Examples of Corruption in Games Journalism

Thank you so much for weighing in here, Jeff. I would love to hear more often about your thoughts on this subject(and just the industry in general). You're a rather trusted fellow, and you tend to keep it real.

As for Official mags, I'm glad to hear you heard some of them might have been on the up and up. I don't know if many would say it was necessarily corruption as much as rather convincing marketing on publishers' part, but over the years, I've heard many people who grew up enjoying those magazines say they later realized how deceptive and manipulative that kind of coverage may have been for kids and teens.

I know I've felt that way after looking back at the old magazines I still have. There seemed to be a relatively common theme of "This system is the best and all you need, [specific console] fan! And here's a glowing review of the latest and greatest game on it you should buy today!" or "Look at this game that is gonna blow [competing console] out of the water!" or "Can you believe the graphics on [publisher's new console]?!" (with a shocked cartoon face or something next to it. ha) that stands out when you look at seemingly "fairer" coverage from unofficial sources. Unofficial folks were enthusiastic, but official magazines seemed to make enthusiasm an art. I mean, you mentioned the normal pressures from publishers on independent magazines and sites, and one can only imagine even greater pressures when you are literally owned by a publisher.

You think Giancarlo Varanini would be willing to discuss how it was back then at OPM and Nintendo Power? That sounds really interesting. I'd be curious to hear how it really was. Perhaps he could help dispel what I've seen as a rather widely accepted view of the old official magazines.

Ignorance is bliss I guess.

This is a scary proposition.

But you're not going to fund someone unless you're already into what they do. You don't gain anything back from supporting someone in that way.

You said you'd admit if you were wrong. You were. Now you're saying we should respect you being wrong?

Dude no

The only time that I actually followed and witnessed something obviously corrupt was on Gamespot. It wasn't corrupt in the sense that there was some evil conspiracy to lie or whatever, but it was still a really shitty thing to do and was really obvious to everyone.

I could go into all the details, but I'll just keep it as short as I can. Gamespot had a huge event going on last year. It was some tournament for the greatest game series of the last decade. Basically, any series that has had a game released on the last decade can be included. They made a whole video of some of the guys at gamespot (Chris, Kevin, Tom), using that lotto ball machine to randomly select the first round matchups. It was made out to be a big event and tons and tons of people got involved with the voting, arguing on the message boards, etc. Got the site a ton of buzz.

So fast-forward to the end, and it comes down to Elder Scrolls and GTA. Through some miracle, Elder Scrolls came out on top with the votes. Everyone was waiting for the big announcement, a video, an article, a photoshopped image of the game as the victor, etc. Instead, it was all completely removed from the site, and not mentioned again. No announcement. Nothing at all. Everyone immediately called bullshit. Why? Because in the next week or two, GTAV was being released. Everyone realized that this poll only hurt the image of GTA, because it didn't win, and that's not something Rockstar would appreciate much. Nobody knows if Rockstar had something to do with it, or Gamespot just panicked and removed it all, but the end result was the same. It was a fun thing for the members and visitors of the site, it lasted at least 2 weeks with tons of hype surrounding it, and it was taken away just as all the Elder Scrolls fans were ready to celebrate their victory. I personally didn't care. I'm not a real fan of either series. It's just clearly a bullshit move on Gamespot's part.

I even went into a comments section on the site and saw that Chris Watters was answering questions from the Gamespot community. I asked, "What ever happened to the greatest series of the decade contest? There was never an announcement for the winner. Is something being prepared for that?" All I got back was, "Yeah, what did happen to that whole thing? I guess we've just been busy around here."

Not a big deal at all in the grand scheme of things, but it was a shitty thing to do and it was obvious that the contest backfired, it would piss off Rockstar, and Gamespot chose to just sweep it all under the rug with no explanation. So yeah, as far as huge conspiracies and corruption go, haven't really seen anything like that. As far as screwing over fans and prioritizing business relations with people you're not supposed to be in business with, this was the only one I've seen myself.

Actually, Motor Trend gets frequent enough accusations of corruption for them, too. The exact same type of stuff we see here. "Such and such car won over obviously and objectively better car? Those tests were paid!!" It's not on the same level as what we're seeing here but it's there. I'm not sure how bad Car and Driver gets it but I'm sure they do.

But I agree that people are taking this too far. Still, what people are really looking for is honesty and people are fed up with not getting it. So, it's not entirely unreasonable that people are so up in arms.

I think any outlet that reviews any kind of consumer product gets some of that, fanboys gonna fanboy. I know I've seen it when local hifi sites do a yearly roundup of "the ten best surround receivers" or whatever. Someone in the comments who for some reason is super invested in one brand will be furious that the review panel preferred something else and I'm sure they get plenty of angry emails.

This is different though, probably mainly because there's not a huge discussion going around the car enthusiast press about how sexist and awful car design is. I imagine if someone started a concerted campaign to get rid of bikini babes from car mags there would be some amount of outcry from the fans of said publications too.

Regarding the Destructoid vs. Allistair Pinsof thing; Dale North, their EIC, has resigned today stating the following:

Without going into details, I feel certain actions taken and statements made by Destructoid management have not accurately reflected my feelings or taken my input as Editor-in-chief into account. I’m no longer comfortable having my name attached to the continued engagement with former staff.

Make of that what you will. Sounds like he's throwing Niero under the bus a bit over the whole thing to me though.

@mousse_gallon said:

I enjoyed that video. It was informative. That said, his comment about editorials struck me as odd:

"Why should I trust your opinion if I don't believe that it is objective?"

To me, editorials (and by extension, personality driven content at sites like GB) are things I look to for their lack of objectivity. People's opinions are necessarily non-objective. I don't have to agree with everything somebody does or says in order to get anything from the editorial (or video or whatever).

I'm not an attorney (but I play one on the Internet), but outright payola is super illegal right?

I don't know, if I wanted people moaning about Reddit mods I'd probably go to Reddit?

That's a half truth that I'd like to clear up, being GB is my favorite place online. I did do that shitty thing but I did it because I was fed false information: http://imgur.com/ajKeLio Why else did I conceal her identity and charity for a month and (ironically) sent angry emails to other outlets that were pressuring her to come out?

This author (who wrote my story with his own motives) failed to emphasis that my employer didn't merely encourage people to blacklist, but also to not hear my side of the story (which is what has come out now via leaked emails that back my above statement).

I don't think anyone would disagree that what I did was wrong, but feeding me bad information that led to that decision, covering it up, and manipulating other outlets to not hear my side of the story and proof is ALSO WRONG. I eventually was offered work at major sites but by then I wanted nothing to do with this industry. People are bringing my story up so I naturally feel a need to talk about it.

I am allies with Zoe Quinn, remain neutral on GamerGate, question the actions going on in this industry, battle any bigotry, and love GB like no other.

If you feel like this is something to be examined, let @patrickklepek know. I'd love to talk to someone that isn't knee deep in this stuff but I know is a good reporter.

@sackmanjones: I loled

@monlo: all i got from your post from reddit is that you are a very toxic person =o

Thanks for stepping in, and explaining your side of the story. Perhaps Patrick will see your call out and you'll get your wish. I imagine that it's a story that could be told without going into many personal details, and I'm sure that's the only way that Patrick would ever even consider reporting it.

I'm someone who heard about all of this when it first happened, but didn't follow it closely after that. Is there a reason why people are bringing this up again? Is it just the fact that ethical issues involving journalists are on everyone's mind lately?

If I remember right, didn't Patricia Hernandez do some pretty extensive coverage of stuff Anna Anthropy, her friend/roommate (or a while at least), without disclosing their relationship? I think they went back and added that info to the articles, but at the time it was a very blatant conflict of interest.

And yeah basically everything going on at Destructoid lately. Using a "secret" (or at least not publicly disclosed) mailing list to talk with competing sites/organizations to collectively decide that someone can't/won't/shouldn't work at their companies is a big fuckin' deal. Blacklisting is a huge breach of journalistic ethics and standards, anyone who's taken journalism 101 could tell you that.

My story got dug back up when some pro-GamerGaters got access to the gamejournopros list and contacted me about the emails concerning me in the list. I didn't want anything to do with gamergate so I just cooperated by sending them links to documents previously leaked a year ago. If they are going to write about me, I might as well point them to accurate information that they can parse on their own.

I don't believe in any conspiracy. I think this industry has had a growing tendency in the past decade to be a bit too small and guarded for its own good, especially when it comes to indie developers and critics. Long ago, these people were just friends but now they are known figures with money in the bank. It's wrong to have a Kotaku writer posting articles about her roommate, or all the conflict of interests that follow Brandon Boyer (he's a nice guy, I can say personally, but there is some dubious stuff when it comes to the IGF and other award shows he judges). Almost all these people hang out and talk on a consistent basis. It's much different than how critics and triple-AAA studio employees act (which is more like Hollywood were few critics are considered of the same class and are welcome to hang out).

My opinion is that this is an industry that grew up too fast and its growing pains are now becoming public knowledge. People who know this are becoming more uncomfortable about it. Giant Bomb remains my favorite site for several reasons but I always appreciated how they not only made their acquaintances public but celebrated them. I mean, Gerstmann isn't Dave Lang's roommate ... although, that would make for hilarious videos.

@lonelyspacepanda: That's a pretty good point, with how young the industry is overall it makes sense that its massive growth spurts have caused issues when the games media industry tries to grow at the same pace. I'm more than willing to believe that, had the technology been available, we'd see the same kind of stuff come up at the onset of writing/music/movies. And yeah, I think Giantbomb is one of the best examples of how to not only disclose personal relationships between games and games media, but do so in a very entertaining way. Their willingness to not review games with developers they're very close to is admirable as well.

Hmm, people should know that "blacklists" have existed since there were tribes. To suggest that someone is actively blocking this guy or that guy from getting a job ever again is the kind of loopiness we've seen from "other movements". On the other hand, if someone does a background check this stuff maybe be easy for any HR or their contractor to find. And video games aren't so large that events like are pretty unusual and easily float around.

Is there a blacklist that this guy is on? Probably not. Is he going to have issues finding work in the industry. Possibly if he applies to a company that cares to run a basic background check. This is why people today need to realize how posting random stuff may come back to haunt them.

Someone that used to do marketing for IGN worked for Destructoid in an unofficial capacity while I was there. Let's just say I heard some things. Nothing I can confirm or prove, but it's the sort of stuff that makes the industry vulnerable to a public outcry like GamerGate.

As for GamerGate itself, it's the worst example of anonymity in social media. I've seen the stuff Zoe links to (which is mostly proof of gross behavior in pro-GG) but I've also seen a lot of LGBT and women posting pro-GG tweets. I've even been linked to an anti-GG threatening to out a transgender GG supporter.

The thing is, is the internet is a place where anyone can say they are anybody and say they want anything. Who knows if the people attacking Zoe and Anita are pro-GG or just trolls. Who knows if the LGBT pro-GG are actual real people. The only thing known are the leaks and concerns against progamejournos and the fact that Anita and Zoe have had their safety and privacy taken away from them. I don't think either of these issues should be tied to GamerGate -- they should be tied to being decent human beings who care about transparency in game reporting and welcoming developers of all beliefs and genders in the development scene. That the debate rages on without this being the prevailing belief is indication to me of the other greatest problem with social media: People live in an echo chamber, refusing to have their reality questioned by alternative views from the other side.

@extomar: I don't think the long history of blacklisting as a concept justifies the act itself. And blacklisting almost never involves a formalized, documented process or list of people. It obviously can't, because it's illegal, and leaving a paper (or email chain, in a more relevant example) trail means you'll get caught at some point.

Bottom line, if a group of media companies is coming together unofficially to "warn" each other of a particular employee and telling each other to avoid them, that is essentially blacklisting. It doesn't mean they'll NEVER get a job again in the industry, it just significantly damages (if not completely destroys) their ability to get a job at those companies.

RE: background checks, calling another company's HR department to find out some basic info about a potential employee is very different from what happened in the case we're talking about. Legally, they are VERY limited in the information they can get, though this varies from state to state I believe. Where I live, the only questions someone can ask about a former employee are "how long did they work for your company" and "would you hire them back?" The latter is pretty much restricted to a yes or no answer, because reason for termination/resignation can't be disclosed.

I was a subscriber to OPM for years, and I don't recall ever feeling like they were a shill for Sony. I believed that I got their honest opinion of the games they were playing. If a game was bad, they said so. In fact, I don't ever recall them referencing the competition much in the articles. I think PSM maybe more fits what you're describing here, but they were an unofficial (not sure what even actually means) magazine that was just an enthusiast for playstation. I can't speak for OXM because I never read that. I would be interested in what Giancarlo has to say on the topic though. I was always under the impression that OPM was licensed to distribute Sony's demo disc but the contract never included control over editorial content. Once demo discs became obsolete, so did the magazine.

I wish people would layoff the blacklist stuff. Yeah, it's a pretty shady thing but the public issue is that a company felt it okay to ignore a reporter's investigation into a false charity by a transgender individual (an issue that the company should have took seriously given the history with Jim), encouraged the reporter to reveal after he fought against it, and then fed false info about it (saying death threats were being thrown against IndieGoGo staff). Then, covered it all up.

The problem isn't that Dtoid made horrible decisions before and after my poor decision (which I still firmly stand was a result of Chris feeding me false info), but that the rest of the industry agreed to cover up Dtoid staff's poor decisions. They joked about and influenced the investigation in all the wrong ways.

In a better industry: I would have been fired for my actions (not for something else, as I was) and other sites would have investigated my evidence proving Dtoid staff's lack of management pushed toward the terrible outcome with the female developer.

My gut feeling is that a lot of these sites pretend to be journalism publications but whenever an ethically complex situation comes around, managing staff go silent and insist they are all bloggers that have to make their own decisions alone, and then when the wrong decisions are made they pretend to be journalists again, saying "well, we did advise against that!" when they never actually did.

fwiw, a Joystiq reporter laughed at my story and said no way in hell would this had gone down like this had it happened there, but I have my doubts any other site would have responded any differently (except for the feeding false info thing).

This is an I THINK and I could be wrong (and it's not true for everyone anyway) but my impression is that in general GG'ers equate 'grading games based on political or ethical concerns' with 'unfair / unethical review' in the first place.

Like, they themselves believe that they are fighting for integrity, but the problem is that their definition of integrity is different than most other people's. Personally, I think that if a reviewer believes they need to knock off 15 points from a score because they think the game is sexist, that's up to them because reviews are subjective -- but a GG'er might disagree, because for them the political portion of the game isn't important at all so they don't understand why it has any bearing on the bottom line. Or they think the reviewer is only doing it for clickbait reasons, but that's a whole different ball of wax and impossible to prove either way so I don't think there's any way to prevent it.

This means they can be confident and internally consistent when they state they're fighting for journalistic integrity, when in fact they're trying to shame people into writing reviews in the way that they want them written -- which if their arguments about censorship are to be believed means GG'ers are working hard to censor reviewers just as reviewers are trying to censor developers, and that's a hard cycle to break.

@nmarebfly: I think you completely nailed it.

@crunchypickles:

I'm not necessarily talking about "previous work history". Now more than ever, people are doing checks against whatever "digital footprint" you leave to make sure what is going. If you said "I worked for Boeing at Seattle for Soandso for 5 years" it is easier to check Facebook and whatever to see if you where there that long than it would be to wrestle with Boeing.

We already have an easy and recent example of this with Paranautical Activity where Maulbek now has a very public, very easy to find mark against him. I'm pretty sure he isn't on any "blacklist" but if wants to work for EA or Activision or some other big company where they have HR do simple checks they are going to see what happened with that game and pass on him. For the press, it is an even smaller circle of people where checking isn't going to take that much work because their job is to leave stuff all over the place in text.

Bingo. Ethics isn't a set of rules you live by, it's an ongoing discussion with yourself and others around you. What seems ethical today could be out of line tomorrow. It's why we need to have discussions over these issues. Instead we spend all our time proving who said what, and when. Everyone is talking and no one is listening.

It's marketing. Games media isn't corrupt. It's just meant to be there so you go out and buy the thing. It's marketing and punditry and its always been marketing. Today it's just more prevalent.

No one in the industry should be calling themselves journalists. That is a entirely dishonest title for what they do as a profession. As the consumer of many video game websites feel okay with addressing that.

While I'm not a part of gamegate, I believe there is an argument to be made that personal values should usually not be a part of a review, at least not when it comes to score.

A good example is Game Spot's review of GTA V. The author made a point to say how offended she was by the game's insulting characterization of transgender people, but she also didn't punish the game for it when it came time to assign a score either. Personally, I think that is the right way to handle the situation, although you might feel otherwise.

The Binding of Issac: Rebirth is coming out soon, and so is a crazy new Saints Row 4 expansion that takes place in hell. If those games happen to offend a Christian reviewer, do you feel that they should remove points from the game and tell everyone how offended they were? At a certain point, don't you think there is an argument to be made that these people should just excuse themselves from writing a review of a game that they already know will offend them, the same way a reviewer might excuse themselves from covering a tournament fighting game when they've never been a fan of the genre?

To me, Polygon reviewing Bayonetta 2 and giving the game a low score seems like a review of The Stick of Truth that starts off with "I've never been a fan of South Park. I never found it humorous, and I frequently find it offensive." Just because that person can write a South Park review doesn't mean that they should.

@spraynardtatum: There are plenty of people in this industry who do journalism.

I think personal views should be taken into account for reviews.

They "do journalism" 20% of the time and then they talk up games for the other 80%.

If they want to be called journalists they should probably start new websites. That's where I stand. We're not going to get a Woodward and Bernstein on Kotaku or IGN. The established sites won't cut it for real journalism because the change in course required would alienate all the people they're trying to sell games to.

There is journalism, but there are not journalists in this industry. Not from where I'm standing. I don't think anyone makes the cut.

@spraynardtatum:

Journalism is gathering, processing, and dissemination of news and information related to the news to an audience.

By that definition, I'd still say there are plenty of journalists in games writing. Though it really doesn't matter at the end of the day, games press, games critic, games writer, call it whatever you want.

I personally think it does matter. All those titles require different standards. In order to understand the standards that someone is set to you need to know what their title is and what they should be held accountable to provide.

The onus is on you then to determine wether or not the reviewers opinion is any relevant to you. There are people out there with views similar to Polygon's on the portrayal of Bayonetta so why shouldn't they have a voice? If your personal values impact your enjoyment of a game then of course it should factor into a review. It's all opinion based anyway. It may not be valuable to you but it may be valuable to some.

I don't understand how this forum system works quotes or my browser is wigging out, so sorry about formatting here.

While I'm not a part of gamegate, I believe there is an argument to be made that personal values should usually not be a part of a review, at least not when it comes to score.

A good example is Game Spot's review of GTA V. The author made a point to say how offended she was by the game's insulting characterization of transgender people, but she also didn't punish the game for it when it came time to assign a score either. Personally, I think that's the better way to handle the situation, although you might feel otherwise.

I think that she handled the situation just fine, but that doesn't mean the Bayonetta reviewer did not -- they both made a valid choice, because all I'm saying is that choice is up to THEM, not us.

The Binding of Issac: Rebirth is coming out soon, and so is a crazy new Saints Row 4 expansion that takes place in hell. If those games happen to offend a Christian reviewer, do you feel that they should remove points from the game and tell everyone how offended they were? At a certain point, don't you think there is an argument to be made that these people should just excuse themselves from writing a review of a game that they already know will offend them, the same way a reviewer might excuse themselves from covering a tournament fighting game when they've never been a fan of the genre?

Yes, if the reviewer is offended by what they think is anti-christian imagery it's totally their right to call it out. There are pleeenty of sites that do stuff like that for movies, and the only negative impact it causes is sometimes people will say 'lol look at this silly review over here.' Covering a fighting game tournament as a non-fan is fine too -- I got a lot of entertainment from articles about Dota's international this year from people who knew absolutely 0 about E-sports. Just be clear about that from the outset.

To me, Polygon reviewing Bayonetta 2 and giving the game a low score seems like a review of The Stick of Truth that starts off with "I've never been a fan of South Park. I never found it humorous, and I frequently find it offensive." Just because that person can write a South Park review doesn't mean that they should.

I think that's a perfectly fine review, especially because the reviewer states at the outset that they don't like South Park. Once they've said that, you know the opinion is going to be reflected in the rest of the review. That's fine! What if you too are someone that does not like South Park, and want to read a review from the perspective of another non-fan to see if there's anything worthwhile in the game for you?

Yeah, I think each side is happy to ignore the self-censorship that they're attempting to impose on others.

See, here we disagree because I don't think criticism is an attempt to impose self-censorship in the first place -- that's why I said 'if their arguments about censorship are to be believed.' I don't believe them. I just mean if they DO think that Anita is trying to force developers to self-censor (and that is a morally incorrect action), by the same token they have to realize that they're trying to force reviewers to do the same (which should, by extension, be morally incorrect.)

I don't really think the fighting game tournament comparison is apt since the writer isn't going to be stamping a score at the end of his article on the tournament. Generally, there isn't that much subjective about a fighting game tournament, whereas games can appeal or not appeal to wide swaths of people for a variety of different reasons and a review is a proper place to voice these opinions.

I don't think that reviewers should feel free to excuse themselves if they feel like a game could offend them as long they go into the game with good faith. This is kind of a tangent, but a problem with the industry, it feels, is that most outlets want to review every game, even ones that they don't want to, which Giant Bomb solves by only reviewing games that they want to review. This doesn't mean that they always review games that they like, examples being Watch_Dogs, Destiny, and Driveclub from just this year, but you can tell that Jeff felt like he had something to say on all of these, even when his opinion was generally not that high. Anyway, in your example, if the person who was never a fan of South Park reviewed the game, then their opinion should still be voiced because it can matter to someone, even if it isn't you. For example, I don't like South Park, but it's been forever since I've paid any attention to it and I've heard good things about The Stick of Truth. I'd want someone who isn't really a fan to voice their opinion because I would feel more comfortable with their point of view than someone who loves to watch South Park because that's just not me.

Here's the thing: there's no such thing as an objective review, so no one should try to be objective. The reviewer should talk about what's most important to them, and if that resonates with the reader, then great. If it doesn't, then the reader should simply get their game reviews from some other source that they feel fits best with them. This doesn't mean that they can't disagree with the review, but I think a lot of gamers have shown that their (I shouldn't have to feel like I need to say that I'm not generalizing against all gamers just a really loud number of them, but I guess I will anyway) definition of criticism can be at best immature and at worst on par with harassment. Like, the GTA 5 review that you brought up had a lot of gamers get really bent out of shape because she only gave it a 9. It's a shame that we have such a long way to go before we get to that place where people can simply agree to disagree.

On the topic of scores though, I think we'd be better off without them. The numbers are pretty arbitrary, aren't static (can a 10/10 game really be considered 10/10 well after its release?), and make the review itself seem worthless if you can condense everything the reviewer feels about a game into some number. And let's not forget that Metacritic has led to some pretty lame business practices like employee bonuses being tied to whether or not the game hits some magic number. This fuels the fire for conspiracy theories like sites being paid to give good reviews and also it's just lame for everyone who worked on the project that a couple of arbitrary numbers decides their pay.

And let's not forget that Metacritic has led to some pretty lame business practices like employee bonuses being tied to whether or not the game hits some magic number.

This right here is the real serious everyone-should-be-up-in-arms problem, imo. It's a contractual thing between publisher and developer and unrelated to journalism at all, but the ramifications can lead to all sorts of nastiness.

Can a mod explain why this post (#187) was taken down?

http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/general-discussion-30/examples-of-corruption-in-games-journalism-1497478/?page=4#js-message-7633489 …

It contained a long list of reporters who investigated recent corruption in the industry -- seemed relevant to the thread's topic. I didn't read all of it but most of what I saw looked legit (Patricia Hernandez not disclosing she wrote about her roommates for many months, Nathan Grayson's name in the source code of Depression Quest). I didn't read all of it but it seemed like just a collection of links and brief explanations, with nothing dirty involved. Could be wrong, however. The sources could be sketchy but isn't part of this thread's point to post corruption and evaluate the legitimacy of posts claiming something went wrong? For instance, I don't think there is anything wrong with Grayson being thanked in someone's game. As long as there is no bigotry involved in the said link (or goes against rules on this site), it seems like it'd be cool to discuss these stories.

Could any mods speak up, please?

@extomar: You make a good point about peoples' social media histories, but keep in mind that social media is on the user's end. In an interview, they can ask you to log onto facebook/twitter/whatever, but it's not exactly a set requirement and if I remember right it's been the cause of a few legal battles in different areas. Ultimately anything said on social media is always assumed to have been posted by the user, so it's pretty much 100% their responsibility to be, well, responsible.

The Paranautical Activity dev example, I dunno if it's a very accurate comparison to what happened with Destructoid/GJP. On one hand, a very young and immature developer loudly and publicly said very stupid things on Twitter, resulting in the game's removal from Steam and him removing himself from the company and severing all ties to the game. On the other hand, we have someone who, through a streak of bad luck and unfortunate events, wound up outing a trans woman while working on researching their IndieGoGo project thinking it was a scam (did it end up being one or was it legit? I'm not fully up to date on this, sorry). This resulted in GJP, an undisclosed mailing list between journalists from different companies (that's the important part) discussing why this person should be fired and not hired elsewhere, and Dtoid's management failing miserably at handling the situation, probably from a severe lack of management experience.

I know it's not good to get hung up on the blacklisting thing as @lonelyspacepanda said, so I won't push it beyond here, but I will say that if anyone who's actually gone to school for journalism and/or worked in other media coverage/news, this would not have happened because it is a pretty big deal. Even without the blacklisting though, the whole situation was still a clusterfuck of unprofessionalism on levels that made me happy as hell to have decided to never get involved in the games industry.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this or if I should even open this can of worms so mods, feel free to delete this. I won't include the probably profanity-laden furious response that I want to write here but I'll just present what happened.

Felicia Day wrote this about GamerGate tonight.

The response was this:

Ok, bye.

@milkman: Yep, saw it on Patrick's twitter. Shitty people gonna keep being shitty because they get their psychotic thrill from it. Luckily a few people have been caught, I know GG people caught some Brazilian tech guy making fake accounts and threatening/doxxing Sarkeesian using GG to get more attention for his site or something. I think he might have been one of the many threatening/doxxing Boogie2988 too, but I don't know for sure.

Anyway... back to corruption. There are lots of circumstantial links and first hand reports of Indie Game Festival corruption which bring together the ideas that journalists and developers and PR staff and venture capitalists (sometimes taking advantage of kickstarter) have been working together to hype, award and sell games. Microsoft was also heavily involved in the funding and publicisation of Fez, so they could be involved as well? I'm not sure if this is a crime, and even if so what crime it is, maybe some form of fraud? It's probably borderline stuff... (the best case for crime I heard was having entrants to the IGF pay for entry, yet they never stood a chance of winning because of vested interest among the judges)... but I don't think anyone can look at that whole situation and claim it isn't corrupt.

@crunchypickles: I think there's a bit more to it than "shitty people gonna keep being shitty." But I'm gonna stop for the sake Rorie's, the mods' and my own sanity.

How many mainstream sites actively review games through the lens of "social justice?" Not a rhetorical question as I stick to the sites I like, and those are few. You have Polygon and the GTAV review from Carolyn Pettit, though she did not dock the game for its personally offensive bits, as has been mentioned. What about Destructoid? RPS? From the way the debates are raging on - not to mention the need for "objective," non-politicized game reviews being part of GG's platform - you'd think politics was finding its way into game reviews all over the place. How prevalent is it, really?