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Ethics and Video Game Reviews
Obiwan Kenobi continues:
The junket used in the article as an example was Ubi Soft's recent Rainbow Six: Raven Shield launch, where the writers got to dress in SWAT garb and have a paintball battle against mock terrorists and disable a dirty bomb. Things like this happen all the time, even more so in the movie industry (which the gaming industry is quickly mirroring).
Not that I was a big-time reviewer or anything. Back in 1997 or so, I ran a small website of my own (hosted on my ISP webspace) called Obiwan Reviews. Since I was just getting out of high school and into college (read: broke), I reviewed Quake mods, such as AirQuake, Quake Rally, After the Fall and others. Soon I tried to spread my wings a little and get a gig at a real gaming site, which would give me the ability to review retail titles. I found that site, frag.com, and the position was given to me by Jonathon "ZyFly" Works after many requests. Though the site itself is no longer with us, the experience was certainly eye-opening.
Technically I only reviewed two retail titles, Tomb Raider 2 and the X-Men Quake mod. I also got Dungeon Keeper and its expansion, The Deeper Dungeons, though I never got around to writing about that one.
In my first "professional" review, I lavished praise on X-Men, which deserved about 75% of it, and the last 25% was, I fully admit (now that I'm nowhere near this "industry") given just because it was free and I'd never gotten a free game before. Yes, it was unethical as hell, but I was under the deluded thinking that if you trash a free game the free games stop coming. I wish I could tell you I knew better, but back then I did not.
An upshot of that bloated thinking came a week later when I got an email from the guys who made that X-Men mod. They thanked me for the kind words and the payoff for some of their hard work.
This is not something that a biased reviewer needs to hear.
This put me in the mindset that "everything is great, just tell em what they want to hear." That way I could get in the industry and be loved by all! Or...so I thought.
After Tomb Raider 2 dropped on my doorstep, I played it for a few days and was very disappointed. Terrible clipping, clunky controls, sometimes buggy levels and graphics. Not that it was all bad, I still had a good time with a few levels, but the majority of the game was a misfire.
But this didn't stop me from hyping it up, telling everyone it was the greatest thing to come out yet.
A week or so later I got another email. Not from the developer, but from a reader. And he was pissed.
While I don't have the email any longer, I certainly remember the gist of it: He bought the game and he saw through my candy-coated review in about thirty minutes. He had trusted my words and was out $50 thanks to me.
I felt terrible and conflicted. I wasn't sure I wanted to review any more at all, considering that I knew there would be others who would purchase titles based on my words. And if those words were false, who was gaining here? The studios producing the titles or myself? The guilt was tough, but the review had ran and a retraction of my gushing paragraphs would mean that nothing I did from then on would be taken seriously. Not that those who purchased TR2 because of my review would do so any longer, but hey, I've got the rest of the readership to worry about.
After some soul searching and mid-terms, I made my decision.
That was my last review for frag.com, and my last video game review. Though I have since written hundreds of movie and DVD reviews, I still look back on those reviews for a free humbling experience any time I need one.
The points that are brought up in articles like the one at Online Journalism are very much factual. If you let yourself be taken in by the free food, games, flights, and gala of a modern-day junket, your reputation is at stake. Roger Ebert has since stopped letting movie studios pay for anything in regards to press gatherings and interview sessions, and I highly commend him for it. Everyone else would be happy to throw a few hundred loving words toward a bad movie because they got to shmooze with the stars and eat an expensive meal alongside them.
This thing happens all the time.
Trust me, I know.
These junkets happen in almost every facet of the entertainment industry. Movies and TV especially. For more information, check out some of the features at Hollywood Bitchslap, they'll give you the straight dirt on that whole mess, including "quote whores" and tidbits on spin-meisters using message boards and chat channels to schill movies the rest of us wouldn't even consider seeing...
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
The good news is, most of us are aware of the keywords in game reviews.
"Stylish"
"Action Packed"
"Best game of the year"
Are just a few of the key phrases that send us into bullshit mode. Everything afterwards ends up sounding like a grown-up from peanuts.
...this is one of the reasons that their user review system is actually a Good Thing(disregarding problems with abuses of the system, which in the large scheme is pretty insignificant). Game reviews can be good to read, especially if you find someone who has a history of praising games that you have enjoyed and criticizing those which you did not. But really what you need to do before buying is harvest some information from amateur reviewers. Certainly some of them will be idiots and a lot of them will have different tastes from you, but at least they have no vested interest in saying that something is good.
disclaimer: Of course, USENET is also great for this purpose and predates Amazon, but Amazon is more in the public consciousness these days than USENET is.
lysergically yours
That is one of the bonuses of living in Britain and getting games later than everyone else, i can speak to my American friends who inevitably have the game months before its out here, and they will tell me if its worth buying or not.
I generally will not trust a review unless i have read many, many others that agree with it.
I write for a mainstream, general circulation newspaper with a daily circulation of about 300,000 readers. The influences of freebies are mitigated by my newspaper's policy, as well as our shear size.
In essence, the paper's policy says that if you review the game, you can keep it. We handle reviews of music CDs the same way. If you don't review the game, it goes in a charity auction that is held four times a year.
I have never felt the need to give a game a better review than it deserved just because I knew I was going to be able to keep it. In fact, I've told PR flacks over the phone dozens of times that I thought their games were of poor quality, when that was in fact the case.
In my situation, games from the industry have never stopped arriving, and if they did, I'd simply call and say I was interested in reviewing a specific title. I actually prefer that way to the flood of unsolicitated titles, which are inevitably followed up by an annoying phone call sniffing for coverage. I'd rather just review what I think my readers will be interested in, and leave the rest for what I call the "enthusiast" media.
As a professional journalist, I am of the opinion that junkets where members of the "press" are invited to participate in spectacles such as a paintball outing are simply unprofessional. While having face time with game industry execs and developers is extremely valuable (that is what I use e3 for) I would never participate in anything that was clearly tied to covering the news, and I would suspect any journalist with any training in ethics would agree with me.
Now that being said, there are gray areas. Sony, Microsoft and other big game publishers will be having receptions at e3 this year with free food and drinks. Will I attend these? Absolutely. Why? Because it gives me access to players in the industry I would otherwise not have. Will I drink a bottle of water while attending these receptions? Sure. Why? Because I will likely be thirsty.
It's not just about avoiding impropriety -- it's about avoiding the appearance of impropriety, too.
And I have to tell you, even in my really limited exposure to it all, that TRUTH and FACTS will get you farther than HYPE. I played a game that sucked, control=crappy; premise=retarded. I deemed it necessary to say so in my review (and no, I won't tell you what it was that I reviewed).
Shock and horror! I got nasty emails from not only the site owner but from the manufacturer. Reviews like mine didn't sell games. Selling games makes money. Money that goes to making more games, which in a trickle-effect helps sites that do reviews, and the reviewers.
But I didn't give a shit. Know why? Because I was unpaid. It didn't effect my bottom-line at all. I spoke the truth as I saw it. Still do.
But notice I don't review games anymore.
Ask Billy "Wicked" Wilson, he'll tell you the same thing. Why do you think he hasn't made a return yet? His new site is "ready to go" but he's lost the drive to do so: the shit you have to go through just isn't worth it.
Can you still press XX OO Up Down Up down to get extra lives?
The Konami code (used for extra lives and such in many of their games) is actually: Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start.
Geez, kids today.
I worked for a small (6 employees) developer. We made low-budget ($150k or so) titles, but they were solid, fun to play and a good value, IMO. But plenty of reviewers felt free to completely slam us. Some reviews were positive and fair, some were negative but fair, but a good number were excessively negative to the point of being completely unfair. Some looked like they hadn't really played the game much, or had maybe only played the demo. Some had plagiarized stuff from other reviews. At least one reviewer was clearly having hardware problems, which are as likely to be the drivers fault as not. Also, many of the reviews have suggestions that would be impossible or very expensive to implement.
The reviews that are the most objective, I think, are the ones in PC Gamer, and Computer Games magazine. Gamespot is usually ok too. The rest of the stuff on the web could just be any 14 year old with an agenda.
The Konami code (used for extra lives and such in many of their games) is actually: Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start.
Wasn't it "select, start"?
Actually, it's neither. Start or Select, start are not actually part of the code. But if you don't hit them, nothing happens. A good way to tell if someone has friends is to ask them what the Contra code was. If they don't say select, then they were playing it alone-- no friends. If they don't know the code, then I suggest killing them, they're probably an evil alien.
"Probably the toughest time in anyone's life is when you have to murder a loved one because they're the devil." -Philips