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Polygon posts ad/re-worded press release as 'News' & deletes user comments [Removed]
- Thread starter Gowans
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lazer_bean
Member
newspapers buy the info from agencies like Reuters and then a journalist makes it his own when writing his article. invetsigation most newspapers is almost dead as is fact checking a lot of the time.
traditional journalists hang out with politicians and other people they write about
on the principle they're not doing any better than gaming journalists.
newspaper dont exist to inform, they're here to control (control what you think).
whalleywhat
Member
lol
What's happened is that a lot of newspapers have had to cut the departments that made them particularly valuable to those who bought them and have come to rely heavily on the newswires over time. While a lot of people attribute this to print being 'dead' in general, many newspapers remained perfectly profitable prior to this evisceration of their content, but were also publicly traded, so they didn't just need to turn a profit, but to provide increasing returns every quarter. The way to do this when you aren't actually expanding your market is to lay people off, and this has resulted in them shutting down a lot of their investigative reporting and relying increasingly on agencies like Reuters, which now means that they don't provide any content that can't be gotten anywhere on the internet, and the death of print becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
lazer_bean said:
What's happened is that a lot of newspapers have had to cut the departments that made them particularly valuable to those who bought them and have come to rely heavily on the newswires over time. While a lot of people attribute this to print being 'dead' in general, many newspapers remained perfectly profitable prior to this evisceration of their content, but were also publicly traded, so they didn't just need to turn a profit, but to provide increasing returns every quarter. The way to do this when you aren't actually expanding your market is to lay people off, and this has resulted in them shutting down a lot of their investigative reporting and relying increasingly on agencies like Reuters, which now means that they don't provide any content that can't be gotten anywhere on the internet, and the death of print becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In Communist Russia maybe.
Corleth the Fey
Member
And this is why they succeed.
Those are wire stories. They're attributed to the writer who wrote the story for AP, Reuters, etc. I believe newspaper, in the U.S., can get into quite a bit of trouble for copyright infringement if they don't properly attribute the article.
Investigative journalism still occurs constantly.
This is highly frowned upon and gets called out when it is discovered.
The people working at newspapers want to inform you. Any newspaper that starts going into the realm of advertorials, if it was reputable, gets called out by the rest of the media.
general_garcia
Member
It's a bit of a shame, that. I kinda liked their design, even though it looks ridiculous on smaller screens a lot of the time. They've lost my traffic now though.
In light of their holier-than-though attitude towards creating something better than everything else that came before, that's a pretty shocking 'article'. Same old shit, flashier front-end and with the 'brave new world' of comment censorship. Congrats to all involved.
It's to their credit that they went and sat on the naughty step when they realised they messed up, but it's really not a lesson that should have to be learned after the events of the last week. It was advertorial, mark it as such. And if they genuinely didn't think that was advertorial content (consciously placed or not), well, there's your best example of the problems with the industry thus far. Brilliantly timed.
Credibility reset.
In light of their holier-than-though attitude towards creating something better than everything else that came before, that's a pretty shocking 'article'. Same old shit, flashier front-end and with the 'brave new world' of comment censorship. Congrats to all involved.
It's to their credit that they went and sat on the naughty step when they realised they messed up, but it's really not a lesson that should have to be learned after the events of the last week. It was advertorial, mark it as such. And if they genuinely didn't think that was advertorial content (consciously placed or not), well, there's your best example of the problems with the industry thus far. Brilliantly timed.
Credibility reset.
Basically. We were right!
Amir0x hard in the fucking paint. Bravo sir, sorry if I double post. On mobile and stupid tired.
No, wait a minute, I'm the conspiracy theorist here! N'Gai even said so!
I don't think that's necessarily true at all. There are several movie critics I trust more than any of my friends and family - they know more than my family and friends do about the world of cinema, they understand filming techniques and the history of acting and movies and whatever. It can often be far more informative than just asking a friend or family member what they think. They carry weight, of course, but not necessarily more.
You'd think this would be the case with game journalists? Obviously not every last person is guilty, so I don't want to cast the net on every individual. Many are innocent. But because of the people leading the show, everyone has to be skeptical about what is coming out.
Don't you think it should be the case that there are game 'journalists' we go to because we trust their in-depth knowledge of a situation? That they know whether or not Koopalings have been in past NSMB games (IGN!)? That they realize what the difference is between certain mechanics and whether they are new to the series or not? That they are warrantedly critical whenever a title is sloppy or buggy, no matter if it's a AAA title or a no-name one? That they don't fear advertising revenue being pulled or someone not giving them early access because of a bad review?
It's very sad we've arrived at this point, because there was a time - briefly, admittedly - where it seems that genuine passion dictated the approach to looking at videogames. But I think that time has passed for MANY. And because of those many it's almost impossible to know which of the few left remaining who aren't that way are trustworthy.
Yep, the same site that will stress that because it came from MS's Internet Explorer division instead of their gaming one means it can't possibly be shady. Even though Major Nelson just endorsed them.
sad & mostly true. I encourage people to subscribe to the Guardian, one of the last bastions funded by a trust but losing buckets of money.
I've never had any beef with Kotaku or any of the other news blogs that basically post news stories as fast as they can to attract readers which in turn make ad revenue. The features on Joystiq and Kotaku and occasionally very well done. From what I can tell, the business model is the same on Polygon but there's an emphasis on well known writers and a nice design package that holds everything together. Occassionally there are some really great features, but a bulk of the daily content is just posted news stories.
Just as the GAF Journalism topic wants game journos to "wake up" to the fact that they're being influenced by PR even when writers insist they aren't, or when the writers insist they're aware of all of PR's tricks... that it's subconscious... the same is true here.
You're now insisting that you have your thumb completely on what influences your movie-going decision. You're insisting film critics... some critics, matter more to you than friends.
But then when journos insist they aren't influenced by PR the masses insist that that isn't possible. Do you see the double standard?
I appreciate that this is mixing arguments, now, and not addressing your central point. It's just something worth thinking about.
If you polled 100 people, 100 of them would probably insist advertising doesn't work on them. And yet the billions keep being spent. No one wants to concede that hey, maybe the multi-billion dollar industry does know better than me.
If you polled 100 people, many of them would probably insist critical reception mattered hugely to them. But what really gets butts-in-seats are a group of people you know vouching for something. "Dude... listen to this album you'll love it" is a stronger call-to-action than 5-star reviews.
I get what you're saying here, but there is a few key differences I'd say.
Firstly, obviously I am going to trust my own perspective on what influences me. I know what goes on inside my head. By default that means I am probably the most trustworthy person I can be familiar with: I can't ever lie to myself, no matter how hard I try.
While I respect that there are many game journalists who probably really do feel they're not being influenced, I'm obviously going to trust that authority less than I trust myself. After all, I'm not in their head. I'm in my own.
But the problem is not, once again, that SOME game journalists might genuinely avoid the pitfalls that have shown up. It's that with the way things have gone, there is simply no way for me to tell one way or the other. The bad game journalists have poisoned the pool, and the rest don't have a large enough influence to change the overarching trajectory. We have seen in the past few years case after case where game journalists have been exposed for taking gifts from developers/publishers; where they have been shown posting Halo 4 articles with giant fucking Halo 4 advertisements plastered all over the border of the article; where they have been shown to be consistently manipulating scores (look at the Gamespot controversy with Jeff); that they will sit in a room filled with Doritos and Mountain Dew while talking about a game those objects are sponsoring.
And god forbid a website or magazine decides to actually buck the trend and give a major AAA title a bad score, they might lose future access! It has happened many times!
Ponder this: Why is that whenever a game is in a big franchise, whenever a game has a AAA marketing campaign, that almost without exception we can expect a score of 85 or above aggregate? Think about what this would mean comparably if it happened in the realm of film criticism. But it doesn't. By and large, it's nearly impossible to predict how a movie will score even if it's a HUGE one with big marketing dollars. But a game? There are so few exceptions to the rule I can list it on one hand, and that's generally from a game so outrageously bad that even a blind man can see they couldn't get away with rating it higher.
If you listed a AAA game right now off the top of your head, I will list the super high score range it almost undoubtedly will fall within. Even if the game is still three years from coming out, I'll tell you what it will score. I bet there's even a scientific formula for it: take off such and such if it's a new IP, take off such and such if its game budget is less than 30 million, take off such and such if the marketing budget is under 5 million.
I would simply have to disagree if the idea is that all these games actually deserve these scores. I can't tell you the number of times I've played a AAA game and thought what the hell were these people actually playing when they posted their so-called "critique." And as anecdotal as that is, you can routinely see the backlash when people's raised expectations from reviews meet the crushing reality of actually playing the game with all its bugs and imperfections.
I certainly respect that this may be the case for plenty of people. But it certainly has never been the case for me. My family routinely tells me to see garbage films and I just laugh at them and say "ok mom sure maybe someday." I know that their standard for quality films is something like a Lifetime movie. And that's OK. But I know if I read my trusted film critics, they're going to be informed in a way my family and friends can never even come close to. They understand what a film is trying to do, they know the references, the filming techniques, the actors, the directors. They offer a depth of knowledge that frankly embarrasses the average game journalists, because these people don't view it as a sort of happy pass to play free games and maybe one day land a job at 343 Studios.
Many actually retain knowledge of past experiences and hold it against the current film. They may even RESEARCH what they're saying before they post something. "Hey, has a Koopaling been in past New Super Mario Bros. games? I wonder if that's something I should check up on before I post a effusive article about the new Wii U title on IGN!"
You read GAF so I'm sure you've come across many topics highlighting the just outrageous editing discrepancies in these articles. Things that would have been caught by anyone who was even bothering to try. So the only conclusion is that they are not, in fact, trying.
I don't mean to cast accusations on those who are genuinely trying to keep their head above water. But you must understand I am a consumer of videogames and I do believe this behavior has cast a very real pall upon the industry, because legitimate criticism is one of the only ways to keep shitty development practices in check. If that criticism is so muddied nobody can trust it, what effect can it have?
toastyToast
Member
Halo 4 is a helluva drug
Right on the fucking money. Especially in regards to the predictability of review scores depending on the budget. I have no idea how these reviewers are so incapable of noticing flaws when playing a game, all the while getting suckered in by the hype of a mediocre game with an expensive budget.
EDIT: Just checked the Halo 4 review thread. Same fucking shit as always.
I usually find that within the first paragraph or two of any review, I'll be able to tell whether there's enough information in the article amongst the bullshit to find out whether I'll like the game or not.
If the bullshit quotient is high in those paragraphs, I blacklist the author and look for another one. Otherwise, I just look at reviews not as reviews, but as informative pieces by which I can get blurbs-eye-view of what a game is. I leave opinion pieces of games with people I genuinely trust and generally agree with, that being people on message boards with similar tastes and a very select few members of the gaming press and anybody they recommend... as in, I might only be familiar with a few by name, anyone they might mention or have on as a guest (prime example is Chris Kohler who was on an Idle Thumbs episode) I'll be sure to investigate further.
With all this stuff, I've learned that you're better off working with a whitelist of sources you can add to rather than a blacklist of places/people to ignore. I'd get severe RSI otherwise.
Hell, thanks to this thread (or was it the other one?) I'll definitely head over to IGN to read GDJustin's impressions on iOS/portable games than going to the default (but previously figured as the only option) Toucharcade.
If the bullshit quotient is high in those paragraphs, I blacklist the author and look for another one. Otherwise, I just look at reviews not as reviews, but as informative pieces by which I can get blurbs-eye-view of what a game is. I leave opinion pieces of games with people I genuinely trust and generally agree with, that being people on message boards with similar tastes and a very select few members of the gaming press and anybody they recommend... as in, I might only be familiar with a few by name, anyone they might mention or have on as a guest (prime example is Chris Kohler who was on an Idle Thumbs episode) I'll be sure to investigate further.
With all this stuff, I've learned that you're better off working with a whitelist of sources you can add to rather than a blacklist of places/people to ignore. I'd get severe RSI otherwise.
Hell, thanks to this thread (or was it the other one?) I'll definitely head over to IGN to read GDJustin's impressions on iOS/portable games than going to the default (but previously figured as the only option) Toucharcade.
I guess God was just letting anything go when Medal of Honor and RE6 got trashed in reviews.
Or you are really good at lying to yourself.
The difference being that anyone could have told you months out that neither of these games were going to be particularly good (even if they sold well). In fact if anyone was talking about this games in the months leading up to their release, it was probably in the context of "I don't think that game will be very good," or "why are they even making that?"
The problem with mainstream game reviews is not that they are outright bought by the publishers. The problem is the reality warping effect of hype and marketing causes certain games to be viewed through rose colored glasses. It's not just reviewers of course, GAF is plenty guilty of this as well, they just don't have the additional pressures of advertisers and close relationships with PR and developers. They also have to worry about alienating a huge portion of their audience by trashing a game that millions of readers are going to buy anyway.
But the fact remains, review scores (and how much a game gets a pass in the text of the review as well) are all too often directly proportional to the hype level of a game, rather than the quality level.
Lord_Nergal
Member
So has any polygon person attempted to explain their reasoning beyond Chris Grant's "It's not a controversy" post?
Ironlion45
Neo Member
Oh, Microsoft. They try so very hard to AstroTurf. And yet they are so BAD at it. You have to give them points for trying, anyway.
so after chris grant "agrees" the mistake in running the pizza article and says how it didnt live up to their fine standards, apparantly now nothing was wrong at all and we're just out to get them.
https://twitter.com/chrisgrant/status/264169305187438592
thank god polygon are here to run the brave new world news that EVERYTHING IS FINE.
https://twitter.com/chrisgrant/status/264169305187438592
thank god polygon are here to run the brave new world news that EVERYTHING IS FINE.
Well that Arab Gaming Spring didn't last long!
Its back to pretending that the games media are the victims here.
https://twitter.com/chrisgrant/status/264171264694964224
Well, as long as they stay true to their ethics. And make great coin from advertising featurettes. Wait... paste great content. Shit.
Make great content.
Finally. Now, where's that delete button?
How many bad games get good reviews, much less great reviews. Everyone talks about the evils of hype coloring reviews and coverage, but at the end of the day these are subjective views on design often attached to a number.
Most games, especially "hyped games" are good. Really fucking good.
Tylahedras
Banned
Wow, I expected them to at least TRY to hide it long enough for people to forget who paid for their site.
Way to lower the bar Polygon.
Way to lower the bar Polygon.
That's just embarrassing. Dude should've just stuck to his original stance of "don't read it if you don't like it" when it came to criticism, if that's how he really felt about the issue. Super lame to be all two-faced about it. Yeesh.
Not to take Journos side. But I think a reason a lot of triple AAA games score great is because those game have bigger budgets. A lot of things about a games quality is subjective to the player or review. Polish something which usually indicates time and budget are usually universally acknowledge for either having it or not. So these so called triple AAA games usually have that polish and it comes through in the product hence the higher review scores.
What I find more concerning is when the press miss the mark on a quality game it finds a great market and all of a sudden the iterative sequel becomes great.
What I find more concerning is when the press miss the mark on a quality game it finds a great market and all of a sudden the iterative sequel becomes great.
Interfectum
Member
Haha wow, the witch hunt argument again.
Oh please. There's a lot more to consistent review standards than "give good scores to good games." Games that are harped on as revolutionary, amazing, bar-setting games, are regarded as pretty good but only iterative a mere 6 months later. The same flaws that are eviscerated in some games are completely glossed over in bigger AAA games. A blockbuster game can be given a near perfect score, when it is broken on a fundamental level on one of the platforms a huge portion of the audience will be playing it on, without so much as a mention in the review.
But by all means, as long as the games that are utterly fellatiated are at least "really fucking good" it's okay that their reviews are more like PR puff pieces. And if you really truly believe that metacritic scores are directly proportional to quality, to the extent that if game A gets a higher score than game B, it's entirely because game A is a better game, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying that all reviewers are incapable of critical assessment of popular games. The point is, if you were to take a game with an 85+ metacritic score, wait a year, and have all of the same reviewers take a serious critical look at the same game, I guarantee you the scores would on average be noticeably worse. Not because other, better games have come out in the meantime (although that would surely have an impact), but because its a lot easier to take a critical look at a game when the hype has worn off.
This is a problem, and not one with an easy solution. Its not a problem because reviewers are unethical or on the take, but because they are human. But it still does a disservice to the audience.
Really it is a separate issue from the ethical standards being discussed in this thread. It's not an unimportant issue, but its one that will persist even if all the shady and unethical bullshit that goes in in games media goes away. The problem is, in the most extreme cases, it creates reviews that are basically just advertisements. And that's when you have people using those reviews as evidence that the reviewers are on the take.
RealDeadOne
Member
When it comes down to it, the problem with reviews is the classic "4 point scale" issue. An average game is an 8, a good game is a 9, and a great game is a 10. 7 is not good and 6 and below all might as well be the same thing.
Reviewers have been using three methods to counteract this: 1) The decimal system creates a much larger scale in between 6 and 10. This is a stupid solution though because almost all games are still in between 8.25 and 9.75 instead of just between 7 and 10 now.
The other solution is 2) Star system. They know they only use four points anyway and so they just make it a five point scale. There are a couple of problems with this however. First of all, many people use half stars, which completely loses the point of the star system in the first place. Second, big sites like Metacritic still use the 10-point scale (or 100 really), and just convert star ratings. So a 3-star game that a reviewer really enjoyed but didn't quite go above and beyond ends up as a 60 on MC, which relative to other reviews doesn't line up to the reviewer's intent. Third, reviewers still just don't like giving out low scores. They'll more often than not give a game 4-stars just because they feel 3 may undersell how much they enjoyed the game.
The final method is just eschewing scores altogether, but this is still unfavorable because people just like to look at a number, they like to quantify things. It works really well for something like RPS but as I said before it can screw up the quantifiable score overall on sites like Metacritic (which I'm not defending, I'm merely saying its place is very important in this industry).
So, to be brief, the best possible solution that would work for both consumers and reviewers, is to change the average. Just throw out all the old scores and start from scratch, with the average base score a game gets being 5. A game has to go above and beyond to get anything more than that, and a 10 is near mythical, coming maybe once or twice a generation.
This also means that if most games coming out now are an 8 or 9, then that is what is average. Call of Duty gets a 5 for preserving the solid gameplay of its predecessors, but can only get a 6 or higher with significant additions, and likely can't get above an 8 without some great shakeups to the formula. Another example, maybe something like Mark of the Ninja could be a 7 or 8 because it is a wholly unique experience executed excellently, while ACIII would be a 4 for not adding significant improvements.
I guess the main problem with that would be Ubisoft would shit themselves if an AC game has a 4, but in this idea 4 would be like today's 8.
This is pretty simple stuff though, honestly. It's all stuff I believed even when I was like 15 and only had a Gamecube. I remember hearing most of these ideas from McElroy and Grant themselves on the Joystiq podcast. I just don't get how those guys can have all these solid ideas for legitimizing game press and criticism but then turn around and do stuff like this. They have no self-awareness.
Reviewers have been using three methods to counteract this: 1) The decimal system creates a much larger scale in between 6 and 10. This is a stupid solution though because almost all games are still in between 8.25 and 9.75 instead of just between 7 and 10 now.
The other solution is 2) Star system. They know they only use four points anyway and so they just make it a five point scale. There are a couple of problems with this however. First of all, many people use half stars, which completely loses the point of the star system in the first place. Second, big sites like Metacritic still use the 10-point scale (or 100 really), and just convert star ratings. So a 3-star game that a reviewer really enjoyed but didn't quite go above and beyond ends up as a 60 on MC, which relative to other reviews doesn't line up to the reviewer's intent. Third, reviewers still just don't like giving out low scores. They'll more often than not give a game 4-stars just because they feel 3 may undersell how much they enjoyed the game.
The final method is just eschewing scores altogether, but this is still unfavorable because people just like to look at a number, they like to quantify things. It works really well for something like RPS but as I said before it can screw up the quantifiable score overall on sites like Metacritic (which I'm not defending, I'm merely saying its place is very important in this industry).
So, to be brief, the best possible solution that would work for both consumers and reviewers, is to change the average. Just throw out all the old scores and start from scratch, with the average base score a game gets being 5. A game has to go above and beyond to get anything more than that, and a 10 is near mythical, coming maybe once or twice a generation.
This also means that if most games coming out now are an 8 or 9, then that is what is average. Call of Duty gets a 5 for preserving the solid gameplay of its predecessors, but can only get a 6 or higher with significant additions, and likely can't get above an 8 without some great shakeups to the formula. Another example, maybe something like Mark of the Ninja could be a 7 or 8 because it is a wholly unique experience executed excellently, while ACIII would be a 4 for not adding significant improvements.
I guess the main problem with that would be Ubisoft would shit themselves if an AC game has a 4, but in this idea 4 would be like today's 8.
This is pretty simple stuff though, honestly. It's all stuff I believed even when I was like 15 and only had a Gamecube. I remember hearing most of these ideas from McElroy and Grant themselves on the Joystiq podcast. I just don't get how those guys can have all these solid ideas for legitimizing game press and criticism but then turn around and do stuff like this. They have no self-awareness.
NihonTiger90
Member
This man speaks the God damned truth. I work in the media and this is exactly what's happening. The reason why fact checking is gone? Copy editors and investigative journalists were deemed to not be "producers" (they didn't produce visible daily content) and they've been axed in a lot of major chains. That's not to say there is no editing or investigating, but any that is done is done by far, far fewer people.
NihonTiger90
Member
Agreed. The problem is the current system is weighted to the U.S. educational grading scale, and that scale is purposely skewed toward one end because they want children to do well so they raise the standards of what failing is in an effort to push them. It doesn't work outside of that kind of realm, though most people will understand it because its what they are used to.
The most amazing thing to me was that someones name was on that "story" but they contributed nothing to it and didn't initially provide any sources. That is straight plagiarism however you spin it. A fireable offense even at my college newspaper back in the day.
This being "games journalism" I don't think that person should be fired, but the way Chris has handled this whole thing "don't read it, gimme a break, witchhunt etc" is appalling.
Admit wrongdoing, correct the issue, and stop posting straight press releases as content with your bylines next to it. Not a huge deal, until you start getting weirdly defensive about it. I'd honestly see this as a positive lesson if I were running the site, it could have been much worse if people get in a habit posting material of this standard.
EatinOlives
Member
"omg wich hunt" is the classic method of deflection. You don't have to defend anything, now the other people look bad because you threw out the two magic words.
Too bad people can see through it. You say "witch hunt" I say "you know you're in the wrong, don't want to admit it".
Too bad people can see through it. You say "witch hunt" I say "you know you're in the wrong, don't want to admit it".
Image at the bottom needs Pizza hut pope hat.
