Ben_Kuchera

Actually there were some great conversations about this, but it was also posted on a certain other notorious message board (I bet you can guess which one) and my feed was flooded with some really ugly stuff. I talked to Erik about it, and once I figured out the source of the hate-speak it made more sense. People being mad about what I said are one thing, but people messaging just to say nasty things or threaten my physically or use certain offensive slurs are something completely different. So yes, there was a ton of homophobia and bigotry sent my way.

You're welcome to still not like me, or my work, or disagree with this situation. But I definitely wanted to explain my side of it. You can take all the screen caps you want, those stories will always be up at Ars Technica, I'm proud of the work, and all my tweets remain in my timeline if you want to go back and read exactly what happened.

Right, I've written about emulators in the past and will continue to do so in the future. It's an interesting topic. What I won't do is bring up a game that is being released in an unorthodox fashion and say that you should download the ROM. I think that's a pretty crappy thing to do, and that's why everyone was talking about the post. It's not really an issue of linking to emulators, which is something I've done, and I've written about emulators extensively.

What's funny is that people are passing around these links, and they don't understand what they're linking to. That's a week in review round-up. The post being talked about in the headline is this one: Accuracy takes power: one man's 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator.

I hope I did that link right...

I explained above the bit about posting bad information hurting your career. The other image people are passing around to try to claim I'm being dishonest says that I deleted tweets. The reality is that someone was tweeting at me, I blocked him, and when he went to click on an old tweet it said the tweet wasn't available. Which was accurate, he was blocked. If you look on my timeline you can see the tweet still there, however.

It's not a matter of linking to emulators, which are as legal as the off-brand NES and SNES consoles you see for sale sometimes. The thing that angered the community was the suggestion that it's better to download the game than pay for it. That's what led to the apology, because he admitted it was the wrong thing to do. If you want anything else explained, fire away. On the other hand, I think someone said I only get five posts on my first day? If that's the case I'll return when I can.

"Why did you think that Kain's comment was such that you felt justified in going after him as you did? He did make a mistake, and he corrected himself after you went after him, but did it require the tone/attitude that you used (i.e.: Hurting his career, as you put it on Twitter?)"

That's really the crux of it, right? People assume I was going after someone personally, which couldn't be further from the truth.

My problem with the post is that he didn't really understand what he was saying, and it was being passed around Twitter with people not really believing that he was actively telling people to just emulate a game in that fashion. Once he realized what he had done, he posted the updates, which in many ways made it worse. He admitted he didn't understand the topic, he didn't have a grasp of the basics of what he had said or the topic he was talking about, and then asked for guidance on what the legal issues with emulation are. I was upset not really due to the content of the article, but because of the very obvious fact that he didn't really understand what he was writing about, or why people were upset.

This is my main problem with the job we do. There is almost no accountability when it comes to publishing something that is wrong. In fact, in game reporting it's helpful to publish wrong information, or to not look into something very deeply. That way you get the hits for the rumor / quote / whatever you're talking about, and get another round of hits when you follow up with a story about what really happened. Plagiarism is rampant, as are poor linking practices. What would be a scandal in the mainstream media is often just another Tuesday in game reporting. It drives me crazy. I've also written about it before, here are the links:

http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/ea-never-called-dead-space-too-scary-but-the-misleading-headlines-are-the-s

http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/bad-linking-plagiarism-and-re-writes-how-game-journalism-is-its-own-worst-e

Our job is to understand our subject, to learn about it, to talk to people, and then to share that information with others. What bothered me about Kain's story was that he did the opposite. He posted something off the top of his head, got a ton of flack for it from other writers, and then scrambled to learn about the subject afterwards, even asking people to explain to him what was going on. Your entire job is to know more about the subject than the audience, or at least to present some new information.

I've always maintained that, as a reporter, when you post bad information or don't do your homework writing about something, it should hurt your career. It has nothing to do with Kain personally, and in fact I was barely aware of him before I saw other writers talking about this story on Twitter. But honestly, if you blow a story like that, it should hurt you. There should be a negative consequence to writing about something without knowing what you're saying. Publishing bad information should be punished in reporting, because your job is to do the opposite of that. I have no animosity towards Erik Kain, that's what I think about this job in general. It goes for everyone. Failing in your duties should be a bad things, and it should hurt people's trust in what you say. In this case it seems like the failure was blatant, and it made me angry, because I feel that sort of thing betrays the reader's trust in the author.

I want our industry to return to a time when you're expected to write about things you have evidence are true, or that you've at least done some legwork to try to prove. You should research your topic for a bit. Talk to people. You don't have to be first. The best way to improve game writing is to hold writers accountable for when they mess up, or don't do basic fact-finding or checking before running something. If people think they could be held responsible for what they write, and writing without facts and evidence to back up your position, it's possible they may think twice about rushing a story, or telling people to download a ROM instead of paying for a game or product.

I take my job very seriously, and I've been doing it for about a decade now. When I post bad information, I apologize and explain what went wrong with my fact-checking. Here's a link:

http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/the-walking-dead-trailer-we-ran-earlier-is-a-fake-our-apologies-and-an-expl

Almost all the stories I write for the Penny Arcade Report feature original reporting, and we've broken a TON of stories through hard work and smart reporting. I'm incredible proud of the site and my work. I want people to take this sort of reporting seriously, and when I see someone who failed to do so I get angry, and I think it's okay to point to it and say that it's not right. I believe that when a story like that is written it's okay to talk about what went wrong. If you can't stand by it, you shouldn't publish it. Writing stories like that should hurt your career the same way being negligent on the clock at ANY job should hurt your career.

Does that make sense?

That I will not promise. :-)

I'll tweet. https://twitter.com/BenKuchera/status/296872682241290240

Hey, this is Ben Kuchera. Since everyone was talking about me I thought I'd chime in. Feel free to ask about what happened, and I'll answer as best I can. There's been a lot of weird stuff going around about this.