indicating that such actions were undertaken also paints a biased narrative.
All these informal fallacies have been present in some way in the media.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking_(fallacy)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_consequences
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_silence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgmental_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophic_burden_of_proof
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasty_generalization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_single_cause
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_high_ground
As you can see, the ease at which I find so many is a disgrace. It shows that even when an opinion piece is produce by the media that the argument that they are presenting is faulty.
As you may begin to understand now, the longer this drags out, the more damage it will do to the gaming press. More shit will be dug up and more cases such as what is happening with Gawker. These sites names will be dragged through the mud to the point that advertisers will slowly leave. Just look at the stock prices for Gamasutra’s parent company. The media’s reluctance to address this, negatively affects them but not the consumer. There is huge competition in games media we have seen and Devs still need to sell games to the consumer.
Ultimately I want journalists that advocate for the consumer. We have seen barely any of this at all and that is probably the biggest factor that has contributed to the mess we have now.
I pretty much fully endorse all of this code. If you were to have a ethics policy, copy and paste this adding in specific examples for clarification. I believe that this should be pushed as an industry standard.
Also additionally, a discussion on the distinction between a review and a critique needs to be had. A review in my opinion should be aimed at a general audience, be the ones with a score and follow below.
— Examine their own cultural values and avoid imposing those values on others.
Sorry for my outburst on twitter, but after finding a journalist finally willing to have the discussion then their employer releasing such an article, it was like an extreme bi-polar roller coaster. Enormous respect earned followed by a massive drop. Being here since the start and having such a passion for gaming means that I am may be over invested. But this is the first time that I’ve felt such purpose for a movement/revolt and actually dedicated time to one. Truth and integrity are something worth fighting for and after engaging with the community that sprung up and the ones that were always there, supporting each other through tough times, I couldn’t be more proud to call myself a gamer.
Look… I don’t care for Anita’s criticism. I think Zoe isn’t a good person. I think you all can do a lot better job of choosing figures that represent diversity in gaming (and you do choose them). Maybe you feel like any woman would face undue hatred, but I still think you can write about better people. Also if you want to write about progressive topics, I encourage you all to not be so lazy as to manufacture controversy (read http://tinyurl.com/mhqxwpw)
However, if you want to write about them on your website that’s fine. I won’t read it, and I don’t want to silence you. I don’t participate in GG (except for donating to anti-bullying fund), and I’ve never threatened anyone. There is a very real problem with big dev/publisher and press relationships, and I want consumer advocates that I can trust. Frankly I find IGN having console-specific editors that gush over their beat while getting first access a little gross too.
However, I don’t think that’s the only problem with the industry, and from the outside looking in there is certainly reason to suspect a bit too much nepotism. I’m a big fan of GB. I think there doing something really unique with their content, but what has been made abundantly clear from watching those videos is that it’s common place for developers (both indie and big studio) to schmooze with the press. It may be innocent, but I think it’s legitimate to question how all of the same people going to almost monthly industry events with after-parties, living in the same cities where they spend social hours together, and reinforcing each other through networking on twitter and private email groups are not being influenced to unduly give coverage to people within their social circle. GB has been pretty good about making distinctions in coverage, but I’ve got to wonder whether the social interactions they have with devs are common place for journalism. How are you guys expected to maintain professional distance with the way social media and industry events have exploded?
When I read a lot of reviews that all have the same criticisms, is that because you all made the same conclusions in your independent play-through’s of the game? Or is it because someone released their review first and everyone emulated it? Or is it because of a private mailing group that you all communicated on with your review builds helped influence a narrative about a game? Maybe it’s none of the above, but it’s certainly easy to perceive unethical behavior from the outside, and it’s not clear how you regulate that. How exactly do you guys quantify whether the friendships you maintain for exclusives are professional or something more? I think a little more self-reflection on those issues, and honest communication to your audiences would help us all find consensus instead of disagreement. At the very least, it would certainly improve my perception of a press that’s just a little to full of enthusiasm and not appreciating the bigger picture of how the internet and social interactions can potentially influence groupthink in your writing.
Remove the journalists who attack and bully their own readers. Have strict social media policies and if your employees go on unprofessional vitriolic rants or insult people, take away their social media account or fire them. This should be under that “Act Accountable” section.
Stop acting like sycophants towards other journalists and stop collaborating with each other to coordinate coverage and shape narratives.
Stop promoting clickbait garbage that only seeks one side of a story and refuses to address the other side of an issue. Any journalist found to be intentionally misrepresenting a story should be dismissed. And never, EVER ban or delete people’s civil comments just because they disagree with the journalist’s position or wish to discuss an issue. If your sites have overly broad Terms of Use that basically let your moderators do anything they want, rewrite them, restrict their powers and make them accountable.
Keep your politics out of your reviews. A professional review should be telling me whether *I* will like a game or not, not whether the reviewer liked it. And shoving your ideology into your review and score helps no one, because my ideology is not likely to be the same as yours. Pure objectivity is of course impossible, but you should strive to be as objective as possible.
And then read Roger Ebert’s own ethical guidelines:
http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/rogers-little-rule-book
And have your journalists follow every single one of them.
Jeff already had a ver concise list of ideas so I am going to quote him to lend support to his suggestions.
“Disclose connections of a financial or personal form as it relates to the subject or subjects of a journalistic article. Disclose financial or physical compensation for reviews.
Recuse if you cannot, or will not, disclose those connections.
Verify your source’s information, and Disclose if you can or will not.
Punishment by editorial staff and publishers for journalists who refuse to follow these guidelines, or who attempt to obscure factual data.
I’d genuinely prefer games journalists realize that it actually is about reporting information, and that “creating a message” is a matter for op-ed pieces, which should be labeled as such.”
— Test the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error. Deliberate distortion is never permissible.
— Diligently seek out subjects of news stories to give them the opportunity to respond to allegations of wrongdoing.
I think this has been a major issue in the past for Polygon and needs to be rectified.
Also, corrections need to be given the proper format and visibility. Going back and changing the wording on an old aticle like ben Kuchera did with the sexual harassment article is not just unprofessional it is downright disingenuous.
Between that, the undisclosed financial relationships to a developer & his attempts to stronarm another publication into shutting down discussion I have a very hard time moving past such actions & trusting the goodwill of Ben Kuchera. His handling of the Patricia Hernandez controversy also is more than questionable.
— Examine their own cultural values and avoid imposing those values on others.
— Avoid stereotyping by race, gender, age, religion, ethnicity, geography, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance or social status.
— Support the open exchange of views, even views they find repugnant.
I think these points touch less on ethics per se, yet still are important to ensure a certain amount of value of information to the reader & would go a long way towards improving the site.
A few issues I’ve had with gaming coverage recently:
I read reviews expecting to get information about how games compare to others, how its graphics/sound/controls shape up, as well as how much fun the reviewer had playing it.
I like obscure Japanese Strategy RPGs, like Disgaea and its ilk. Sometimes when I read reviews of them, I understand that the reviewer may not like those games as much. I then am forced to just rely on the more ‘objective’ aspects of the review, and ignore personal impressions since the reviewer doesn’t like the genre.
I feel like more and more reviews I read recently are from people who “don’t like the genre.” I read reviews and come away with the feeling I’ve been criticized for liking those games. Whether that’s saying SRPGs are for math nerds or FPSs are for immature bros, or just a general attitude about the game being beneath them.
That’s not to say I don’t or won’t read opinion pieces on gaming, but I don’t personally feel that has as much a place in reviews of a particular game. I wouldn’t want to be a developer releasing a game I’ve worked on for 3 years right when a few websites decide they need to take a stand against whatever genre my game is.
I also feel like a lot of people have been burned recently by well reviewed indie games. I’ve read glowing reviews of games that have interesting mechanics, storylines, are particularly progressive in their handling of issues, etc. But when I buy them, I find they’re not actually that fun to play. And the reviewer maybe only played it because they had to, and had no desire to go back and play it on their own time. I want those games to be made, and I want them to be refined so that one of them is worth my time some day, but I don’t want to feel deceived by reviewers.
The last issue I wanted to touch on maybe feeds into all of this. I think people have been concerned with the group-think / herd-mentality of video game journalists. I feel like this has fostered contempt for game players that I can feel in some reviews. I feel like this prevents reviewers from speaking out about issues with indie darlings. I feel like this prevents people from writing as well as they could. All of the gamergate related coverage has been to try and express some nuanced ideas about inclusiveness, stereotypes, and the complex relationship between consumer, journalist, and producer.
I don’t feel like many of the writers attempting to tackle it are skilled enough to communicate that nuance. I have read many articles and felt stereotyped, criticized, and attacked. A lot of the writing is only capable of communicating an idea to someone who already understands the idea — as if no devil’s advocate editor or dissenting opinion has helped work through some imprecise language.
Just gonna drop this here…
And also, start reporting fairly already! No mention of any good things we do, overblowing & accusations on shaky grounds, ect.
http://www.littletinyfrogs.com/article/458015/GamerGate_What_do_you_want
We know there are a lot of financial connections and cozyness between developpers and game journalists. The first step would be to actually disclose them. No one would deny that they need review copies to do their jobs, but when you go on a 5000$ trip paid for by the devs, there is a problem.
With full disclosure, it’s up to the to consumer decides whether or not to trust your review. Not only would we be able to give feedback on what is and isn’t acceptable, it would open the debate on grey areas.
And ultimately, it puts pressure on the devs instead of the journalists. If a dev is giving a car with your review copy, a lot of the backlash would be directed (justly imo) at the dev.
I would also like journalists to be accountable for their actions. Many of them insult people publicly and their parent companies are perfectly okay with it. If a dev does something like this they get crucified by the games media. But the same standards don’t seem to apply to them.
One more Think I totally forgot about the whole GamerGate scandal. I think it was really telling that not one of the gaming media who covert these events wrote something objective. It was all one sided fitting a narrative. There was no objectivity at all it was all protect these people and do not care about the rest and Writer do the same:
For example I warned a unnamed writer for Polygon and co that her Address was being posted by a troll and that GamerGate is reporting them until he gets suspended. Hours later when she woke up she thanked me and I said “np and that we need to fight harassment together and not against each other”.
A minute Later she blamed everything on GamerGate. I asked her politely if she could restate this claim and that it was not GamerGate but her response was this:
” Even if GamerGate itself didn’t doxxed me, its existence is encouraging this kind of harrasment to happen to women who speak up”
I will not name the Person who writes for Polygon and other sites but this shows exactly what was going on. They spinned their own narrative without even reaching out to the other side. How can we trust Games Journalism if they have writer like this who do not care about the truth and objectivity but rather to cause even more outrage for the sake of their goals?
This seems fantastic. If you do stick to this (and I’m not saying you won’t) this will make you one of the most ethically sound publications in the US. That is something to be proud of! Actually, I think I should go email spj and ask them to put together a numeric rating system to judge media outlets on their ethical soundness.
One of the talking points I’d like to see is where the line between ‘fast reporting’ and ‘accurate reporting’. I understand that to journalists, often being the first to break or comment on a story is going to (or it is perceived it will) earn them the biggest audience for coverage on that subject. The question I want to pose is where that line should be drawn. It feels like too often people are abandoning the allegation and distance from the topic until facts are known, and instead plunging into opinion pieces based on incomplete information, or worse, articles intended to come off as factual based on incorrect information.
I believe at no point should haste cause any chance of inaccuracy in reporting, and that if it has the writers should own up to their mistakes instead of claiming ignorance at the time. I’d much rather read a factual piece 48 hours after the fact than a knee jerk reaction 12 hours afterwards. Haste itself doesn’t fall directly under any given bulletpoint, but I feel it is a cause for several of them, making them symptoms of it. I do concede that at times, a publication’s livelihood may rely on being the first to break the story, but is that truly an excuse for the risk of being biased by one’s own interpretation of events, or worse, flat out incorrect?
Is there any ethical guideline one could enforce to make sure that haste doesn’t compromise a story, or can we only create guidelines to deal with the symptoms it causes?
Our goal is to have the mainstream gaming media review and adopt ethics policies hopefully aligned with those laid out by the Society of Professional Journalists. If these standards are not achievable then the media should at least attempt to interact with the Gamergate community to see what actions changes can be made. A dialogue of some type on the issue is clearly needed.
After this week? After the entire main press jumping on gamers without investigating, calling us an hate mob, and creating more hate? After the entire mainstream press failing at basic human rationality? After generalizing, comparing us to terrorists, appealing to emotiong to generate more hate, saying hacking members of gamergate is ok? After that guy from gawker saying bullying is ok?
I will fight to the end. I will fight until the truth comes out. But honestly, this week I lost all if any faith in journalism as a whole. I was hoping there were a few people with values, intelligence and ethics out there. A few people who would be skeptical enough to not buy the narrative that 30000 gamers are terrorists fighting to get girls out of videogames.
Seems I was wrong.
So currently? I do believe the entire industry needs to be purged; fire everyone and then hire new people. Gamergate would never achieve that of course. But I honestly believe that’s the only solution.
But I digress. Click-bait journalist must end. There must be a central body who endorses good journalism and punished bad journalism. If you want to have a “badge” saying journalist, you must adhere to this body and behave according to it’s standarts. Inside our outside the internet. And if you fail you are kicked out. No journalism can be done by anyone who is not a journalist with a badge. And if you fail that badge you are out of the cool journalists club. Bloggers are bloggers, opinionators. Journalists are truth seekers, people who are here to make a better world. If you are a journalist and you only trust but don’t verify, if you are a journalists whose job description is not to publish the truth but generate click-bait, if your news are speculations; then you are not a journalist, you don’t have a badge and you are not authorized to call your pieces “news”.
On that last word I meant “journalism”, not “news”.
Thanks for reading
I would like the gaming journalist and bloggers to adopt a code of journalistic ethics. that does not allow nepotism, cronyism, collusion or abuse of its customers. they should lose there jobs at some point if these practices continue. as it is, they dont even think there is a problem, much less that some one should be punished for these things. Gamergate has a list of ethics based on the journalists code of ethics. I also dont think that they should be able to label there customers as anything derogatory just to stop discussion on certain topics- misogynist, etc falls under the abuse of customers. silencing my opinion for having a different ideology is not right. also if you want to review games based on a political idiology your review score should not reflect on any all inclusive scores like Metacritic.
since this has gone on to include game awards also. those need to be presented fairly and honestly. and not allowing people to participate because of there ideology can also not be allowed.
For Ethics.
What I figured out in the last months that most article were even made not for actual coverage but to protect friends. This industry is so tightly together that actual objective Journalism has been made impossible. If you are friends with someone or have a relationship NEVER EVER write about them. Not even one word. Do not defend them personally be objective and not personal in your articles. Here is a great video about Journalistic Ethics and relationships and these rules are currently broken by almost every Games “journalist”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-7RLxrsJ04
As for Reviews and Criticizing games :
It is totally fine to criticize a game based on a social issues but it should never negative influence a Review Score which is part of Metacritic. In this Industry Developer are getting paid by this score. Obsidian for example did not get a Bonus and had to cancel a project because their score was 84 instead of 85.
If you want social commentary or a review do it as a second opinion or editorial. Do not give a score like Kotaku does. Also only criticize the Game and not the people who like these sort of games or Developer. I just read some report on the Hatred game calling the Dev Team “human Garbage”
Also if you already know that you will hate the game do not Review it if its on Metacritic. It should not be the case that someone who hates Racing games thinks they and cars are dumb is going to Review Gran Turismo 6 and the score will affect Metacritic. If you do not like JRPGs do not review them if you do not like soccer or soccer games do not review them. Give an opinion if you want but without a score. Done.
As for Social criticism in general. Don’t use words like Sexist, racist etc like its free Candy. These words actually meant something but through the over use of these words they lose meaning and only become annoying. Also do not hyperbole. It can not be the case that someone is allowed to compare a vampire Scene in Castlevania 2 with a game called Rapelay. This is clickbait and hyperbole. Do not use these social issues as a click-bait be honest and fair about it. Do not try to censor things with words through public pressure.
I would also say social media interactions need to be better handled. A LOT of this is due to people acting like dammed fools over Twitter etc. Editors need to power to say “If you say X in a public space you represent this site and will face discipline”
If i said the things these people had said on my personal social media accounts no one would want to work with me. I’m not a public figure, a journalist who trades in reader confidence needs to be held to at least a basic standard.
Badly researched, clearly biased or hit-piece articles need to be prevented. It should be basic policy that this shouldn’t take place. When it does take place we need a mechanism of reader accountability. E-mailing advertisers was a last resort option, it should NOT have to be the norm. These sites make money out of US. WE are their commodity they sell to their customers. When something is clearly out of line (and i do think it has to be extreme, populism isn’t always the best choice) we need to be able to hold their feet to the fire before it is allowed the escalate like it has done.
Throwing gamers under the bus in the mainstream media is unacceptable practice for games journalist at a major website. That as appalling to see.
Some Journalists also need to apologize. Right now. They are way past the line and actively damaging the image of the gaming industry.
It would be nice if at least one of the “mainstream” outlets would “reveal” the “truth” behind #GamerGate: that it is a group of human beings (some shitty) who are united by being disenfranchised by their media when that media was pushed on issues of their own corruption.
Personally, I’m not expecting professional journalistic standards, because most are just bloggers who made good. I’d LOVE professional standards, but what I expect from someone calling themselves a journalist is simple:
Disclose connections of a financial or personal form as it relates to the subject or subjects of a journalistic article. Disclose financial or physical compensation for reviews.
Recuse if you cannot, or will not, disclose those connections.
Verify your source’s information, and Disclose if you can or will not.
Punishment by editorial staff and publishers for journalists who refuse to follow these guidelines, or who attempt to obscure factual data.
I’d genuinely prefer games journalists realize that it actually is about reporting information, and that “creating a message” is a matter for op-ed pieces, which should be labeled as such.
What we have now, however, is a system where any dissent is met with threats and dismissal, from the journalist side. Not all, but enough to keep the fire burning.
As a personal matter, I’d like the GameJournoPro complete e-mail list shown publicly. If it is such a vindicating document, that should reveal the truth behind the journos’ innocence. If, however, it is still worth hiding that suggests that there is still information in it worth concealing. I’d also like to know why “ethical” journos involved in it said nothing to their audience when they saw unethical behavior occurring.
Look at the Patricia Hernandez situation. She clearly broke the rules twice with no consequence. The editor just weaved it off. When a journalist has a clear undeclared relationship and is actively promoting their friends/ former lovers products without the reader knowing there should be a clear mechanism in place for how that journalist is dealt with.
These guidelines should be public and the readers should be able to know what will happen and what SHOULD happen in the event of a major lapse. You can’t just go “oops” and that be that.
What we’ve been seeing from the gaming media lately is that they’re in bed with devs and publishers, there’s a lot of shady financial and personal connections going on. We’ve also seen an increasing contempt for their audience, even before the gamers are dead articles, and it’s just kept going since.
There’s a definite feel of “methinks thou dost protest too much”, every concievable avenue to deflect criticism, shame and blame critical voices has been used. It’s just staggering the lengths the gaming media has gone to, to discredit a consumer revolt looking for some journalistic integrity in games media.
It’s very clear that it was never about misogyny, and all about covering ass.
Not only is gaming media in full smear mode on gamers, zealously so, it’s been pushing very hard for censorship from the start, banning all dissent to its fabricated narrative.
And there’s been very real harm, people have had to drop out because they’ve been doxxed, threatened and in some cases had their place of work harassed into firing them. This goes unreported by the media of course, as only their chosen victims apparently matter, and are tied to their opposition without any evidence what so ever, and in many cases quite suspect to begin with(for example known self-confessed sock puppeteer gets tons of coverage, without any research or critical thought put into it).
Dear Bryan Crecente, first of all, thank you for make this space possible, is good to know that not all bridges were burn, as a pro Gamergate I believe the problem comes from thinking that all is worth in the quest of equality in the medium, I’m pro feminist, pro diversity (I’m Mexican), and I think we can work together on this, I play games and for me the gender of the character is not the problem, I don’t fell my gender or identify in jeopardy, on the contrary, I fell I can understand more other people, right now I’m playing Alien Isolation, but the way Polygon, Kotaku, Rock Paper Shotgun and Gamasutra are talking about those changes is problematic, first, instead of point fingers at any one how play video games for not playing a female is way to put the mentality of “Us Vs. Them”, and that is not helpful, why not make them part of the solution, why not put positive things in the articles and make gamers fell not as the bad guy, but as the good guy, for example if there is a lack of female characters, way not say, we want more Tifas, more Lara Crofts more new characters put positive news; ¿Why doctor Sommers can have a more positive reception from gamers and not Anita? I think the problem is the approach, you cannot change the minds of people by closing discussion and from a Ivory Tower, you need to put your hands on the mud and talk to gamers, second, sexuality, the approach that Polygon is taking is not good, sexual expression can, and will change from subject to subject, there are people that want to expressed more, others less and we need to respect both, why music and movies can make videos as Anaconda with sexual themes or movies like Eyes Wide Shut and be call art, but video games cannot, is important to respect the sexuality of the game and understand the content of the piece, the industry has a place for Gone Home and Bayonetta 2, not only for one, third, if we really want equality, criticism cannot be only for males and not females, game media sites cannot afford another Zoe Quinn debacle, is a fact that if this news was well cover two months ago, like any other news, none of this will happen, let people blow off some steam in forums, when video games web sites made this news a “No Talk” subject, of course more people wanted to talk about it, I love games, and diversity is something that is happening right now, games will change, and they are changing, but we need to let everybody talk, the only reason to forbid someone from a forum or a discussion is if that person disrespectful of others, not if that person think different, is we want real diversity, all ideas need to be talk, even Gamergate, I think this forum is productive in order to reach a conclusion to this, thank you for your time.
I think its important to really investigate a narrative before you start pushing it. For example some of the narrative being pushed by the anti gamergate crowd is that Jack Thompson was right and gamers are by and large being effected by what they play. This is a mindset everyone needs to fight against. I don’t think due diligence has been done on a bunch of these articles because the viewpoints they express are directing us towards a terrible end.
Another issue is diverse gaming. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want diversity but its being pushed as a change what you like instead of make something new. We don’t need to sacrifice what we have or change what we have. We need more options on top of what is already available. I don’t understand why people don’t understand that. For example if you think bayonetta is too sexual don’t play it. Don’t tell those who enjoy it they are bad and don’t try to change that game just ignore it and find something you do like. Push developers to make new things but not at the expense of what people enjoy. That’s not an inclusive view that’s a greedy view. Appease me at the expense of all or else!
Last but not least journalists should have a wall between them and subjects they cover. Obviously people will make friends onntje industry. That’s natural and expected. There is however a difference between a friend you see at events or talk to from time to time and a friend you talk to daily or see personally outside of work.
I don’t mind someone putting their own views into an article or review but don’t knock somethings quality because you don’t agree with its “message” or ideals. That does a disservice to the game in question. If you would rate a game a 9 but give it a 7 because of a political view that’s unfair. A review should be based on the overall merit of the game. Talk about what you don’t agree with but don’t penalize because of it. I hope that makes sense because its obviously a tricky area.
We just want fair truthful coverage of the industry. We don’t want to be mislead we don’t want things to be excluded because they aren’t your thing or made by someone you dont agree with.
An example I personally have is gone home. I bought gone home based on someone in the press insinuating it was a horror themed game. I should have done more due diligence before buying it but it was someone I thought I could trust. Did I enjoy gone home? Sure, it was OK. I however never would have paid $20 had I known what it actually was. It was an experience worth having but I got there through less than honest means which really pissed me off.
It would be nice to have a business model that wasn’t entirely reliant on cooperation with the people covered.
That’s not the sort of thing that can be fixed by trying harder to be more ethical, though.
This isn’t some sort of gamergate thing, either. I see previews and reviews, at their heart, as advertorial content, and I’d love to see outlets focusing on something other than upcoming product which you should (not) preorder and new product which you should (not) buy.
The problem is that I have no idea what that “something” would be, or how to attract enough of an audience to it in order to pay someone to write it. If I did have an idea, I wouldn’t be grousing in some article’s comment section!
I have always liked the rules of ethics of journalism for a long time as they seem rather clear cut and simple to follow. However, often I feel these rules get bent for certain situations particularly when it comes to politics.
I was wondering what you would say about sites like Wiki-leaks who when the initial scandal broke released the names of inocent individuals and parties which could (& may have to all I know) endangered them & their families.
I know that Wiki-leaks may not be considered a news site by some journalists & many news organizations like the Washington Post worked incredibly hard to censor information of those who may be negatively harmed for simply being mentioned in the reports but I was wondering how does one deal with this? If you get a hold of something that could cause serious harm to inocent bystandards, but the story itself may be important for the public to know, how do you ensure what you do will not hurt those people or how do you censor something when all that information is already out there?
Yeah, given that the publishers/manufacture’s pretty much expect you not to follow any of these rules, combined with the hoard of 19 year old guys looking for free games and you’ve got an environment that actively discourages integrity with punitive measures.
I would applaud a change and I know from personal experience that it can be a positive experience for both developers (artists, programmers) and gamers who appreciate honesty. It’s just getting the publishers on-board that’s the real challenge when they can cut your team off over a perceived slight and have no repercussions since some other magazine will be more than willing to take your place for the story leads.
Not bitter, seriously 🙂
Great post Bryan,
I think many of the problems surrounding lack of ethics in game journalism stem from lack of content. In no other entertainment medium do you have such long spans between major events to the point where opinion, fabricated outrage and speculation make up the bulk of day to day content. that also means that journalistic outlets are so under pressure to be the first to see, talk, or review a game to get something actually material to talk about, that they’ll beg borrow and steal to be first in line.
I work b2b journalism, in a vertical that is pretty small and even in that sector there is enough material news to make at least 10-12 solid stories daily without defaulting to opinion or speculations pieces. On any day the outlets and companies I cover will have multiple press releases and will make themselves available for comment, and that’s in addition to actually breaking hard news stories that happen. Even with that much to choose from, there are still instances where I need to run a story against my better judgement to appease a sponsor. The trends of content marketing and more pressure on journalistic outlets to play nice with advertisers has eroded at least some of the principles outline above for just about every publication.
In VG journalism those content options simply aren’t there and that pressure to appease an advertiser while getting content up to draw eyeballs to the site is even higher. Add to that lack of transparency in the industry, rampant fanboy-ism and an audience that loves to hear itself talk and the quality of content falls even further.
Think of it akin to sports entertainment journalism, a field that granted does not have the best track record on ethics (consider the press seats conundrum), but offers a decent analog. Regardless of who you cheer for there are at least 6 games on Sunday, one on Monday and one on Thursday and the aggregate cost to pay all the players in one game most be somewhere in the same stratum of a AAA game development budget. Anyways, those games are frequent enough that coverage can consist of ongoing analysis of the team, as well as coverage of the multi-weekly games themselves plus coaching strategy, scouting, sponsorships etc. I almost see triple AAA titles as a single Giants game that happens once every 4 years, and has the starting line revealed 3 weeks in advanced, naturally as a sports journalist you’re going to do anything to be at that game, even if its at a cost of violating the tenets above. When the team sucks in the NFL you have the hope they’ll rebound to keep the drama up, when a game sucks? that’s usually the end of the story.
This is not a defense of game journalism in its current state. There could be more to cover; the business, development, legal and other behind the scenes type stuff that could make for great day to day content. Episodic content too could offer a space for daily analysis and conversations. But developers are generally tight lipped about industry details, and no one has really nailed the episodic game thing just yet (or has produced it quickly enough) so they’re not there to create original, compelling content on a day to day basis. The result is again opinion, speculation, and fabricated outrage.
I offer no solution on this, just observations on why the space seems so schizophrenic and full of poor journalism. Some of this may also speak to the disparity in maturity level in the audience, on the one hand you have the 19 year old who is more interested in DOTA streams then the machinations of executive leadership going on at EA.
Would love to hear your thoughts on whether or not you think this is part of the issue since you have more first hand experience in the space. Just thought I’d get my thoughts out there since this is topic of conversation I always finding interesting.
I think if every abides by your idea it’d be great
I think the line in the SPJ about housing both sides of an issue is not being done here. Without that all you have is controversial rhetoric. Which is both polarizing, and dangerous, and it certainly isn’t news.
I gave an analysis of my opinions on ethical games journalism here:
http://youtu.be/Jur85S1YAPs
I understand it can be daunting being out of the gate without a review the day of launch but I believe that if publishers do stone wall you and you’ve built up credibility with your audience that the simple mention of the fact they are stonewalling due to article x could have an impact on their bottom line to the point where such a threat would be ill advised on their part.
At least I’d like to think we live in this kind of world. Still this isn’t an approach that I’ve seen tried from the press and would love to see it in action. If there could be something out there equivalent to the Michelin Guide in the culinary world for games, it might help people make more informed decisions. Or give developers a reason to raise the price of a certain game.
I think where people get their gaming journalism should be handled on an individual basis. There are a few independents I trust to offer a bullshit free review and I’ve found those people on my own. If others crave that kind of experience, it’s already out there.
Ok, sorry for my English. You always seemed like a good guy and I hope something positive will come out of this fiasco.
First I would like to say i’ve been gaming since the 80s so I saw the emergence of mags, exclusives reviews and paid covers.
I would love for the gaming press not to throw us under a bus and to the mainstream media when a few hundred raging lunatics are threatening people on Twitter for having an opinion.
I would like more transparency. This includes disclosure of relationship when there is one. I do not believe you can be totally impartial when you are talking about your friends. I want disclosure of any kind of embargo or restrictions publishers have put upon discussing a game or a review.
I would like more varied opinions when it comes to reviews and opinion pieces and people that are not afraid of their opinions or using a scale. This involves having more reviewers and journalists from different backgrounds, ethnicities, sex and religions.
This may actually help with the metacritic system and offer more varied experiences.I would actually a gaming press that actually has the balls to get rid of the rating system altogether which may force metacritic to run a fresh/rotten system instead.
I want stronger moderation on site, not for people that have a dissident opinion but for people that cannot handle a civil discussion.
I want less clickbait, because I believe the press is partly to blame for this generation of gamer warriors, and more in depth articles about the underlying problems of the industry and the press. This includes corruption, but also companies that do not treat their employees fairly or equally or are simply being unethical. I want to hear about the difficulty or discrimination certain groups of people are suffering within the industry.
I want the gaming press to stop acting like previewed games are super exciting and it is not a big advert for the publisher.
I want to hear all the sides of a story when possible.
If there’s anything positive about this whole situation is that we have proven is that gamers can organise and ruffle up some feathers. I want to gaming press to be less complacent and help us investigate and point out underlying issues in the industry so we can start focusing the gaming mob for good and hopefully eradicate some problems developers and journalists may have been suffering all these years.
I would love to be able to discuss this without someone telling me ‘if you are not with us you are against us’. I will always be on the side of my fellow gamers, regardless of sex or origin.