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L.A. Times on Game Reviewer 'Playola'
madmancarman writes "Celebrity parties, target practice with automatic weapons, and free trips to spend the night in haunted castles are just some 'perks' game reviewers enjoy as described by this article from the L.A. Times. The reviewers say this has no effect on their reviews, but we've all heard politicians say the same thing with respect to their jobs. Maybe Ion Storm should have spent some more money on Daikatana junkets?"
Why do publishers always call complete collections "perfect"? This bit of stupidity comes from the Japanese word "kanzen" which means complete. Kanzen can also mean perfect, in the sense of perfectly complete, but that's not how it's normally used.
Several years ago some idiot decided to translate kanzen as perfect because it sort of made sense to call a game guide book a "perfect guide". But not we have "perfect sets" "perfect series" "perfect collections"... the whole thing is just BAKA.
I love metacritic.com, because it allows me to quickly glance at all major review scores (converted to percentage scale) for any given game. I feel taking the "average" of these reviews is a good approach to finding the truth about the latest game.
-jc
The "Submachine Gun Course" they are referring to is this one (I think):
http://www.frontsight.com/1day_smg_course.htm
It's done by a company called FrontSight and it's free. The course is about five hours training (most of it on the range), and then a two hour pitch about signing up for more courses. You don't have to stay for the two hour pitch if you don't want to.
I was in Vegas for a bachelor party and attended the course, and I must say it is very well done. The instructors are actually very nice, normal people. What really surprised me about them is that they are extremely courteous and helpful. They won't yell at you when you do something wrong like a lot of ranges. (I assume with the obvious exception of things that are outright dangerous)
The magazines I worked on didn't play that game but in the ultra-competitive British games magazine industry, there were several who most certainly did. I remember in particular being pretty sweet with GT Interactive's PR with regards to TA: Kingdoms. I was a massive fan of the former game and thought I had an understanding that I would review this game for our magazine first because I had the best background. Bingo it turned up on the cover of another magazine, exclusive review with a Big Score.
I couldn't even review the game, it had too many show stopping bugs namely the fact that it ran at about 25% normal speed. The game sucked anyway. Up until that point I was sufficiently naive to believe that everyone was like me. The process of getting reviews for the blockbusters is very much a business negotiation in the UK. Mags barter scores (I assume, although I never saw it myself), pages, coverdisk space and cover realestate.
Still, at the end of the day if you buy a mag and it says a game is great when it's absolutely crap - then you wont buy that magazine right? That's what I don't quite get about American magazines. They've always been very bum licky crawly to publishers, but then again their reviews are pretty useless coming out 2 months after a game hits the shelves anyhow...
Later on, after I escaped journalism to work in the games industry properly, I came to realise a real home truth. Actually reviews are pretty irrelevant. In this day and age, under 20% of those buying games have EVER bought a magazine for their console, still less have looked at a web site.
...I was invited by a friend who's a game reviewer to Microsoft's little self-congratulatory gig in SF yesterday (Bungie got a platinum disk for a million copies sold).
Anyway, the reviewers there were bitching like mad about the article, because it was taken totally out of context - yeah, there's payola for front covers and the like, handed out to the high ups in the press, but the average reviewer is lucky to get a flight and a shared bedroom on a lot of the junkets.
On top of that, the reviewers don't typically earn very much at all - and the last year has been real bad because of the decline in content providers. I got the impression not many of them make over $30 or $40k... in a good year (my friend made $10k last year). There's free food and trips which make up for it a little, but no-one seems to do it for the kickbacks. The general impression was that for the LA Times it was an extremely unbalanced article.
Winton
Ronnie Regan, like many 'non-major' radio personalities, would sit in a little booth, reading the wire report of the game-in-progress, and make up the bits to go along. I.e. wire says 'Player bob at bat..strike...strike..ball...ball..strike out.' and he'd fill in the details of the gritty player stepping up to the plate, knocking the dirt out of his cleats, the sound of the crowd, the whiffffffSMACK! of the strike hitting the catcher's mitt, and so on.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I used to review games for a rather large online RPG site. None of this stuff ever happened, and this was when people thought the net meant money. We were lucky to get review copies of the games, let alone to fly in an F-16. We had to buy our own E3 press passes, the games, everything. Most of the site's budget went to bandwidth, then to games. Nobody got paid, we reviewed the games because we enjoyed playing them.
After playing so many games, you start noticing what to look for, and it bugs you not to tell other people. Heck, I got the shit flamed out of me for giving Zelda 64 an 8.5 (which I still think it deserved.) I want to know where this "playola" was, and why didn't I get any? I have a feeling that this may be an isolated incident, because I know a lot of game reviewers working for prominent newspapers/websites, and none of them even hear stories of this stuff. Sure, there are some perks, usually a trip to E3 or Comdex or some other large expo, but nothing on the magnitude this guy is claiming.
If there are people out there who get this kind of treatment, it's sad. Most gamers I know don't even read reviews, game purchases are decided on word-of-mouth. Jedi Knight 2 is a perfect example. I didn't buy it because of the reviews, I bought it because everyone I knew was really excited about it and it looked cool to me. After I bought it I discovered it got rave reviews, but that was an afterthought. Gamers have an eye for spotting a good game, we don't need a reviewer to tell us what's good and what's not. Besides, mainstream media coverage of games is often horrible. I'll take word-of-mouth anyday.