Games Journalism! Wainwright/Florence/Tomb Raider/Eurogamer/Libel Threats/Doritos

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Wow, so I decided to not pay much attention to this when it broke this morning...
and now, it seems to have evolved into such a labyrinth of faux-journalism hodge-podge that I'd never get to the bottom of it.

What the hell happened?
Rhetorial question. Don't answer.
 
Robert Florence has earned my respect. He's one of the few people I can happily refer to as a game journalist without laughing and feeling shame in it. He joins the ranks of Jeremy Parish, Adam Sessler, and Greg Kasavin.

Not sure where I'd put Wainright. To my understanding, he claimed she was super hyped for Tomb Raider and it turned out she's very closely connected to Square-Enix in general? That's shameful, worse than most cases of "games journalists" courting to their PR buds.
 
McBradders said:
It directly affects their livliehoods, they should have a fucking opinion.
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I agree, but if they come out and criticize or make an opinion about what their company is doing with regards to relationships with the media, then I would think they could lose their job or at least be in some serious hot water.
 
Remember Mass Effect 3? When everyone (mostly) but journos said the ending was disappointing?


Yeah, who ended up winning that one? I don't think EA of all people changed the ending with free DLC because it was a vocal minority whining.
 
NHale said:
Why are you so entitled? Geez...
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peeweecommandgetpreviewlibraryphotoarchiverecid1081018filenamepeewee-2.jpg


AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH


YOU SAID THE MAGIC WORD
 
In fairness to Lauren Wainright, if the new Tomb Raider game is half as entertaining as the fallout from her ill-considered actions then I'd endorse it as much as she does. It deserves to score HNNGNGFNGNGNNNGGNGNG.5 / 10. Easily.

The child in me thinks:
Given as Lauren is attempting to go 'off the grid' in a bemusingly cack-handed fashion, there's a very strong temptation for a @Wainwrong fake Twitter to be created to maintain momentum.

The adult in me thinks:
Everybody makes mistakes. That's guaranteed. It's how you handle those mistakes that makes the difference.
 
not_so_special said:
i love how games journos can talk shit about anyone but when they got attacked act as a wolf pack
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They all sleep in the same bed... Just look some of these talking to each other on twitter... its like a big party where everyone who work in the "industry" is a friend of someone who work at a different place.


Its like a Cnn anchorman on twitter saying to bill o'reilly, "you did a great job bill".

You will never see that but in gaming industry .... You do!
 
It really is crazy to me that Rab's article mentioned that he couldn't help but be suspicious of Wainwright in regards to Tomb Raider due to some of her tweets, only for that to end up being entirely true. His random example that he pulled from the Twitter hat ended up revealing the ugly side of all this biz perfectly and just serving to further show the point of the entire article.
 
Nert said:
Not yet, but Klepek might do something eventually. From Twitter:

"Lotta folks asking me my thoughts on what's happening with Eurogamer and MCV. Don't have time to say much right now. In short, it's gross."
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As well as,

Patrick Klepek ‏@patrickklepek
@rain_one No time to weigh in right now. I'll do so eventually.
 
I thought the Geoff Keighley thing was funny.

Didn't really pay attention to the Eurogamer thing.

Now this has seemingly become news and it doesn't make me happy how this happened. I know who the bad guys appear to be here, but I can't help but be mad at Eurogamer, as well, for capitulating despite not being wrong.
 
I used to talk to Lauren a lot when she was first hired to write articles for Destructoid. She's always been a huge TR fan. It's a shame this is all so ugly.
 
Schrödinger's cat;43605199 said:
In fairness to Lauren Wainright, if the new Tomb Raider game is half as entertaining as the fallout from her ill-considered actions then I'd endorse it as much as she does. It deserves to score HNNGNGFNGNGNNNGGNGNG.5 / 10. Easily.

The child in me thinks:
Given as Lauren is attempting to go 'off the grid' in a bemusingly cack-handed fashion, there's a very strong temptation for a @Wainwrong fake Twitter to be created to maintain momentum.

The adult in me thinks:
Everybody makes mistakes. That's guaranteed. It's how you handle those mistakes that makes the difference.
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Of course. And history has shown game journalists make the worst mistakes imaginable when it comes to correcting things. I remember Brian Ashcraft wrote a damning piece on Hironobu Sakaguchi, and how his new game was just stealing from Final Fantasy, especially with the cover artwork. The problem, and it's a big one: the game was Pandora's Tower, a game he had no involvement in at all.

And what do people like Ashcraft do? Oh, they remove all mention of Sakaguchi and how he's stealing from Final Fantasy and correct the article, but make no mention whatsoever of what the original article intended. Shit, that happened this week too; someone wrote an article about how the Wii U advertisements featured Brad Pitt, but the Youtube video only had Brad Pitt in it because it was the end of the previous commercial. For such a silly mistake, the "journalist" could have taken the snaffu and mentioned that the article was corrected. Nope, just removal of Brad Pitt in the entire article, only to hide her correction in the comment section.

The only way people handle mistakes well is if they have journalistic integrity in the first place, and I would assume this thread has opened a beehive on the issue that we even argue if game journalism has integrity.
 
anyway... before that... Who took geoff kheighley seriously?

I mean... If there is a PR Puppet in the industry ... Its him!

I never saw an interview where he asked real challenging question to the guy in front of him...
Its alway some verry friendly interview asking question that everyone will be happy to answer.
 
Foffy said:
Of course. And history has shown game journalists make the worst mistakes imaginable when it comes to correcting things. I remember Brian Ashcraft wrote a damning piece on Hironobu Sakaguchi, and how his new game was just stealing from Final Fantasy, especially with the cover artwork. The problem, and it's a big one: the game was Pandora's Tower, a game he had no involvement in at all.
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Oh.

My.

God.
 
Mutagenic said:
I used to talk to Lauren a lot when she was first hired to write articles for Destructoid. She's always been a huge TR fan. It's a shame this is all so ugly.
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It really does seem like there should be some sort of training process for games enthusiast press on dealing with controversy, social media, etc. the weird limbo between fans and professionals that they inhabit means things can turn really ugly really quickly if handled poorly (and the digital equivalent of shredding the evidence is generally considered poor.)
 
theJwac said:
I agree. In fact, this thread had an image earlier showing several other uses of that hashtag by people who describe themselves as being affiliated with different gaming publications/sites.
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Found it. Yup, that's exactly what I'm talking about.

jarosh said:
CVMP4.jpg


Just an excerpt...
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That shows you all you really need to know right there and nobody can possibly act like they were unfairly singled-out or whatever. It better describes the problem than just the one, personalized example. Plus it is compelling more than just a couple people to discuss their involvement in what I can really only see as bribery.

EDIT: Probably mentioned before, but there isn't much different here from the Kickstarter scandal a few months back.
 
Professional, for profit, video game criticism is just broke. (as the original article points out)

Gaming media/entertainment (i.e. Giantbomb, podcasts, etc) is the future. Outlets need to differentiate themselves on more than just speed (exclusive reviews, etc) and writing quality. That's not to say traditional journalism won't exist too, but its just so common that you cannot rely on it alone to make money (unless you sell out to publishers to get exclusives).
 
lednerg said:
I might get flamed for this but whatever. I don't think Florence needed to name names in order to write a compelling article. I'm NOT saying what he did was libel or even necessarily 'wrong', it was just a bit much, especially towards a relative noname such as Wainwright. He could have just described the situation and guided people on a Twitter search for the offending hashtags. By calling her and others out by name, it makes things a little too personal for my liking. What could have been constructive criticism of the industry in general was instead something that could easily be misconstrued as personal attacks. [Note: I'm saying they were not personal attacks.] Regardless of how I feel about this admittedly minor point, I'm on the same page as most folks here about everything that transpired afterwards. At no point should anyone, especially a journalist, resort to or even fake legal action to silence criticism. I don't care how singled-out or unfairly treated she felt, nothing excuses that.
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The response proves exactly why he needed to name names. If anything he should have named more.
 
Meccanical said:
Oh.

My.

God.
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Yep, that's why when someone ever links me an article and it's from Brian Ashcraft I instantly close it, not even giving 10 seconds to read his work. Granted, he mostly talks about non-video game stuff on a video game website, which is perplexing, but I can only hope he doesn't make massive mistakes like that when it comes to talking about Japanese culture.

But I'm reminded that I don't go to a video game "blog" to read about how angry Japanese fans hate an idol because she has a boyfriend, so I wouldn't even care if he gets facts wrong.
 
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