If you mean individual writers and developers, no, that probably wouldn’t matter in most cases. If you’re best buds with the person behind a specific game, you either disclose it in your review or recuse yourself. But companies do all sorts of things for attention and good reviews. Hosting giant events, giving away nice crap, blah blah blah. There are reasons media outlets have ethics policies that cover things like gifts- that’s all I’m saying.
And that stuff really isn’t a big deal. I’m saying it’s something worth paying attention to and that it’s OK to have a public discussion of this stuff, not that there’s something crooked going on here.
“Hard questions” is a bit subjective, but gaming journalism really needs to become more it is. This satirical article really hits home. Game reviews are very rote and focus a lot on the mechanical aspects of the game and its plot more than its cultural relevance, place in the world, and how its themes interact with society and the player. That’s fine for some games, just like it’s okay to review B horror movies as nothing more than B horror movies, but it’s striking just how by-the-numbers game reviews are compared to reviews of other forms of media.
And that’s precisely the point that exposes the whole “scandal” as some mysoginistic circle-jerk.
Gaming journalism is rotten and corrupt, and has been for ever (at least where large publishers are involved - indie games are a different matter). Publishers blackmail for or outright buy good reviews ; astroturf metacritic ; journos get threatened with the boot should they dare not give this or that title (advertized on the site, natch) two thumbs up… and nobody, and I mean nobody *reads reviews any more anyway. Because everybody knows they’re bullshit, and even if the reviewer is 100% legit he’s only played the first few levels anyway (which the devs have naturally packed with all the good stuff… that you’ll only see there most of the time, or will never be developed further).
Which is why word of mouth has become the norm.
But *this *time, for *this *obscure game, it’s different. Because it wasn’t the banal landscape of money, nepotism or back-scratching all around. Ooooh no. This time ~feminine wiles~ might (very doubtfully) have been employed. And that’s UNACCEPTABLE. Dirty sex-haver !
This is what I’m talking about. All of the big publishers stopped holding giant media events years ago. Yes, more than a decade ago, a company like Capcom would fly you out to Vegas or Hawaii to show you the latest Resident Evil game. But that very quickly turned into an invitation to pay your own way to a media event in Vegas or Hawaii before the whole idea of “media days” stopped soon after. Ubisoft was the last holdout and their yearly Ubidays event was last held in 2008.
As for giving away crap… the idea that a keychain or a USB drive would be enough to entice a good review out of someone is insulting.
There’s a lot of moving pieces to a video game and it’s hard to react to them all without becoming sort of generic. There are plenty of folks doing more in-depth criticism (I like Polygon, for example), but the average game review is meant to serve as a guide to help gamers decide if the game is worth buying or not. The review culture of any medium is quite similar.
That said, the vast majority of games don’t need this kind of criticism. Most game narratives are still at the B movie level.
Just because it happened once (and no one has ever commented on the specifics IIRC) doesn’t mean that there is systemic corruption in the game journalism sector.
I have no idea about other folks, but for me, I tend to “trust” Gamespot reviews–the ironiquotes are because I have no personal trust in them. It’s not about that kind of trust. Rather, it’s about the fact that I find, when I play a game, I tend to agree with their reviews.
There’s a big difference between game reviews and, say, movie reviews. The most famous movie review sites are linked to larger publications: NYTimes, LATimes, Time, etc. People go to these sites for news and read the reviews alongside the news. A certain level of integrity is necessary, because people trust the source.
Game reviews, at least for me, are different. Almost the only reason I visit a game site is to check out the reviews (with very rare looks at previews and news articles). If I find that the site is giving good reviews to games that I think are lousy, I’ll stop visiting them. Their entire currency is their reputation as reviewers; incompetent reviewers will lose page views.
At least, that’s my theory. I have no idea if it’s accurate :).
Oh god OP what have you done, the Dope isn’t in the demographics for this sort of video game e-drama. Yeah, gaming journalism is somehow even more corrupt than actual journalism. But everyone already knew that. And Zoe Quinn is the unholy scamming embodiment of video game SJWs, whatevs.
To me the funniest thing to come out of this is Vivian James and the SJWs out of touch response to 4chan, especially since she’s better than anything they could do, which just propels the butt hurt jealousy out of the stratosphere. Plus Vivian is the perfect avatar for /v/ in general. All the counter charity trolling is icing.
The flood of Vivian art is a river of god damned platinum. It’s like every half-baked meme from the last 10 years came back to life to be repackaged for the latest controversy. My sides have ascended into another dimension.
4chan as the “Cathedral of Misogyny” is classic. What would the Dope be? The Synagogue of Burned Out Hippies? I can’t into cleverness.
So, when a couple of European YouTube Let’s Players I subscribe to post Vlogs from Paris talking about how Ubisoft paid their way to attend an event to give select people hands-on access to a hot new upcoming game, and then later they are able to post early game footage of the event because Ubisoft lets them record them playing at the event, are you saying all of that is faked because it stopped happening in 2008?
Who Zoe Quinn sleeps with is her own business. The journalist in Item #3 is Nathan Grayson. He never reviewed her game and only mentioned it once in a list of upcoming Indie releases.
The boss is Joshua Boggs. He’s married and I guess his life is pretty much a mess right now, thanks to being dragged into this mess by the bitter ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjroni. They started sleeping together before she was hired but it didn’t affect her hiring though, even BitterBoy made a point of saying that.
Robin Arnott is a third guy involved. He’s generally standing by Zoe, although he hasn’t really commented. Some internet sleuth found that he was involved with a Indiecade 2013 festival. Depression Quest was selected to exhibit in the Night Games category. Arnott was the category chair. Depression Quest did not win an award. It just showed up.
But overall, this all just garden-variety slut-shaming from a bitter ex. The only reason it’s “news” is that it involves a feminist having sex.
The original project was that, in order to encourage women to particpate in gaming and game development, women were to submit their ideas for games to the Fine Young Capitalists. The FYC would put them on a website and people would vote for their fav. The winning game would go into production and then be sold. The proceeds would be donated to charity, with the winning woman keeping 8%.
Zoe made a series of tweets about how this is a stupid idea. She pointed out that if the FYC want to encourage women in game development, they should hire women to do the work, not just hand over their ideas. She also pointed that 8% is pretty measly compensation. The idea that “the rest” would go to charity was never really spelled out, nor was the compensation for the people making the game.
Eventually, the project collapsed in a shower of vague promises and unanswered questions.
In the middle of the firestorm around Zoe, a redittor showed up and blamed her for destroying the whole project. This is clearly false. It’s not Quinn’s fault that the original project was poorly thought out. The redittor only made one post about it, with no citations or anything. Just vague accusations.
Furthermore, if you visit their website, you’ll see the FYC, actually have a modified version of the Women in Gaming project going right now. Clearly, Quinn’s prodding hasn’t destroyed anything of value and may even have been some use in prodding it into shape.
Unverifiable. When things started to blow up, Quinn was inundated with Twitter, YouTube & email hate and death threats. She responded poorly, making DCMA threats to websites to get hate messages about herself removed. This was clumsy and ultimately futile. She dropped the matter almost immediately.
I don’t want to make light of the misuse of DCMA threats but I do think it’s reasonable to point out that she backed off the issue when wiser heads prevailed.
Another reference to the FYC thing (Unless it’s a reference to a failed tv show, which is a whole other Dramarama)… Quinn did not sabotage it. It fell apart from poor planning once people (including Quinn) started asking questions. And she certainly didn’t do so she could “run a replacement”.
In the wake of the Women in Gaming project falling through, Quinn started plans for a game jam for women. It’s called Rebel Jam here’s its site http://www.rebelgamejam.com/
It was only announced end of April, there’s no info on it since then. Quinn has been working to finish her game and then there’s all this bullshit going on. Also, the name Rebel Jam will probably have to be changed for trademark reasons.
It’s true that if nothing comes of this, Quinn’s handling of the money will come into question but it’s too soon to say it’s a bust.
Yeah, industry people get industry contacts to announce their industry events. It’s not a scandal just because a feminist did it.
Wolf Wozniak (this guy - https://twitter.com/Ouren) made a post on Twitter saying that he’d been sexually harrassed by Zoe at a wedding. Phil Fish responded in the only way he knows how by setting his own hair on fire and threatening to burn everyone to the ground with him. Wozniak eventually apologized for bringing it up. Phil Fish quit gaming (again.)
Declaring that Phil Fish is Zoe Quinn’s “sidekick” is pretty much all you need to know about the truth of this dubious incident. Wozniak deleted the post and no longer seems to want to pursue it. I don’t know what went on at the wedding but the people there that night think Wozniak was a shithead to say that. Maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t.
At any rate, blindboyard’s characterization of the event is nonsense.
There’s no reason to think she faked being mugged. Besides, how else do you think she pays her army of minions and industry bigwigs who do all this silencing and promoting on her behalf. It’s not like being a freelance game dev is bringing in the bacon.
But claiming that Quinn (and Anita Sarkeesian) is faking all the harrasment she gets is a common way that the internet hatemongers try to deflect from their out of control death threats and rape threats. They claim that the women are making it all up for attention or for money and donation. Sometimes, my favorite, they claim that the women are faking their harassment in order to harass their harassers.
Oh yeah more of the fake harassment. Wizard Chan is a 4chan thing. Fuck all those fuckers. Depression Quest didn’t get Greenlighted on its first attempt. The second time it got enough votes. Obviously the only explanation is that Zoe Quinn told a bunch of lies about innocent 4channers for the attention.
So there’s this crowdfunding site called Patreon, where you can set it up so that people can automatically donate a couple bucks to you each month. It’s for freelancers to try and have an idea of a monthly budget via regular donations.
Zoe Quinn had a patreon page set up and some of the people who pledged donations of a couple bucks included Ben Kuchera - and I forget who else. So that’s what this is. Ben Kuchera doesn’t seem to have slept with Zoe Quinn or written much of anything about it. It’s only important because this whole #gamergate thing is trying to make this be about gaming journalism integrity (rofl) to cover up the fact that’s it’s 100% anti-feminazi bullshit and rape threats.
As I said above. The DMCA takedown letter was wrong but not false. IT was a mistake and Quinn has stopped pursuing the matter.
It’s like they can’t conceive that a person’s friends who care about her and don’t want to post a bunch of hurtful half-truths or look the other way while people dox her and threaten her and burn her for being a feminazi. No, all those industry people aren’t concerned for Zoe Quinn or even the truth of the situation. She must have leaned on them with her all-powerful uh, what is it, that she’s supposed to have that gives her the power to mass delete Reddit?
No different than the naked pics of Jennifer Lawrence. Putting a naked photo on the internet is not the same thing as “knowing” that people would track them down and mail them to her parents.
Yeah, right. What’s actually happened is that 4chan is orchestrating people to use the hashtags #notyourshield (don’t ask; it’s dumb) and #gamergate on massive numbers of throwaway accounts to complain about the so called “scandal” in gaming journalism.
Then at some point, someone (Leigh Alexander, I think) started talking about how Gamers as a culture are dead. That pissed all the hatemongers off even more. That’s where the #gamergate thing comes from. The basic idea is correct though. People who were once bullied and latched onto a niche hobby built their identity around being straight, white, male, Gamers. Well, gaming is no longer a niche hobby and Gamer is no longer an identity that applies only to maladjusted pale-males. The term, the industry, the games themselves are expanding to reflect the fact that today, we’re all gamers. So people are starting to take note of the latent sexism in the industry and are working to grow beyond. That’s where Sarkeesian and Quinn come in. It’s not surprising that the old guard is pushing back - although it’s a little surprising that they’re sending death threats to Sarkeesian’s family (while simultaneously insisting that she’s making it all up for attention.)
It feels a lot like this:
And yet, no one is accusing the FYC of playing things up for attention …
In other news, people on Reddit have been trading and hosting the various stolen nude photos recently. They raised a lot of money (well … $6000) and have been trying to donate it to charities like Water and the Prostate Cancer Foundation, but those charities have told them to take a hike. It says a lot about the “fine young capitalists” that they’re associating themselves with 4chan - because if there’s one thing we all know about 4chan, it’s their deep commitment to social justice.
Sorry for the lateness and how long this is. In the end, you should all just read Marley’s post #5
It might be misandry - if you orchestrated 4chan to send so many rape threats to the guy that Twitter’s report feature doesn’t even work for him any more because they think he’s bot who’s overloading their system, meaning that he has no further way to block any of the people talking about killing and/or raping him.
I tend to believe Melenith’s take on events if only because the original complaint about Zoey Quinn seems to give her powers far beyond what a regular freelancer would be capable of.
