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1UP, Plagiarizing, and Other Bits of Joy
Nathan writes "1up recently posted their Dead or Alive 4 strategy guide on their website. It didn't take long for users at the Dead or Alive Central forums to recognize their hard work analyzing the fighting game engine had been blatantly pasted into the strategy guide without any credit given whatsoever. While movelists are largely factual and can be argued to be public knowledge, the most incriminating evidence is the section on the evasion system, which had been pasted into the 1up guide with a few reworded sentences. Discussions are ongoing at Gaming Age Forums (with 1up members defending the writer of the guide) and DoA Central.
Perhaps the most interesting bit about this is that just a month or two ago, Dan Hsu from EGM and 1up had famously written an editorial criticizing shady ongoings at other publications." I've reread the different pieces, and while I think the DoA Forums are a large basis of work, people need to read Kate Turabian's on how to cite research because I don't see this as plagiarism in the whole - just poorly cited. Update: 01/23 22:20 GMT by Z : 1up has announced that they've pulled the guide to review the situation.
I interviewed at 1up recently, and when I brought up the subject of game "journalism" the guys just laughed it off. They said, basically, that they're in the business to make money, and that the editorial wall of old-guard journalism doesn't apply.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
"Oh, oops, I forgot to cite my usage of these third party pieces of code. It's just poor citation. It's not stealing or anything right?"
Yeah, people need to stop making up euphemisms for things.
I've reread the different pieces, and while I think the DoA Forums are a large basis of work, people need to read Kate Turabian's on how to cite research because I don't see this as plagiarism in the whole - just poorly cited.
Which is exactly the opposite of everything they teach you in school. If you don't cite your sources, you are plagiarizing. Claiming incompetance by poorly citing your work is no excuse...
"...I don't see this as plagiarism in the whole - just poorly cited." It's widely accepted that poor citing == plagiarism.
I once showed a script I wrote to a guy who heads IT security in our company. A few months later in a company newsletter he mentioned the script, how it had helped find and resolve a serious security falw and how he had submitted it to a 3rd party security organization for review. He took full credit for everything and ended up getting an interview with SANS. Granted, the guy is higher up the corporate ladder than me, but he's not my boss and my name was never mentioned as being the autor of the script. For me, this was a lesson learned.
I'll never show this dude a script again! Now, I understand how he got to where he is... making friends with smart people and using their work to gain a reputation that he does not deserve.
Anywhere I go on the web to find information I see the same thing. Whether it's a Doom walkthrough or a guitar tab/chord guide for the latest song it's the same thing. One person did some work and everybody else with a site is there to copy and paste that work to their own site. Melissa Etheridge's 'Closer to Fine' guitar tab for instance. I've found that one tab at a ton of sites, not one site bothering to change one word of the introduction from the one person who tabbed out the song. Go look at Google News and find all the related stories under one header and you'll find 1000 stories, all the same. Same words and sometimes attributed to a wireservice report. Now just let me copy and paste this comment into my Digg comment on the same story. No use fighting against the tide here.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
Actually these guys have been ripping off video game FAQ authors for years. Even as far back as 1993. A well known faq author for some of the Mortal Kombat games would actually poison his FAQ with false moves just to see if they appeared in other peoples FAQs or magazines. Any MK fans from that era will prolly recall seeing the "Tiger Run" move from MK2 posted in an EGM "strategy guide" in one of their issues. Sure enough, EGM was there to rip of his every word, even the fake ones. A few years later they ripped of a FAQ author of a Tekken 3 Moves list. So to most of the people in the fighting game community this isn't really nothing new. Really sad, but it has been happening for over 10 years now.
I'm sure there's someone I should cite for that quote, but I can't remember who. ;)
TZ