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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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Kind of garbage quality, but there's a reason why this is the only thing people remember about Ratatouille:

 

 

Good journalism is fair, but good journalism takes a side. It's completely unreasonable to expect a journalist to champion a work without being allowed to support it in ways that actually matter. The only reason we even have journalists is to champion new works that need friends; Activision, 2K, EA and Ubisoft are perfectly capable of selling their games on their own.

I would agree that it has a stance. I don't like the term "take a side" because I find that to be too conflict oriented rather than discussion oriented but I essentially agree. 

 

 

I'd read the whole post, but I'm too busy doing cool things with my cool friends.

 

If you really want to get into clique stuff, then I promise: No matter how successful, well known, or well regarded you become in games or game journalism, that shit will still follow you around, and the reason for that is not because it's all-pervasive, but because you care about it and think it's real. It is more a state of mind than an actual reflection of social relationships. No matter what part of the industry or its surroundings you eventually crack into, you'll find that people make friends and hang out, some people actually hate each other in ways you didn't expect, no one is as united as they may look from afar, and a whole load of others are looking for the slightest confirmation of a ᴄʟɪǫᴜᴇ in order to tell themselves whatever narrative they want to about it, usually to confirm a set of conclusions they already came to.

People make friends. People talk about people and groups of people. People have profiles in media, and in turn those images become assumptions in the heads of others. That process is not under anyone person or group's control. The idea of cliques builds on these things along with all kinds of bullshit stories we tell ourselves based around antagonist-protagonist, giving those we feel excluded by the role of antagonists when they almost certainly mean no malice whatsoever. Sometimes, people just don't fit in with each other. I know a lot of indie developers, and deal with hundreds every year. Some of them are close friends, but there are a whole heap that I don't really fit with and who don't fit with me when it comes to social settings. I still do business with them, but we don't hang out. It's just humans, it's not a conspiracy, and the only way to deal with it is move the fuck on and find your people.

 

It's not that group behaviour is never problematic, but these things are human problems, not games industry problems.

I totally agree it's not a conspiracy and also not a thing that's just the games industry. I don't think it's intentional but I also think that doesn't mean we shouldn't pay attention to it and try to decrease it's influence. Most systemic prejudice isn't intentional. People don't wake up in the morning a pass laws that have far reaching and disproportionate effects on minorities because they're card carrying Klan members. Stuff like Redlining ain't sexy enough for the media to talk about but it's probably the single biggest driving force of racism in America, and it came about not through specific outward expressions of hatred but rather through the effects of human social dynamics. Outward forms of hatred are easy to fight. Racist skinheads are the least of our worries, because they're intentional and not going to attract any real substantial following. It's the pernicious effect of systemic problems that we should really be concerned with, precisely because that kind of stuff just goes under the radar most of the time and it's very difficult to stop.

And as I've said time and time again I don't think it's a black and white issue. I think it's a human nature and there are pros and cons to it, but I do think the games industry could probably do with some reflection on the issue. There ought to be a greater fostering of openness in the industry, much in the same way that people have been trying to do with female game devs etc.  I think what makes it difficult is that in general there is an insularity, even to indie circles that you don't see in most other industries. Film is a whole lot more open, you have people from all sorts of walks of life involved, while in games, even if you have a bright pink mohawk, you're probably still a geek. People self identify so strongly in games, people define themselves as "gamers". So fucking weird when you think about it, no other medium really does that, except in the really really deep snob circles. So yeah it's a human problem, but it's a particularly big problem in games. 

 

If you want to talk about the nebulous turn of phrase "invested in its success", should we not allow reviewers to review sequels of games that they reviewed? Because undoubtedly someone who played Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2 would then be invested in the success of Mass Effect 3, particularly if they carried a save from game to game.

 

I honestly find this example no different from the Patreon example. Who's to say that money is any more or less of an "investment" than time for any particular person? If you're some rich asshole that reviews games (just pretend this person exists, lolol) wouldn't your $5 "investment" per month to contribute to a game's development be effectively pocket change "investment"? What if that rich reviewer (lolol) spent hundreds of hours on the prior games, which if you value that dude's time would amount of literally thousands of dollars worth of "investment"?

Actually that probably wouldn't be a bad idea right? Also, I understand why sequels are such a thing in games, but I still find that weird. I hope as generic engines get more powerful, we'll see less of that be a thing to begin with. 

Anyway I think money is part of an investment but Patreon is a lot more than that. You're a patron. That's a role that holds a huge amount of significance in the Art World. A patron isn't just a customer, they're a champion to a cause. 

 

I can't believe people are talking about this. It's a joke. Follow the money: there's only a problem when it flows to the journalists from developers and publishers, not the other way around. That's just being a consumer.

I'd argue being a "consumer" is also a problem. This whole self-identification with the product is itself a problem. I would like journalists to be critics, not consumers. Games criticism is only sort of coming into being a thing, rather than just a way of selling Consumer Electronics, you know? This is stuff that other mediums figured out a long time ago.

Ideally no money should change hands. You pay for something, you want it to be good. You're paid to say something is good, you'll say it's good. That's why most real film criticism happens in academia, because it removes profit motive.

Anyway I think that's an ideal, not necessarily achievable, and so the most important thing is disclosure.  

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If your outlet thinks Patreon is unacceptable for subjects of articles, then ban it

It's a lot easier to be okay with this when you don't follow a lot of writers and game devs who are a few Patreon contributions away from homelessness. This is real fucking money that real fucking people need to make a living.

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It's a lot easier to be okay with this when you don't follow a lot of writers and game devs who are a few Patreon contributions away from homelessness. This is real fucking money that real fucking people need to make a living.

Additionally, a ban on just Patreon, like Kotaku did, seems extremely shitty. If there's something wrong with the concept of funding a game developer (or journalist, like in the example of Cara Ellison and her campaign to support her embedded journalism series) in order to get works from them is deemed ethically unacceptable, then shouldn't Kickstarter be off-limits too?

There's very little daylight between Kickstarter and Patreon from my perspective. Personally, If I were in the shoes of someone setting ethics policy at game writing sites, I wouldn't ban either, but if forced to, both would be gone.

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Additionally, a ban on just Patreon, like Kotaku did, seems extremely shitty. If there's something wrong with the concept of funding a game developer (or journalist, like in the example of Cara Ellison and her campaign to support her embedded journalism series) in order to get works from them is deemed ethically unacceptable, then shouldn't Kickstarter be off-limits too?

There's very little daylight between Kickstarter and Patreon from my perspective. Personally, If I were in the shoes of someone setting ethics policy at game writing sites, I wouldn't ban either, but if forced to, both would be gone.

 

Absolutely. A ban on all crowdfunding still seems silly but it is at least consistent.  Singling out Patreon is awful.

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Actually that probably wouldn't be a bad idea right? Also, I understand why sequels are such a thing in games, but I still find that weird. I hope as generic engines get more powerful, we'll see less of that be a thing to begin with. 

Anyway I think money is part of an investment but Patreon is a lot more than that. You're a patron. That's a role that holds a huge amount of significance in the Art World. A patron isn't just a customer, they're a champion to a cause. 

 

Not right. Reviews are a subjective exercise, so the opinions of someone "invested" are just as valuable as someone who comes to a sequel cold.

 

Also, I think your understanding of patronage is backwards. Patrons often funded art that espoused the same socio-political/religious views as the patron, so in effect the art was the champion for the patron. That's why I don't think this is a big deal - of course people involved in games media would have a preference for what direction they'd want the art form to go. That doesn't make them any less equipped to make an analysis of the final product.

 

Basically, I see no value in banning Patreon. If Kotaku did it because they saw funding of someone's Patreon as an implicit endorsement, then they could have banned non-anonymous Patreon contributions. But they don't claim to make that argument or seek to make that distinction in the restriction, so it seems incredibly misguided.

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Not right. Reviews are a subjective exercise, so the opinions of someone "invested" are just as valuable as someone who comes to a sequel cold.

 

Depending on the audience (of the review), I'd think the opinion of someone invested could be far more valuable than that of someone new to a series. For instance, I can only imagine that a football manager grognard is going to be much more interested in the opinion of someone who can tell them what the current iteration does differently than the previous ones versus the opinion of a neophyte to the series (and frankly, there aren't that many football management sims out there so if they haven't played a recent football manager, it probably means they're a neophyte to the genre as well).

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Not right. Reviews are a subjective exercise, so the opinions of someone "invested" are just as valuable as someone who comes to a sequel cold.

 

Also, I think your understanding of patronage is backwards. Patrons often funded art that espoused the same socio-political/religious views as the patron, so in effect the art was the champion for the patron. That's why I don't think this is a big deal - of course people involved in games media would have a preference for what direction they'd want the art form to go. That doesn't make them any less equipped to make an analysis of the final product.

 

Basically, I see no value in banning Patreon. If Kotaku did it because they saw funding of someone's Patreon as an implicit endorsement, then they could have banned non-anonymous Patreon contributions. But they don't claim to make that argument or seek to make that distinction in the restriction, so it seems incredibly misguided.

If you see my earlier post, I said that any kind of journalism is subjective because humans are by nature subjective beings, and there's no point in trying to pretend we're objective. I am against the Kotaku ban, and I think it doesn't really address the real issue, which is disclosure. I also agree this sort of stuff should apply to kickstarters and other things of that nature. 

Also patronage is a storied 2-way relationship but a significant part of it is definitely about the patron championing their patronized. It's complex, some of it is the patron championing their own ideals through the vessel of their patronized, some of it is about supporting a person they believe in, some of it is just about good PR and supporting causes that will give them brownie points (Like how the Koch Brothers and Bank of America donated a lionshare of the Boston Museum of Fine Art), some of it was just the economic system of the time. 

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If you believe that playing games can affect your investment in reviewing a sequel and that disclosure is the answer, do you think that reviewers should thusly disclose if they played the previous games in a review of a sequel?

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I'd argue being a "consumer" is also a problem. This whole self-identification with the product is itself a problem. I would like journalists to be critics, not consumers. Games criticism is only sort of coming into being a thing, rather than just a way of selling Consumer Electronics, you know? This is stuff that other mediums figured out a long time ago.

Ideally no money should change hands. You pay for something, you want it to be good. You're paid to say something is good, you'll say it's good. That's why most real film criticism happens in academia, because it removes profit motive.

Anyway I think that's an ideal, not necessarily achievable, and so the most important thing is disclosure.

Explain to me a person who's a critic but not a consumer. You think Roger Ebert never paid to watch a movie?

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If you believe that playing games can affect your investment in reviewing a sequel and that disclosure is the answer, do you think that reviewers should thusly disclose if they played the previous games in a review of a sequel?

They pretty much always disclose that in the actual article anyways.

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They pretty much always disclose that in the actual article anyways.

 

There's a difference between mentioning it for practical purposes versus requiring disclosure of it for ethical reasons.

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There's a difference between mentioning it for practical purposes versus requiring disclosure of it for ethical reasons.

 

I wonder about whether there's so much difference between moral and practical question in ethics. Isn't it reasonable to look at ethics from a rational perspective rather than an aesthetic one? The problem of a husband writing about a wife is both that it is potentially unfair and also that it runs the risk of the writing becoming irrational by virtue of how someone in a relationship perceives their partner. That is a good practical consideration if you want to have writing that is useful.

 

It is useful to know how an author relates to the subject of their writing. Things like mentioning that they've played the predecessor in a series, what the gameplay reminds them of, how they've experienced similar games in the past, and many other such points provide us with useful points of reference to calibrate and understand the experience they're relating to us. Authors will provide much of this as a matter of course because it allows their readers to better understand the experience they're trying to share and that's good.

 

The problem with a wife writing about a husband isn't just that it's potentially biased, but rather that this potential bias can pass undetected by readers producing a skewed perspective on the subject being written about. Something like Patreon falls into the same type of potential influence: one that can go unnoticed even though it's present. That being said, for a good volume of video game writing potential influences all the way from something as small as Patreon to as large as being someone's spouse do not matter in the least.

 

My initial response to Patreon being undisclosed was that it should be, and I still feel the same way. From personal experience, I've found that materially funding a developer or project produces a more vested interest than not. I won't reiterate my justifications further than that because what it boils down to is personal opinion from colloquial experience and that's not much better than speculation: the same is true about those dismissing the potential influences. There is simply insufficient evidence to walk around proclaiming that Patreon has this or that effect, but there is a good degree of concern so I feel it merits consideration though I find Kotaku's decision to ban Patreon outright to be premature and excessive.

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Depending on the audience (of the review), I'd think the opinion of someone invested could be far more valuable than that of someone new to a series. For instance, I can only imagine that a football manager grognard is going to be much more interested in the opinion of someone who can tell them what the current iteration does differently than the previous ones versus the opinion of a neophyte to the series (and frankly, there aren't that many football management sims out there so if they haven't played a recent football manager, it probably means they're a neophyte to the genre as well).

 

That kinds of feels like analysis, though, and analysis typically gets far fewer hits than the thumbs up/down 'should you buy this?' review.

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That kinds of feels like analysis, though, and analysis typically gets far fewer hits than the thumbs up/down 'should you buy this?' review.

I don't think so? I think it's pretty common for even the big outlets to factor in "this is worse than/better than/doesn't change anything from last year's madden/call of duty/etc." am I totally off base about that?

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They generally don't go particularly deep; I remember seeing someone from the fighting game community talking about how ignorant games reviewers are because they don't go indepth into the timing of the moves and the balance and how that's much more important to whether the game is any good than the variety of modes and characters. I'm probably mentally substituting your argument for his.

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Upon performing some research, I'm ready to revise my premise. The research yielded this study that acknowledges a higher value placed on objects created (or in this case partially funded). It's a cognitive bias called the IKEA effect. So, I concede that reviewers will probably have greater investment in a game they help fund, but also I don't feel any less confident that other forms of unavoidable consumerism that exist in the gaming space have some effect.

 

I was giving this more thought last night - I know for a fact that lots of reviewers of course own their own consoles and PCs to play games on. I don't believe it's required by any particular outlet, but obviously the practical considerations of being able to play a game for review at home in addition to at work can make reviewing a lengthy game more bearable. So, if you believe that sunk costs can contribute to a cognitive bias yielding higher value for something created, isn't it then possible that if someone owns for instance a Wii U and a PS4 that they'd place a higher value on reviewed games on those consoles rather than Xbox One and PC games that they can only play at work?

 

There are any number of examples that are congruent to that one, whether it's the sequel factor where the sunk cost is time or the actual price of a game where the sunk cost varies due to pricing. These are all issues not always directly disclosed or mentioned organically in reviews, but they could potentially have a bias effect that would presumably affect the outcome much like a Patreon contribution might.

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There are any number of examples that are congruent to that one, whether it's the sequel factor where the sunk cost is time or the actual price of a game where the sunk cost varies due to pricing. These are all issues not always directly disclosed or mentioned organically in reviews, but they could potentially have a bias effect that would presumably affect the outcome much like a Patreon contribution might.

Patreon is not a typical source of bias though. The vast majority of readers will not be contributing to a project or developer via something like Kickstarter or Patreon, hence it's alien to their experience and unexpected. We generally expect things like playing the predecessor of a game, or purchasing a game, or all sorts of mundanity: those are things we do ourselves and understand.

 

We know that the experience of someone who really into a series or genre is going to be quite different than someone who's playing a game for the first time. In the most extreme examples like Lords Managements or competitive shooters, the difference between how a person who has poured thousands of hours into a game, versus a couple hours, will be immense, but we understand the difference between those two experiences by virtue of having seen the differences before.

 

On the ownership and usage of consoles, another extreme example would be Dan Ryckert who has spent most of gaming hours with old school consoles, especially on the Nintendo side, with almost no experience at all on the PC side. Sometimes his opinion on games is so alien that it might as well have come from an alternate dimension and it's clear that this is because his background with games has been so different than many of his audience's, but this is something that we can grasp pretty quickly.

 

If there are aspects that would be outside of our expectations, that would be difficult to detect, then I don't see why they there wouldn't be some benefit from treating them in the same vein as Patreon or Kickstarter. If a writer is playing the Super Uber Limited Collector's Ultimate Edition of a game that they threw down $500 to grab, it's probably worth noting at least, or better still, looking at the standard version that 99% of their readership would be playing instead.

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It seems to me that you're saying that extreme cases of sunk costs will yield obvious and detectable results. But what I was talking about it non-extreme cases with undetectable but probably still measurable results. I don't really know how anything you said is relevant minus the very first paragraph, to which I respond that I don't really think that Patreon/Kickstarter is all that different than, for instance, preorders and alpha/beta tests. At least they're not all that different in terms of the actual exchange (sunk costs -> higher perceived value) that is happening, minus the minutiae.

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It seems to me that you're saying that extreme cases of sunk costs will yield obvious and detectable results. But what I was talking about it non-extreme cases with undetectable but probably still measurable results. I don't really know how anything you said is relevant minus the very first paragraph, to which I respond that I don't really think that Patreon/Kickstarter is all that different than, for instance, preorders and alpha/beta tests. At least they're not all that different in terms of the actual exchange (sunk costs -> higher perceived value) that is happening, minus the minutiae.

I feel that preorders and things like Kickstarter and Patreon are very different simply by virtue of experience having participated in a good number of Kickstarters and Patreons (maybe on the order of 40 - 50 now). Sample size of one, but to me the degree of vested interested is quite a great deal higher than something like a preorder. With a preorder I don't feel like I'm actually contributing towards the creation of something: I'm putting down money towards a purchase, with Kickstarter and Patreon I feel like I'm helping someone achieve their dreams in life, like I'm actually helping make something happen, and that's a very different thing.

 

If you talked to people who have thrown down tens of thousands of dollars towards Star Citizen, it's pretty clear that there is good cause to believe there is a correlation between irrational belief in the success and worth of Star Citizen and how much you've contributed towards Star Citizen. Is it causal? Kind of hard to tell without giving it serious investigation, but having seen people go from, "Hey Star Citizen is kind of cool, I hope they succeed" to "Star Citizen will be the best game ever made and there is nothing that happens which will ever dissuade me of this opinion" in the space of a thousand dollars or more, makes me believe there is a good chance that it is causal.

 

With the other paragraphs, I'm just saying that there is an immense spectrum of factors that bias and affect our opinions, but the ones that warrant explicit guidelines of disclosure are those which are difficult to detect, are outside of our expectation, and have a reasonable chance of having a non-trivial impact on our opinions.

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I just can't imagine there ever being a case where I would have been able to report on someone, but because of a Patreon or Kickstarter I now feel too close. Either I was too close because of my relationship with them, or I wasn't.   Not having donated isn't going to play into that decision.

 

I'll make an exception for 10,000 spaceships but I wouldn't base a policy around that.

 

I guess maybe there are people that do feel like they are building a personal connection with a kickstarter, it's not like impossible.  I've backed so many that I've taken to blocking updates from Kickstarter with filters because I don't care to follow them.

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I'll make an exception for 10,000 spaceships but I wouldn't base a policy around that.

Well, if there is an issue at $10,000 then there is an issue at some value of contribution, hence wouldn't it be threshold question rather than an issue of whether or not there is a problem with contributing to Patreon and Kickstarter? If there is a problem at $10,000, it's likely that there will be a lesser problem at $9,000, and a lesser problem at $8,000, and so on and hence is a continuous function. If that's the case then isn't this a question of establishing an appropriate threshold when a contribution potentially becomes too much of an influence?

 

I personally don't think that even contributing $10,000 is an issue, even if it is guaranteed to have major impact on the writer's disposition, as long as the association is disclosed, and disclosure of this sort only costs a sentence.

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I personally don't think that even contributing $10,000 is an issue, even if it is guaranteed to have major impact on the writer's disposition, as long as the association is disclosed, and disclosure of this sort only costs a sentence.

 

At some point, even with a disclosure policy in place you're still going to have to trust the reviewer to be honest about following said policy. I really don't think that's hugely different that just trusting the reviewer to appropriately exercise the judgement to compartmentalize whatever feelings they might have from supporting a kickstarter/patreon and rendering an honest verdict regardless. And in the cases where they feel such compartmentalization is impossible, recusing themselves.

 

It seems to me, if you don't trust the writer to be able to do those things, maybe you don't respect that reviewer to begin with.

And if that's the case, why are you even reading the review?

 

Disclosure policies don't do any real harm so I'm not strictly opposed to them per se, but really, folks, it still comes down to a matter of trust. Both Patreon and Kickstarter can be contributed to if not entirely anonymously then certainly via pseudonymous email such that no member of the public at large is going to be able to suss out the connection. It still comes down to trust.

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Well, if there is an issue at $10,000 then there is an issue at some value of contribution, hence wouldn't it be threshold question rather than an issue of whether or not there is a problem with contributing to Patreon and Kickstarter? If there is a problem at $10,000, it's likely that there will be a lesser problem at $9,000, and a lesser problem at $8,000, and so on and hence is a continuous function. If that's the case then isn't this a question of establishing an appropriate threshold when a contribution potentially becomes too much of an influence?

 

I don't believe it would be more of an influence than buying a retail game for 60 dollars, for example.  And that I believe has less influence than getting a game for free.

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I don't believe it would be more of an influence than buying a retail game for 60 dollars, for example.  And that I believe has less influence than getting a game for free.

 

Then there should be no exception for $10,000 spaceships.

 

EDIT: I guess I should elaborate: it's cool if you don't think that there is any impact, but it doesn't make sense to say that an exception should be made for $10,000 Internet spaceships because there is an impact while also saying that there is no appreciable impact.

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What I meant is, if someone paid 10,000 for a retail disc I'd feel the same way.  Or 60 dollars to whatever.  Or 400 dollars for a console.  I don't feel like it being a Kickstarter is the relevant bit. 

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