OK, I've decided to quit biting my tongue and tackle the two serious issues that I've raised in my previous article. Granted, this is because I'm not in a state to do reviews at the minute, but I also want to give my take on this and I might as well get this sorted, so let me have a serious discussion. I'm going to start with the issue that GamerGate is investigating and why I think that, if it weren't for the fact that I cannot support the group due to the sheer amount of poor behaviour among people associated with it, I would find myself in some sort of agreement with the group.
I'm sure everyone has heard about stories of journalists involved in shady business to ensure they can do articles or reviews. The one most people in the UK will know of was when the newspaper (and I use that term only because I think referring to it as "a piece of underwritten and shoddy tripe which was not worth using as toilet paper" would not be professional etiquette) The News Of The World was revealed to have hacked phones to ensure they could get exclusive details, but corruption in the media does not necessarily cover unethical ways of obtaining their information: refusing to print stories which are actually in the public interest to read, refusing to release articles just because they incriminate a person that the journalist knows or blatantly lying to their readers are just a few of the ways that journalistic corruption can have a negative impact on the public at large, and are not restricted purely to video games media. Shady journalism in ANY media is a concerning issue, but, in video games media, it appears to have developed to be a serious issue due to how expensive gaming has become overall (let's be honest, spending £50 on a high profile new game is not something most people are going to want to do unless they have a VERY good reason to get it!) and the determination to win over games journalists and reviewers to the side of the developers, often at the expense of the consumer.
Obviously, anything which puts the consumer in a worse position is not something which is good for the industry as a whole. An angry consumer will make their anger heard, which can affect sales for either the product in question (if they have a high profile voice) or subsequent products by the company connected to the product. While gamers are a crowd who are willing to take A LOT of abuse on their wallet for the games they love (why do you think DLC is still a popular thing when so much of it is purely cosmetic, doesn't enhance the game much or is parts of the game that SHOULD have been finished when the game was released?), a gamer who has been pushed to the limit will usually be LIVID with the company who has picked them to the limit and may well refuse to support the company in the future for the rest of the company's existence...and maybe beyond that, if members of it split off to form another company and the gamer is particularly determined to refuse to give them a chance.
However, if the gamer is being LIED to by those who are supposed to protect them from terrible quality products...then things get REALLY ugly very quickly. Not only has the gamer had their trust broken by a person whose voice should have protected them from a terrible quality product, but the financial cost the gamer has had to incur (which can be a lot, as I think I've stressed rather nicely a bit earlier), in most cases, cannot be undone. And this affects everyone: the consumer is affected because of their financial loss, the journalist/reviewer is affected because they no longer get trusted by their audience and the company is affected because the consumer both no longer trusts them for corrupting the journalist AND for trying to deceive them. From a technical perspective, you could argue that it's actually the consumer who is least affected by the corruption of a journalist, not the company: all they lose is their money for one game, but the company and journalist have their jobs on the line if caught making underhand deals and, if enough consumers makes a valid boycott, BOTH can end up worse off.
This is partially why I have refused to do reviewing on a professional level and, despite trying to do articles and reviews to a rough schedule, will always refer to myself as an amateur reviewer: I would prefer to be both open to choose what I want to review and to be able to work on my own schedule instead of having an album and a deadline someone else has set for me. On top of that, as an amateur reviewer, I do not have a pull in the industry and, as such, do not get sent material by bands to review (the only exception being when I reviewed Knightmare's album a few months back, which was the ONLY case of me contacting the band to get sent a copy of their album for review work, as I mentioned in the introduction to the review: the review is available to be read here, if you want to read it): if I want to review an album, I have to go out and get a copy of it. This makes me unable to be corrupted by bands or labels and is the way I like to do things. Sure, it has drawbacks (it's a costly method that means I can end up spending a lot of money, especially if I want to do reviews for a large number of albums, and I will next to never be able to have a review of an album up on the day the album is released due to the way I have to get my copies of the albums in question), but I find that this works fine for me.
However, I am aware that professional reviewers have to operate under a different set of rules: they are often obliged to follow embargoes which mean they cannot put out reviews before a certain date, they can get fairly close to those who make the products they review (for example, a video games critic might get close to publishers and developers to find out what things are like on those levels of work) and all sorts of other things like that. Two of my favourite gaming personalities, TotalBiscuit and Jimquisition, have discussed these in some detail and why it is important to follow these if you are involved in professional criticism (for instance, breaking an embargo? That could incur a financial cost AND you might be blacklisted in the industry to do it, so you won't ever get any promo copies of stuff ever again just for putting out a review a few minutes earlier than you should have done!), so I'll not go into the ins and outs of them here, but the important point is that professional reviewers are not simply amateur reviewers who just get stuff earlier than the general public and/or get their reviews published in professional sources with a lot of attention directed to them: there's a lot more to it than that!
Personally speaking, I'm not interested in most of that stuff. Sure, it'd be nice to get published on a professional site in the future, but embargoes nearly always come with a few rules which I simply do not like. For one thing, some embargoes by morally dubious companies will flat out state that you cannot give a game a score lower than one they set (or will allow you to post reviews early if you give it a certain score or above), which is a sickening practice in my book and, if I do end up going professional, I will ALWAYS refuse to agree to an embargo which has a rule like that one because I do not consider a rule like that one to be worth agreeing to, even if I would have ended up giving the score the embargo demands I give it. Another thing is that being a professional demands an ability to stick to deadlines, which I CAN do, but I tend to find that I work best when I set my own deadlines simply because I can't focus on the same thing for a long time (which is why I've taken up doing video game and anime reviews in between writing articles and music reviews: those allow me to take time out from doing music reviews and articles to talk about other stuff which I like when I feel I can't do those any more). Another practise which has gained popularity in video games embargoes recently (and used to be a practise connected to film criticism) is to restrict what is shown or said about certain games. While this is usually meant just to stop reviewers from spoiling secrets connected to them (so, the surprise return of a fan favourite character who was mentioned in promo material as not being in the game), some have gone further and dictated what can be said about a game. For example, promo copies of the game Middle-Earth: Shadows Of Mordor which were given to YouTube critics apparently had rules ranging from not being allowed to show bugs in the game, not being allowed to mention the game in comparison to The Lord Of The Rings or The Hobbit and the publisher of the game having to approve the video 24 hours before it went live. While these are a necessary evil in professional criticism, I simply do not feel that restricting what I say (or having an implied reason to play by the rules of a person who might not be looking out for the consumer due to the rules they want me to play by) is a valid way to do journalism. For me, journalism and criticism should be as honest and as uncorrupt as reasonably possible, and embargoes simply do not strike me as an honest way to do things unless I am allowed to say what the rules for the embargo I am following are.
Does this mean that I would demand the complete separation of journalists and critics from people connected to making the media they are discussing? No, of course not: a journalist needs to be able to be close to their media in order to discuss interesting stories connected to it and a critic who is completely unconnected from the media they are assessing cannot be reasonably expected to assess a product to their best of their ability. However, I would feel that a journalist who refuses to reveal the nature of their sources (unless the source would be at risk of being attacked for being revealed) is a journalist to be suspicious of, much as I would be suspicious of a critic if they hyped up a game that was by a company who they had a known connection to. When I did my review of Knightmare's album, I was open about the fact that I'd been in discussion with a member of the band and that I'd got my copy thanks to the member sending me a copy by my request. In that aspect, I was being open about the fact that my review had a potential bias connected to it. While I did not reveal every detail, I covered the important points that I felt were important to cover to allow readers to make up their minds as to whether my review was trustworthy or not, and that is a practice which I feel journalists and critics should have to follow: if the critic got a copy of the product they're critiquing through a connection to someone involved in making the game (or something like that), I would prefer to be informed of that, even if they do not give the name of their connection, and the same rule applies to journalists for me (namely, if their information is from a person directly connected to the topic they're discussing, I would prefer them to admit that they have information from someone connected to the topic).
What GamerGate (and many other people, come to think of it) gets wrong, however, is assuming that refusing to run an article is a sign of corruption. In fact, refusing to run an article is a perfectly valid decision to make: the reason that an article isn't run can range from it not matching the rules for articles set by the editor(s), being too controversial (yes, surprisingly, some articles are just too controversial for some people to want to run, even on the internet, and they have a right to say "I won't run that article" if they feel that is the case), being pieces which the editor(s) do not feel suit the nature of their publication/website or even being purely what is known on the internet as "clickbait" (basically, obviously intended just to get readers and having no other purpose than that...and yes, even on the internet, some websites will refuse to run something purely because it's clickbait and nothing more). While there ARE valid signs of corruption related to refusing to run articles, these would require the article to be a perfectly acceptable article by all other standards and simply being rejected due to the editor not liking it (or demanding it be changed to have a completely different opinion told through it and refusing to run it if that isn't done). Attacks on people are what most people would consider to be clickbait, and a refusal to run an article which is obviously designed to attack someone and nothing else is a perfectly acceptable decision to make that I would actually commend the editor for, even if they admitted that their main reason for rejecting it was because they didn't like it.
For me, honest and uncorrupt journalism is a very important thing, as it makes it impossible for anyone to abuse the consumer and it ultimately protects everyone. While there will always be some shadiness in journalism and criticism relating to how the information or product was obtained, that is ultimately the nature of the beast. However, contributing to the shady nature of things doesn't allow things to improve, and, in that aspect, I will find myself in agreement with GamerGate. However, that does not mean that our morales should be forgotten purely for the sake of being honest and uncorrupt: by opening the floodgates to letting any article be run purely because it is honest or uncorrupt, we open the floodgates to letting anything with truth be published purely on that merit, even if it does not fit in with the usual material of whatever it is being published in or is poorly written. So a right to honest and uncorrupt journalist does NOT mean that articles should be unable to be rejected: in fact, I'd argue that the inverse is true, in that a determination to provide honest and uncorrupt journalism means that articles should not be published until the facts are established and the truth of the facts determined.
Tune back next time for my examination of the issue Anita Sarkeesian is investigating and why I feel she has a point as well!
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