IGN's Dead Cells Review Has Been Removed

At this point, there is 0.1% chance that he did not copy from other reviews. The most damning thing is his Metroid one where he even makes the same controls mistake by mixing the L and R buttons as the review his plagiarizing.

I thought the most damning thing about that was comparing the same Metroid games in the same order as the review he was copying from.

I'm sure he'll get a spot in the YouTube realm where things like this tend to pass by (TMartin and ProSyndacate come to mind). Don't send him death threats, tho. That's not cool.

Leave Keighley out of this.

@oodli: When I heard that specific part is kind of broke my brain a little bit.

https://kotaku.com/ign-pulls-ex-editors-posts-after-dozens-more-plagiarism-1828357792

Kotaku has another article up and lists a whole bunch of more accusations from people across the internet finding shit. I think the literal laugh out loud moment is the video of him talking about HD rumble. As pointed out in that article, and the tweet it links to, he literally reads almost verbatim an entire paragraph of text from someone on neogaf describing what HD rumble is or could be.

Guy's a fucking dirt bag. Still don't need to literally have threats against family or swatting or any stupid internet shit like that, but his career in games should be fucking hit with a nuclear bomb. IGN is removing basically everything he ever did to look at and see if they CAN put it back up and doing re-reviews of games they'll need to keep down indefinitely.

What an absolute mess this whole thing is. Not only the plagiarizing but also using his colleagues to benefit himself and casting them aside. I will be shocked if we even hear from this guy on the internet for years to come (if he is smart).

Also, let me shout out the people of the IGN team. They have been classy about this whole debacle and they deserve none of any bad will that comes their way from this.

Apparently, even his freaking Linkedin resume is copied from somewhere else. I swear, there's going to be a freaking psychology case study written about this guy.

@therealturk: Is this all a performance art piece?

If that many reviews are plagiarized, what the hell kind of peer review process does IGN have if at all?

God I love this story. Each newly discovered instance is a haunting voyage into this dude's psychology.

@boonsong said:

That must be the answer! Filip Miucin has been Jaoquin Phoenix all along!

@bicycleham: I had the same reaction. It's almost as if all they wanted to do was hire a good looking guy with a lot of Youtube followers. His actual ability to review games was secondary.

@bicycleham: I have no idea, but to be fair no one else seemingly had ideas about this either.

@bicycleham: I think the hiring process at most game review sources wouldn't pick up on this style of plagiarism. It would be a lot of wasted time on the part of staff to exhaustively comb through the past work of a potential hire looking for plagiarism. There isn't a TurnItIn or SafeAssign or whatever for game reviews to easily compare thousands of reviews, because (unlike with academic plagiarism) there just isn't the demand for such a service. Professional plagiarism is much rarer than academic plagiarism, given that the job of game reviewer is "play a game, write an opinion piece on the game," therefore the expectation is that anyone entering the field professionally wants to do that and has a passion for it.

Students plagiarize (presumably) because they don't like the class or don't like the level of effort the writing requires, but it's a compulsory course, and they don't want to do extensive research and formal writing on a topic they don't really care about so they plagiarize to get through the course and never think about it again. The style of writing in reviews is much more informal and the only background research usually needed is simply playing the game. The number of professional writers that plagiarize, when it's a job they ostensibly *want* to be doing, should be remarkably low compared to academic plagiarism. The stakes are also much higher; plagiarizing in high school or undergrad might get you a warning or at worst expulsion from an institution, but plagiarizing in your profession pretty much results in no one ever hiring you in that profession ever again.

I'd guess that traditional journalism has a stricter vetting process when it comes to plagiarizing and/or fact checking (even then stuff like Stephen Glass happens), but I don't know for sure. Maybe game review places will look harder for plagiarism after this IGN incident, but man, the vast majority of applicants genuinely want to write the reviews, not take shortcuts because they're serial plagiarists.

Whatever it was, you can bet it's been changed.

The problem here was that no one expected someone hired to write reviews for the biggest (or possibly second biggest) games review site to be a shameless plagiarist because that shit just doesn't happen.

Video game historians might know: has this happened before in the games writing space? Surely if it has, it wasn't at this scale.

Nintendo wire put up a video for fire emblem warriors https://youtu.be/Qr57RhoUbYw

Sorry about he link, I’m at work on my phone.

I kind of feel for the other members of the IGN staff who have generally handled this quite well. I don't think criticism of 'well you shouldn't have hired a Youtuber' is fair as there are hundreds of passionate and talented people out there doing youtube videos about games.

The idea that someone decides to get into playing and reviewing video games for a living but then has no interest in actually doing whats required is so bizarre. Lots of people have jobs they don't enjoy but games journalism just doesn't seem like the sort of position you end up in when you are just looking to pay the bills.

He even stole from a co-worker... While they were working together.

Absolutely shameless.

@stinger061: I feel like Dan, is his way, described it best with what a fucking gross bummer this was just in light of how many people, both on and off of YouTube are dying for these jobs. To have this wang get there with no actual interest in sharing his own opinion really sucks for the people overlooked (and hell, it also sucks for those that will continue to be overlooked).

I don't blame IGN but fuck that guy, makes a living off the back of stealing someone else's work and then tries to bullshit everyone about it. Looking forward to never seeing or hearing from him again, prick deserves obscurity.

Look, I don't want to castigate IGN into oblivion but they have to take some of the blame with regards to editorial oversight. Otherwise, one would have to admit that this could happen to any website and I do not believe this could happen to Giant Bomb because I firmly believe GB has the appropriate fail safe measures to prevent this from happening. At least, I want to believe that. IGN is more than video games, so it can take a black eye and keep moving, but if this had happened to a smaller site, it would be game over.

@berfunkle: I think that people think it's easy to sniff out plagiarism, especially a situation as egregious as this, but YouTube is literally filled with thousands of people making videos about video games. Not everyone who makes a video has a big audience. Some people have tiny audiences, and I think that those small time YouTubers are the ones that get targeted. Who at IGN is going to look at every possible video of a game, possibly double or even triple digit amounts of videos depending on how popular the game is, to make sure that some text in it isn't plagiarized? They may now that this guy has been so darn prolific, but I doubt they had the suspicion before that someone would be so brazen.

With books, novels and academic papers, there are tools to use to uncover plagiarism relatively quickly (as already mentioned) but what is the tool for uncovering this? I guess you just have to have someone on staff trained to look through video content and determine if something is ripping off someone else or not. That may add a lot of time to review turnaround. I have no idea, but it would certainly be the only good way to prevent this in the future, until there are actual tools to use to streamline the process.

I think the one place you can place blame on IGN is how they handled the hiring process. If anything, this is a good lesson in just how much they should look into their hiring candidates prior work. It's a literal horror story of sustained and bold plagiarism that went uncovered and maybe should have. But that's hindsight.

@jadegl: Great post. I think that they also said, (maybe on the Bombcast?) that at some point you make a hire and decide to trust that person. Obviously, the trust in this case was misplaced, but far better to trust the new hire and let them reveal themselves than not trust the new hire and make them prove themselves, no?

Edit: I don't want that to sound like I'm trying to correct you or anything, your post is great. Just some additional thoughts that I had.

This is all just too incredible to not be art xD. From the way that video review of deadcels got progressively more blatantly copied throughout its 4 minute runtime to that horrible reaction video he made to the way we now keep seeing progressively more embarrassing things he plagiarized like stuff from his colleagues and his own resume. Holy moly.

I feel my initial comment was disingenuous, and granted I was mostly being facetious/sarcastic. Writing and creating reviews and conveying and expressing yourself and uour thoughts/feelings to print/video is definitely something you need to put effort at to do effectively and well. I just feel that the way opinions are tossed around on the internet it can't be that troublesome to at least put something out there even if it is lazier than a fully thought out review. At least you can grow and improve down the line and you aren't sacrificing your entire livelihood. I could understand slightly say the pressure of deadlines if there were one or two isolated incidents from him, and if he explained himself and showed proper remorse afterwards. But no, this just feels pathological and I doubt he gave a shit about the business he was in in the first place.

I think what is interesting is that this went on for months if not years. Some things he plagiarized from small outlets, so they had little voice so I am not shocked taht didn't come out. Yet you woudl think the big players woudl notice or catch it/ On teh other hand, writers who work big-outlets in the industry have little time to read each other work.

So, we probably should not be shocked that people who hire for print or online, did not catch his behaviors sooner. This looks bad for IGN, but I think them missing this is probably not really their fault; not maliciously so at least.

Interestingly, it seems like Giant Bombs Wiki at least has a "stout" automated search for "plagiarized" content, because if any more than three words in a phrase your use describing a game are similar to anything else witten online you get a stern robo-post of admonishment. ;-) Giant Bomb should sell that tech!

At this point, we need to connect all of the dots on his previous works. School essays, college portfolios, cover letters for jobs, his old youtube stuff. Any birthday, marriage, condolence cards he may have sent to colleagues, etc. All of it.

When do we learn that even his driver's license is plagiarized?

I read somewhere that even his name is plagiarised, apparently his parents came up with it originally and he's been copying them ever since.

Come on now. I'm sure he made certain to change Philip to Filip so his license was "in his own words."