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Date Posted: 12:45:01 11/16/04 Tue
Author: Mike Tanner
Subject: Re: Media to Explore Junkets, Hype & The Hollywood Quote Machine
In reply to: by Jonathan Evans 's message, "Media to Explore Junkets, Hype & The Hollywood Quote Machine" on 12:42:19 11/16/04 Tue

Muckraker Rankles Videogame Press
Mike Tanner

05:02 AM Sep. 11, 1997 PT

When David Israels, a 20-year veteran of activist journalism at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, brought his muckraking style to bear on the world of videogame journalism, he opened himself up to accusations of self-promotion and of violating journalistic ethics in his crusade to uphold game-review morality. His attacks on a broad selection of gaming publications didn't do much for his career as a free-lance writer in the field, and cost him review assignments at CNET's Gamecenter. But it did bring a brewing Usenet discussion of game-journal moralism to a boil and cause several magazines to assess their own journalistic policies.

Israels launched the Bay Guardian's plug & play site last week with an incendiary two-part lead editorial entitled "The Perils of Playola," which accused the games magazine industry of trading in over-enthusiastic "access journalism" and taking it to task for such ethical breaches as accepting trips from game companies without disclosing the fact, overemphasizing uncritical product previews, and reviewing beta product as a final version.

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Today's the Day. Though his article takes pains to avoid outright allegations of quid pro quo deals with manufacturers, Israels believes the gaming magazines are "just rife with graft."

"They don't understand that their responsibility is to their readers," he complains. Israels says he's sympathetic to the game publishers' desire to push their games and make money, but insists that "it's the magazines' job to say, 'Screw that,'" and present unbiased reporting.

Which is something editors of several of the mags under Israels' scrutiny say that Israels himself has failed to provide. "The motives [for the article] are kind of strange," says Gamecenter managing editor Alice Hill. "It looks like it's meant to drive traffic to his site." Since the Bay Guardian story was posted, Gamecenter has canceled Israels' free-lance assignments. Hill says Israels' separation is merely because his editorship of plug & play makes him a direct competitor of Gamecenter, and any continued writing for the site would make for a "big conflict of interest."

"He's used the article to get publicity for himself in a rather unethical manner," echoes PC Gamer editor Dan Bennett. Bennett accuses Israels of ignoring interviews with PC Gamer executive editor Gary Whitta explaining the magazine's policies of disallowing staffers who go on paid junkets from reviewing the products presented and implying that PC Gamer had failed to return calls. Although Israels ran a subsequent correction on his site, Bennett says the whole episode was presented in a "pretty misleading" way.

"What's disappointing about the stance Israels took," adds Bennett, is that it "took attention away from some very valid issues." This sort of thing appears frequently on newsgroups, he points out, where "people are convinced that gaming journalists are mired in this ethical muck." It is rare, however, that it is addressed in the gaming press.

One of the few journals to publicly consider appearances of impropriety is GamePen, which went so far as to publish an op/ed piece last month by Usenet conspiracy theorist "Critical Bill" lambasting the influence of press junkets on reviews. GamePen editor Aaron Loeb says his publication lets participants in press junkets write only previews of upcoming products, never actual reviews of the finished games. And from now on, he says, all reporting that comes out of publisher-sponsored trips will be explicitly acknowledged. In addition - and partially as a result of talking to Israels during his reporting - the site will soon publish a statement of its ethical policies.

CNET representatives say that Gamecenter, like all its subsidiaries, is bound to the company's code of ethics. Gamecenter's Hill believes, nonetheless, that these controversies are bound to arise at this point in her industry's growth. The industry started with a bunch of people in a hotel room looking at each other's games, she says, and it was "not about who paid for their beer or whatever." Now that it's matured into a bigger business, she adds, it makes sense that people are going to take ethical issues more seriously.

To Loeb, it's not so much a question of actual conflicts of interest, but of considering the views of their audience. "The gamer's mind is a strange mind," he says. Not only do they tend to be fans of X-Files-type conspiracy theories, he asserts, but they believe that "some people in the industry are allowed to make money, and some aren't."

But even Loeb sees the ethics of gaming junkets as an odd target for a media expose. After all, he says, "this kind of thing has been going on forever in Hollywood." (Israels himself admits that reviewing videogames naturally seems lightweight compared with serious topics like his previous writing about AIDS.) And everyone seems to miss the irony of raising moral questions around games which are so often based on endless, mindless slaughter.

Armchair moralists can join the peanut gallery flame-fest at such newsgroups as comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.flight-sim and comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic.

05:02 AM Sep. 11, 1997 PT

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