It was business-as-usual until someone lost their job.
Then it made me sick and the cover-up just made it worse. That woman should have left it alone after the article was edited, everything beyond that was digging her grave deeper. It offended me as a practitioner and consumer of journalism. It wasn't enough to just get away with it, she wanted to do a victory lap, which, fuck you, seriously. You got someone fired (or asked to step down or what the hell ever) for something that did not demand that level of conflict.
Each time these ethical debates come up, I keep hoping this will be the time it sticks, this will be the time where journalists and PR people don't circle the wagons to keep their concept of "normal" going indefinitely. Maybe we can get a real conversation about why game criticism differs so much in terms of ethical quagmires from any other kind. Maybe we'll get people to cop to the fact that, hey, this is sort of fucked up, but this is the way it works and I doubt anyone capable of changing it is amenable to doing so. That's at least honest, you know?
It's not all game journalists that play the "I'm not touching you!" game with their hand an inch off your face and it's not all PR people that gleefully celebrate the murkiness of the waters that we all find ourselves in now, but stuff like that N'Gai Croal twitter conversation up above somehow manages to make me sick all over again. We can talk about the abstracts of journalism, and if you want to sweep those under the rug, at least no one's getting hurt. But now real people are suffering from this circus that's been set-up for pointing out how comical the whole thing is and that's when trying to just "move on and forget it" or joking about it until it's gone becomes wildly offensive.
This is a great post.
This whole thing is a bit soul-crushing for me, considering I am rapidly approaching a career crossroads. I started writing about games at 15 (!!!) for a volunteer-run site and yeah, I will admit, as much as I looooooooved video games at that point I can't pretend that "free video games!" wasn't part of the allure. It's been six years since I started, though, and my outlook has changed dramatically, especially over the last year or so. I can't say I'm consciously aware of any times where PR has influenced something that I've written, but like FartofWar pointed out, that's often the point of PR.
Then again, I write for a dinky little site that only started getting picked up by MetaCritic and whatnot a couple of years ago, if I remember right. We're still not big or influential enough to be invited to most events or given most sketchy offers, although I will say that there are a
few dumb events that we've been offered, and there have been a few too many PR packages that, in retrospect, make me wince a little. Then again, a lot of this stuff shows up out of the blue, so it's not like we could say no in the first place, but still. I am incredibly thankful that, for the most part, I haven't accepted anything too blatantly sketchy. I've written some real dumbass articles and reviews that I hate. Still, there's some things I'm re-evaluating, and I've come to the conclusion that I can only improve from where I am now.
But see, that's the thing - what counts as improvement for a critic? Perhaps receiving games early, from publishers, is enough to sway my opinion. I'd like to say it isn't, since I've torn plenty of games I've been sent to shreds in reviews. Then again, maybe I subconsciously gave them an extra point because, you know, maybe it wasn't
that bad. Then again, I think timely reviews are a valuable thing, because critics in this medium are essentially consumer help. I still don't get paid for my writing - we run no ads at all - but I do get free games every now and then, and there are the bonuses of being invited to events like E3 and PAX as press. Humm. I've realized that my love for a couple of game series has become a conflict of interest, and I stopped reviewing games in that series precisely because of that.
My interactions with PR have been mostly fine, they aren't snakes. Then again, I don't write for anywhere particularly important, so I'm sure lots of the skeezier offers and whatnot simply aren't going to be shown to us. I have dealt with iffy PR. I do regret accepting some things, small gifts and tangentially-related-to-gaming products. I have had a few PR folks breathe down my neck a bit, although I imagine at the level they're at they do it because someone else is breathing down
theirs.
I have no interest in doing journalism. My interests lie squarely with criticism and analysis, but I really hope that there are people my age who are interested in doing proper investigative journalism into development, work conditions, and everything else that surrounds video games. I'm not sure if I want to pursue a career in writing about games anymore, though. It sounds fun, but I'm starting to realize that 1. now is a terrible time for someone becoming self-aware about writing and ethics to try and get into the industry and 2. posting about and discussing games with groups like NeoGAF is far more rewarding than pushing up articles. At least I'm young enough to be able to change now, as opposed to getting caught up in all this bullshit after it's too late.
Maybe I
will take the starving artist route and just work on comics and post about video games with other people who like video games.