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Ethics in video game journalism
Starting with the simple Pong video game, three decades ago and evolving into lavishly drawn interactive epics, the scale of video games and the size of their audience has grown exponentially, with sales in the billions of dollars and major multinational corporations clamoring for a piece of the action.
But despite these signs of a fast-growing industry, the print and online publications that cover video games often employ fans who unwittingly make poor ethical choices.
The first print magazine covering video games, Electronic Games was co-founded by Bill Kunkel in 1981. Kunkel describes those early days in a recent interview: To an extent, we were cheer leaders for the industry -- we loved these games, we wanted to see more of them, we wanted to keep writing about them.
Not much has changed in the past 20 years. Game publications and Web sites still mostly employ low-paid hobbyists who are easy targets of lavish marketing events that encourage inappropriate ties between game makers and game critics.
These unwholesome relationships were put under a spotlight by an article in the Los Angeles Times last August Gamers' Perks, or 'Playola' by Alex Pham. In an interview with Online Journalism Review, Pham said she was motivated to write the piece when she discovered that game journalists get to do outrageously funny things. She noted that software publishers arranged for journalists to shoot guns, skydive and race cars -- all under the pretense of researching video games.
No where was Pham's article discussed more than FatBabies.com. Fatbabies traffics in stories of outrage in game development and game publishing -- gossip for game industry employees. Responding to Pham's story, a Fatbabies writer FatGameSpotGuru savagely derided most game journalists as biased amateurs who wouldn't understand the concept of journalistic integrity if it came and bit them in the ass.
Credibility
Junkets are nothing new in entertainment journalism. Writers covering the movie industry are invited to nice hotels to confer with stars over expensive meals. Pulitzer-prize winning film critic Roger Ebert says that when he first started working at the Chicago Sun-Times, reporters would accept any trip they were offered. Now, he says he pays his own expenses when attending industry events.
Any player can write a review of a game, but only sanctioned media outlets have access to games before they are available to the public. Brokering these agreements fall upon an untoward mix of editorial and promotions. Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Cieply, who writes about the film industry, says that within entertainment journalism there are junket-driven celebrity stories, coverage that is generally favorable by unspoken agreement and just-the-facts coverage that doesn't take any perks from publicists or publishers.
Between this, Cieply says, there is a place of compromise, where major magazine cover stories are decided between editors and publicists, where photos and text might be subject to consent by handlers. He favors uncompromising entertainment journalism; speaking of publicist-managed reporting, he says: people who get on those bandwagons cheat themselves and cheat their readers.
Source: BonusGambler.com Editors' Choice
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