"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

[MadJackalope]

But, I mean... isn't that implied by the very idea of evaluating art?

Maybe? I mean, it's hard to say what's implied when you're talking about a vast number of people. Some people believe in objective standards in art. Some people believe in subjective standards. Some people believe in objective standards but subjective perception. Some people don't even believe that video games are art, or that if they were they should be evaluated in the same way as art. 

If we're talking in general about the games press though? I don't think that's generally the way they're evaluated. 

 

Systemic corruption is defined as the following:

 

 

So let me get this straight. You're saying that corruption is the rule rather than the exception, that corruption is the primary if not only method by which things are reported at all in the games industry? That companies regularly bribe journalists/reporters to present gaming news exactly how they wish it to be presented?

A couple of things. I'm not sure where you get "the rule, rather than the exception" from that definition. I'm guessing maybe you're pointing at the use of the word "routinely" maybe? Anyway I'm not making any statement on the the rate of incidence, and I'm not exactly clear what you're getting at. Also bribing isn't really systemic corruption unless it's actually part of the mechanism of the organization. Just look at the definition that wikipedia gives: 

Systemic corruption (or endemic corruption) is corruption which is primarily due to the weaknesses of an organization or process. It can be contrasted with individual officials or agents who act corruptly within the system.

A single cop regularly taking bribes isn't systemic corruption. A cop writing a higher than necessary number of speeding tickets, in order to meet an unofficial quota, due to pressure from higher up to make more money for the department is systemic corruption. The wiki article also goes on to say "Factors which encourage systemic corruption include conflicting incentives, discretionary powers; monopolistic powers; lack of transparency; low pay; and a culture of impunity." All of which I think applies to games press. (except monopoly I guess)  (also the article goes on to talk about the rule rather than exception too, so maybe that's where you're getting that from?)

More importantly semantic arguments are the weakest piddling argument to beat around the bush with. 

I don't even think there's that big of an issue. I took issue with undisclosed Patreon, that has been changed. I still think there's a general paradigm shift in how we talk about games that needs to take place, but that sort of thing takes time. My original point was that I object to the statement "there is/never has been corruption, and anyone who thinks there is has motives for saying so". 

 

It's imprecise to use 'systemic corruption' to describe a highly commercialised industry in which the major corporations use every avenue available to attempt to influence thought leaders. A corrupt industry is one that suspends its ethical standards for money, not one in which there are holes in their ethical standards that haven't yet been patched.

 

Honestly I also think that the worst-case scenario here isn't particularly worth worrying about: at worst, game journalism is a third-party advertisement of commercial products, and consumers will have to rely on product reviews to determine whether that product is any good -- just like most other kinds of products. The artistic standards of the industry would definitely decrease, but people don't seem to be referring to cultural critics like Brandon Keogh or Anita Sarkeesian when they talk about corruption, they mean sites like Gamespot or IGN. So the cultural critics, who make the most difference in discussing non-commercial games and the artistic side of the medium, probably won't go away.

I don't think Anita is corrupt in the least, and I don't want to seem like that was my position. Anita is cool. If anything she's exactly what I wish we had more of. 

And yeah, I guess it's not the end of the world if games journalism continues to be advertisement for commercial products but DAGNABIT! I want the medium to do something better. The fact that we're talking about games as a "commercial product" in the first place is depressing. 

Maybe it's kind of silly to expect that because of the nature of the economics in creating mass-production art. On the other hand fine art kind of has similar but different problems. Maybe I'm being unrealistically idealistic of art for it's own inherent merit, but I sure hope I'm not.

[Urthman]

Ahem it is possible to write unbiased reviews - my website publishes them.

Which is amusing, but of course even these reviews which are supposedly entirety factual aren't actually unbiased as the writer still uses her or his biases to decide which facts are relevant.

[Merus]

Yeah, once I realised that you're talking about 'corruption' here and about labour in games in the Video Games forum, it became clearer that your position is strongly anti-capitalist and we weren't picking up on the difference in assumptions.

 

The art vs commerce question is incredibly difficult in games, because it's always been a hobbyist medium with a capitalist streak. It's simultaneously radically participatory and aggressively commercial in ways that confound both art critics and shareholders. The biggest game in the world was made by a guy doing a hobby project and he's a multi-millionaire. CCP games made an MMO that was what they always wanted to see, and it's one of Iceland's biggest companies. CEOs of gaming companies take turns proclaiming that they're going to focus on making "great games" at the expense of profitability. Major players are routinely outclassed, and even humiliated, by hobbyists who build on their work, and this is normal and expected. Entrenched powers get blown away every five years. The games industry is fucking weird in that capital only ensures you'll break even, but market leadership can't be bought at any price - no matter how many ads you buy, it won't stop a Minecraft.

 

I also note that games journalists obsessed for years over when a game with a strong artistic statement would gain mainstream recognition, but what ended up doing it was the industry making fuckloads of money. 

[Bjorn]

http://deathofgamergate.tumblr.com/ a good overview.

 

Good summary of the Quinn stuff, but leaves out that the fever pitch was really kicked into overdrive by the timing of the latest Sarkeesian video (it's proof of the conspiracy!) and the exiting of people like Bryce and Frank from games writing, which are all important parts of the story. 

 

I only mention that because I've actually been trying to find something that does a good job of explaining this whole fiasco without requiring a shit ton of pre-existing background knowledge, and haven't really run across anything like that.  I've got some real life friends who play video games, but who pay very little attention to blogs or greater online gamer culture, so they are really clueless about this.  I'd like to have a clear rundown of this thing just to send to people, and have started to write one up a couple of times myself, but it's so ridiculously convoluted at this point once you try to include all the different parts of it. 

[Problem Machine]

Greg Costikyan weighs in with a nuanced take on the controversy

[Denial]

I'd like to have a clear rundown of this thing just to send to people, and have started to write one up a couple of times myself, but it's so ridiculously convoluted at this point once you try to include all the different parts of it. 

 

This by Tadgh Kelly (disclosure- whom I know) is actually not a bad summary as well as something of a call to action. It doesn't cover everything - the Silverstring-as-ACORN part, for example, is not there, and I think TFYC as a whole doesn't feature noticeably, but then that feels like a sideshow anyway...

[Merus]

FUCK... greed-head... brain-dead... fucking... exploited... boy-men... tits... high-breasted bimbos... blinkered idiots... fuck... fuck... fuck... fuck... fucked... fuck... fucking... fuck... fucking... fucking... bullshit?... actual fornication... fuck off. Stop masturbating with your console controller and get a life. ...this is bullshit, you are arseholes, and get a life. ...crap... you are arseholes.

[Nachimir]

I'm starting to have an automatic response to anything related to gaters now, which is just "get the fuck out of my head fuck off fuck off". I don't think I can watch any longer without internalising and mistakenly generalising a deep suspicion and hatred for a particular audience.

 

(I think typing the stuff below has helped exorcise some of it. This really bothers me; a few events I work on have given me a sense of having to fight a scumbag, sexist, harassing element of the audience among developers and gamers alike. To see that element living, breathing and mobilising on Twitter has been dispiriting at best).

 

I've seen various people accuse them of being a cult. They're not, there's too much diversity of thought, but a few groupthink terms have definitely taken hold in the weird little subculture driving this thing. Edit: Sorry, lots of bits added).

 

 

Patterns I've seen amongst gaters:

They impatiently wait for "the next happening" "the happenings" "latest happenings" etc. Most of the people investigating are just shuffling the same conspiracy gifs and youtube videos around without making many edits, few of them seem to do or discuss research. They may be doing that on a private channel, and after someone repeatedly vandalised their etherpad, they've certainly learned to keep backups away from that service. In the places I've been, they do not speak about hacking, though I and others I know have been subject to hack attempts since this started.

 

Gater speculation on wrongdoing means that, to gaters, a person is automatically guilty. Gaters/gater allies committing actual crimes to obtain data on which to speculate is never spoken of as a crime; it's implicitly assumed that it will be admissible in court and the people who obtained it won't be prosecuted.

 

Anything posted by them as evidence is seen as incontrovertible.

 

Any actual evidence that's not in favour of their movement is "out of context", "cherry picking", or immediately claimed to be fake.

 

Gaters have a continuously moving target. Now they're trying to give the IGF a kicking, if someone points out their campaign was apparently about press ethics, they basically reply "Yeah but this came up now and it's bigger".

 

Anyone filing a police report over harassment is accused of not actually filing a police report (because of course "they faked it"). Most seem to think filing an FOIA request for documentation of an ongoing police investigation is fair play and won't be flagged in any way (This assumption in particular makes me think of them as flawed systems thinkers. It reminds me of how broken and biased toward the player game systems tend to be. The guards will forget you. You can always succeed. Means definitely justify the ends, etc.).

 

Anyone who is victimised is just "Playing the victim card".

 

Habits like claiming harassment is faked are backed by, amongst other things, citing Occam's Razor (!).

 

For as long as they can't dominate news cycles, they seek to dominate social platforms, and occasionally speak of their hopes to get on (for instance) the BBC or other major non-games press (A friend asked me on Twitter to explain gamergate to her yesterday, and within a minute had complete strangers popping up to tell her "GamerGate isn't misogynistic!").

 

They're worse at investigating things than the specialist press they claim are corrupt, because gaters are more tribal than rational. They're rather trust an unhinged youtuber than, say, a much more extensive examination of the IGF that Rock Paper Shotgun did, because the youtuber is one of their own.

[Denial]

Oh, yeah, logic and rhetorical terms get used a lot - I think that's the effect of Reddit. Lots of "genetic fallacy" and "ad hominem" going around, not least because proponents of the hashtag keep turning out to have... complicated pasts.

[Ozzie]

RPS has finally posted their stance on the harassment campaign/claims of journalistic corruption of the past month.

[Merus]

Oh well look who finally showed up to the party.

[Ozzie]

Better than nothing, as far as I'm aware most gaming sites still haven't adressed the issue at all. It would be nice if they did, it would act as a good countermeasure against a lot of the misinformation going around. It's odd that you have to visit websites like The Guardian to read up on an issue that affects the gaming industry.

[Nachimir]

At first, they all avoided it because actual god damn journalistic ethics steered them well away from posting about a woman's private life. As it's rolled on and become a bigger thing that gradually switches targets though, and given how badly Kotaku and then Polygon screwed it up*, I've not really been surprised at how gingerly the specialist press have approached it.

 

* Chris Plante Grant shared 1700-strong block list last night with a "block all" button at the top. As well as gaters it had a bunch of minority game developers and games journalists on it too.

[Problem Machine]

* Chris Plante shared 1700-strong block list last night with a "block all" button at the top. As well as gaters it had a bunch of minority game developers and games journalists on it too.

wow awesome gj

[JonCole]

As far as I know, Chris Grant was the one who posted it but it was a compiled list with Ben Kuchera and the aforementioned Chris Plante. Basically, it seemed like a half-decent idea to share a block list but the problem is that people block people for different reasons and have different tolerances for certain things so when you compile a list between an ineffectual annoying shit like Grant, someone who is perpetually wrong like Kuchera, and a generally reasonable SJW-type like Plante you're sure to catch tons of people under that net for tons of different reasons.

[Nachimir]

(Edit: Yes, Jon is correct. I also saw a few people point at blocktogether days earlier, but after checking it out felt it was a bad idea for exactly the reason Polygon were caught out).

 

Oh god dammit, Chris Grant, not Chris Plante. It was a combined list, and there was furious backpedalling:

https://twitter.com/chrisgrant/status/508740905860599808

https://twitter.com/chrisgrant/status/508758526735286272

 

Grants response to industry figures being on the list was "look over there!"

https://twitter.com/chrisgrant/status/508725940781060096

[JonCole]

He also basically took no responsibility, saying that it probably came from someone else he compiled with. I really don't like Chris Grant, he literally never takes any situation seriously. When he used to be on the Joystiq Podcast, he was always the "but it's video games!" guy who basically made any serious conversation ridiculous. I'm not surprised that he's been largely quiet during this whole GG debacle, because he'd need teeth for that.

[Bjorn]

That's infuriating, his first (that I know of) public comment is to brag about his Twitter blocklist?  To not have it occur to you at all that this might be a bad idea to lump several people's lists together? 

[Denial]

On the other hand, I can imagine how awful Twitter might be for a Polygon writer if nobody was blocked. I noticed a couple of names in the list of people who have been kicking around the dread hashtag. However, using somebody else's blocklist, using Blocktogether, does sound like a hostage to fortune.

 

(There's blockbot, which has a list of known trolls, spammers, griefers etc, which works a bit differently.)

 

OTOH, I can't fault someone for blocking people in general. And if you're the editor in chief of Polygon and relying on Twitter as a primary mode of contact with industry figures, you're probably in trouble anyway, so I don't know how big a deal that is.

[JonCole]

It just strikes me as odd for the EIC of a gaming monolith-type website that probably has a hand in hiring. If you're adopting blocks of independent/freelance writers from other people, you're in some way counting those writers out if you post a position, they apply, and you say "well I've never heard about this person before..."

[Nachimir]

Yeah. I think they, and lots of other people who resorted to blocktogether, didn't really think the implications through. Blocking could be very different for someone who does versus someone who doesn't hire writers. Within minutes, it was also being referred to as a "blacklist" among gaters.

 

At least maladjusted stupidity in games audiences has a name now: gaters. People flailed around a bit at first trying to find one that described them without prejudice, and the whole event has been big and traumatic enough they can just be named after their own thing.

[tegan]

Kayin of I Wanna Be The Guy fame weighs in.

 

[Problem Machine]

Maddy Myers on surviving gaters. Almost physically painful to read. Important.

[Bjorn]

@Tegan, I'm crying from laughing at that. 

[Henroid]

There's a good write-up of the whole clusterfuck that was GamerGate over here. I wish I could write as well as other people when my sentiment is the same.

http://deathofgamergate.tumblr.com/post/96929549057/why-gamergate-is-destined-to-fail

 

Also Tegan that is the greatest thing.