Blog Archives
A Sordid Affair: Of Zoe Quinn, Privacy and Integrity
In a fourth year human resources course, we were posed a question about what we would do if an employee was sleeping with someone from a customer business. I responded with the old Trudeau-ism of “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” What is personal is personal and it stays that way as long as it doesn’t affect my business.
That was the wrong answer according to the professor and whole rest of the class. The implication of the scenario was that my hypothetical employee was sleeping that person to make sales. They couldn’t be using each other just to use each other. She was obviously using him to reach another end.
Gaming is going through this same scenario right now. Zoe Quinn, the developer behind Depression Quest, is mired in scandal after her ex-boyfriend outed her as sleeping with a number of people in the industry, including a writer for Kotaku, which blew up into accusations of Quinn using sex to get positive coverage from the gaming press.
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EA Not Issuing Advance Review Copies of The Sims 4
There are certain things that we have learned are major red flags over the last few years. One is major game releases that set a review embargo at such a late time that you can’t cancel your pre-orders. The other is major game releases that don’t even issue review copies of a game to game reviewers and journalists.
For the second time this year, it looks like a major EA release won’t have review copies. Back in March, EA didn’t issue review copies of Titanfall on PC and only allowed Xbox One reviews at a closed event hosted by EA and Respawn. Now, EA is not going to release review copies of the upcoming Maxis title The Sims 4.
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Who is Phil Fish?
Phil Fish has been in the news lately over his views about the monetization of Let’s Play videos on YouTube. Whether he’s right or not is something that will be up for debate among lawyers, fans and the various content creators for a while still so let’s leave that point for another day.
The thing is that we haven’t really heard much from Phil Fish since he cancelled Fez 2 and left the games industry last summer. Well, he may not have completely vanished but we may never know because Phil Fish is only famous for being famous in the wrong way. The Phil Fish we know isn’t so much famous for being a games designer but being a media creation designed to generate page views
So just who is the real Phil Fish? Innuendo Studios attempts to figure that out.
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CVG, The World’s First Gaming Mag, Facing Closure
Just as the gaming industry grows with record revenues at the launch of a new console generation, the old guard of the gaming media whithers and dies. A BBC report says that CVG’s publishers, Future, are examining the future of the CVG brand and may shut the magazine down.
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Ubisoft Gives Press Members Tablets at a Watch Dogs Event. Who Can We Trust Now?
I’ve talked about the bought and paid for reputation of games news reporting before on the blog. However, not everyone in the industry has gotten the growing message that readers and viewers are increasingly concerned about the ethics of games reporting.
The latest example is from a recent press event held by Ubisoft in Paris for Watch Dogs. At the event, the attending invited press members were given free Google Nexus 7 tablets.
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EA and Xbox One Paying for Positive YouTube Videos
Anybody who is overly positive about almost anything in the gaming world is almost instantly hit with accusations of being bought by a publisher. Most of the time, statements like these are completely outlandish and unfounded. On rare occasions, though, these accusations find the mark.
Recently, it came to light that Microsoft was paying Machinima content creators for positive coverage of the Xbox One. Now, various outlets on the internet have revealed that EA has also been paying YouTubers for positive coverage of its games.
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Games Criticism, Censorship and Artistic Integrity
Did I miss the memo? I’m convinced that there is a missive sent out to video games writers with talking points that we’re all supposed to stick to for a year.
Last year, it was that the vision of a developer should never be questioned. Look at the uproar over Mass Effect 3’s ending. Despite the plot holes and inconsistencies in the ending sequence, many members of the media defended BioWare by saying that this was BioWare’s vision and it shouldn’t be compromised because we shouldn’t compromise the developer’s “artistic integrity.”
This year, artistic integrity is no longer an applicable concept when talking about the contents of a game. Now, if a writer feels that the majority of people should be offended by something, it should be changed. In twelve months, we’ve gone from a developer having unassailable artistic integrity to a press corps getting dangerously close to censorship.
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Phil Fish vs. Marcus Beer Says More About Games Journalism than Either Man
The weekend’s big gaming news story wasn’t about a new game or another major announcement but a feud between two gaming personalities.
On one side was Marcus Beer, GameTrailer’s Annoyed Gamer, who criticized prominent indie developers Phil Fish and Jonathan Blow for not commenting on Microsoft allowing indie game self-publishing on the Xbox One. On the other side was the aforementioned Phil Fish who didn’t take kindly to Beer lobbing personal insults at him on video.
However, I don’t think that the takeaway from this feud should be anything about either Beer or Fish. I think how this feud started says more about how this gaming journalism works and why it might be irreparably broken.
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