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Dec. 15, 2014 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
01:10:57
A Conversation with GoodGamers.us about Ethics #GamerGate #NotYourShield
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Hello everyone, I'm having a conversation with the members of GoodGamers.us, a video game website that has kind of sprung up in the wake of Gamergate because of how the other various gaming sites decided, or certain ones decided they didn't need ethics policies.
And goodgamers.us wrote an ethics policy that I read and was remarkably impressed with, so I thought I would invite them on to talk to them about it.
So how are you guys doing?
Great.
Very good.
How are you?
Yeah, I'm very well.
Would you like to introduce yourselves and what you do?
My name is Moosh.
I am a journalist by day and by night.
I am an ultra nerd.
Like I'm running through video games constantly.
Right.
I'm Mess.
I write for the site.
And at the moment, my day job is looking for jobs.
Right.
And Kenton?
I also write for the site.
And my day job is moving right now.
And so I have as much free time as I have with the site.
Great.
Okay.
And would you like to tell me about goodgamers.us?
Well, basically, we were a site started up by Stephanie Dorman, and she was very impassioned with the whole system of current news gaming coverage.
And she basically sort of did an open call to get a load of people on board.
And we, all the staff of Good Gamers US, all applied for it.
And since then, Stephanie's stepped down as the editor-in-chief.
And we've all sort of been lumped together.
And we're like, okay, seriously, let's make a sort of run of this.
And the idea was to make a site that was not like, I mean, choose my wording carefully here, not pushing ideology or pushing emotion and pursuing it, but instead just literally giving people the information that they want and allowing them to make up their own opinions, not telling them what they should think and feel.
And that's what we're really focusing on right now.
So you're saying that your site has respect for the intelligence of your audience?
I know, it's rare, isn't it?
You have to understand the game where I'm really not familiar with this.
It's an alien concept.
It is.
It is.
So what do you guys think about Gamergate?
And how long have you been following it?
And what's your impression so far?
Well, we've all been following it.
Like when Stephanie sent out the call, I feel like the reason it got any attention at all was due to the Gamers of Dead articles and some of us following the Gamergate hashtag.
So you could say that the site was birthed by Gamergate, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we're all posting under the hashtag all the time.
In fact, I would say that our site agrees with, you know, we're against harassment and we support ethics in journalism.
Like that is, you know, and that's the Gamergate slogan, right?
We're all behind that.
Yeah, I've yet to meet someone who actually cares about Gamergate who is opposed to those concepts.
That is the uniting force as far as I can tell.
Okay, great.
So would you like to tell me something about your ethics policy?
Just what generally sort of brought you know, what made you what really inspired you to write it in the first place to start with?
Well, I was one of the guys that sort of like originally laid everything out.
And I've been working as a journalist for a while.
And what, like, I went to university for it, and they fill your head full of magic when you're in university.
It's kind of like when you learn how to drive a car.
You know, like when you're getting your tests and stuff, you get all these things that you're supposed to do.
And then the second that you're behind the wheel, ninety percent of that is thrown out of the window, you know, and it's just how it is, which is really sort of sad.
And for me, it's it's like the problems that Gamergate have surfaced around the media uh coverage and stuff, especially mainstream media, how they've covered Gamergate.
Um it's shown a lot of people that a lot of uh journalistic outlets don't do non-partisan coverage and that's the whole ideology behind all the ethics courses that we took.
And for me that's so fucking important and it's sort of just you know disregarded by I'm not going to say name names and point fingers, because that's you know throwing rocks at glass houses and our own glass houses.
I can point fingers and name names.
Totello from Kotaku, you little weasel, get a fucking ethics policy.
It's not wrong to be nailed down when someone you employ has done something wrong.
It's wrong to try and weasel out of it your little anyway, sorry, I'll go I won't go all right.
I can either confirm or deny what you've just said.
But what I will say though is that we wanted to really sort of make a difference.
And obviously right now if someone looks at our site it's amateurish and that's the whole point which is why we're working on a big huge redesign that's coming when it's ready and one of the things that we really wanted to nail first you need a foundation to build such a site and the most important cornerstone I think of any sort of journalistic outlet is the rules and practices that they adhere to.
So that's why we put our heads together and we came up with the ethics policy that we did.
And to me it's it's common fucking sense.
90% of the things that we outlined, some stuff I don't know other sites that have done it.
But I just think it's the best way to be fair to the consumer, which at the end of the day matters, because that's what the Fourth Estate's all about.
I completely agree.
One of the things that I notice is that the first thing that you've got you've got the Game Gate ethics policy.
I'm going to tweet it out just so people can read it along with us if they choose.
That would be the good gamers' ethics policy, right?
It is, yeah.
The ethics policy it was written by Chris, it says, but I think it says all the staff of good gamers should adhere to these policies.
And I noticed that the first one the first bullet point under public relations is always treat your readers with respect.
That's quite unusual, isn't it?
What made you do that?
It's the thing about us, like, one of the things that I can say, I can sort of do a game analogy.
EA always have this player-first policy, and that's what they've always saying.
And it's easy to say that, but the fact is they very rarely do so.
And we're going to try our best to answer to our readers.
And there's things like that we've had with our site.
We don't give review scores because we asked the readers, look, do you want us to give scores or not?
And it was overwhelming majority said, you know, hey, we don't want this.
So we're like, okay, fuck, we'll do what you want.
And for us, that's what's more important.
So do you have like a recommended, not recommended, or do you not have anything like that?
Currently in place, we've got nothing like that of the sort.
We were thinking, we've been throwing around ideas of a thumbs up, thumbs down, or I mean a meh sort of system.
The only problem that we have with scores and stuff, when you have a score, all discussion becomes about that score.
You know, if I give, say, alien isolation a four out of ten, all the discussion underneath it isn't what the game made the game great or what made the game bad.
It was why is this a four out of ten and not a seven out of ten or a ten out of ten or a three out of ten.
You know, it's one of the things we're going to avoid doing because like it's like top ten lists and clickbaity articles like that.
It kinda just kills all fucking discussion, which we're against.
Yeah, I I agree.
Sorry, go on.
Yeah, if if I may add to that, you know, if We are much more interested in discussing what a game is than whether or not it is a seven or an eight.
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
I agree.
I've never really been a fan of like, you know, nine point eight out of ten or anything like that.
It's you know, arbitrary, essentially.
But the um the I think one one thing for me personally, I'm not speaking for anyone else here, um is that I personally like to see whether it's uh recommended or not recommended, um, just because it you know, I'm not going to read a huge review on a game that I don't really know or care about, but if it's you know recommended, maybe I'll give it a look or you know, something like that.
But again, that's personal preference.
We have a sort of like final word thing at the bottom, which basically sums up the entirety of the review in what, like a few sentences.
Right.
Something in the lines of this fucking game, it's fucking amazing, or avoid this like the plague.
You know, it's as simple as that, you know.
That's the way we do it, as opposed to giving it a binary score.
That's a combinary discussion.
To give an example of a review I've been working on, I say at the end of it, you know, get this game if you if you're genuinely interested, but get it on sale.
You know, I discouraged full price on it.
So usually the last paragraph or two paragraphs, you could find something like that in our reviews.
Yeah, see, there's there's a fine line between saying we want to focus on the games and then you know, not actually providing a consumer with a great tool, which is something that can easily be taken into account when he's making a purchasing decision.
So would you describe yourselves primarily as a consumer advocacy site?
Yeah.
One of the things that we're really focusing on is being pro-consumer and outlying dodgy practices and anti-consumer practices that run in the industry.
Because to us, that's what's important.
At the end of the day, we're not asking for people to pay us up front, like an Indiegogo campaign or a Patreon or something.
Hopefully we want to fund some advertising.
And because of which we're going to answer to our consumer base, which will be our readers and what they say goes.
And if they want to make us implement certain systems and stuff like that, and there's a sort of means for that, and people are calling for that, then we'll do that, because we answer to them.
But what if you get an advertisement from a particularly large and influential video game company that asks you, please don't review this unfavorably, and we do happen to spend millions advertising on your site.
What happens then?
That's one of the things that we've outlined in the ethics policy.
If we were ever to get, like, say, sponsorships and stuff, we do it from processes and graphics cards and things like that.
Things that pertain to gaming that we won't write about.
There's nothing that infuriates me more when you will see on a certain publication that I won't name a very dodgy business practice by one developer having their game always online and then twenty advertisements all over the page of that same game.
Like things like that I hate and we will recuse ourselves of doing that.
We will actually refuse advertisements of that because at the end of the day we serve the consumer.
We don't serve our own personal bank accounts.
That's the thing.
We're doing it all for free at the moment, not even for hot pockets.
It's a terrible sort of thing we're doing.
That's a good point though, because I mean, one of the things that I think that a lot of people would be really worried about is the fact that, yeah, like you say, if you're reading a review of a video game with adverts of the video game all around it, you can be quite sure that there's a lot of bias that is influencing the review, isn't there?
I mean, there has to be.
You can't then sit there and slam this game that is basically paying massive amounts of money to your site.
Yeah, it has the appearance of impropriety.
And look, this is it's important to stress that We're fifteen people on this site.
If we had a single owner, yeah, that that two million dollar advertising campaign was going to look mighty lucrative, right?
But at this point, you know, we're owned 15 ways.
And there only does there has to be just one of us that goes against the group thing and publicizes that mistake, and the site is done and nothing comes of it.
So we it I'm not going to say we're incorruptible, but I would be hard pressed to see how this many people who at this point cares about ethics, there wouldn't be at least one person blowing the whistle.
That's very interesting.
So you're not owned by a larger parent company like Gorka then?
No, no, certainly not.
They don't pay the bills for this thing, unfortunately.
We're all doing other things in the meantime.
And this is sort of a side project.
That said, we're putting our heart and soul and a lot of man hours into it right now with the back end.
Yeah, like we wouldn't want to be owned.
I mean, like, the way that we're set up, we're democratically run.
So there's like 14 of us that all have to come to a decision, which obviously is a lot of bureaucracy and things like that.
But if they have to buy out the majority of the fucking jury, you know, like fair play to the person that can afford that, at the end of the day.
Yeah, yeah, I understand.
Okay, that's interesting.
So one of the things I noticed, I mean, you've got that you'll never delete legitimate comments.
Each and every comment goes through an approval process and will only be removed if it contains spam or breaks the conduct policy.
Opposing viewpoints will be welcomed and not be taken down just because you personally agree with them.
What made you come to that decision?
Thank you.
Okay, so there's a this this ethic the ethics policy is is still being worked on I should say.
This is this is the the first edition we publicized.
Okay.
The the thing you read there, it gives the impression that maybe we're pre-approving comments from going up.
That won't be the case.
That is why I mentioned it, in fact.
Yeah, because obviously like when you when you put together a large lengthy document like this, you don't necessarily see all of the side effects that are gonna come from it.
One of the side effects here could be that somebody put up a comment and if it's pre-approved, there would be no you would not know why it was not approved and there would be no way of seeing why it was not approved.
And that would be terrible.
That is not transparent and it doesn't work.
I've myself submitted comments on Anita Sakisian's site and I have submitted them on Kyle Orland's blog and neither comment has ever been approved.
I don't know if it was because I did something particularly inflammatory or anything or what it was.
So that is you know if somebody writes something, it should go up and it should for all intents and purposes it should stay up.
The reason we have this language here is because what's on our front page even if it's comments to some extent will reflect on the site.
So that means we have to have some way of dealing with spam and outright shills.
What we're trying to do here the current idea is that we will be moving comments into a kind of a backside, a separate forum or something to that effect, where you will have a link at the bottom of the comments so you can see which comments were removed.
That is to say, or which comments were moved.
That way, Anybody is able to verify our like the reason we made those decisions.
And we'll be we'll have to explain when we move stuff.
So in a nutshell and stuff, like we want the idea of having the readers have sort of a big impact, so like top comments of the day and stuff like that featured on the front page.
The only problem when we're doing that, obviously, is if we had a sort of Reddit system where people can up and downvote comments, someone could make a load of puppet accounts and have Hitler was right on our front page, which obviously looks very bad for us.
So things like that, it was more pertaining to things like that as opposed to freedom of speech.
We all agree in the free market, and if what we're doing is wrong, we want to be told that we're wrong so we can make it right.
That's the reason behind it, really.
It was just worded incorrectly, but that's the beauty of what we did.
We rolled out the ethics policy.
It's sort of in beta because we wanted to get feedback to make it even better than it is.
That was the whole point of us putting out there.
Yeah, totally understand.
And so are you going to do you have comments on every article, or are there some articles that you'll be closing the comments on for various things?
No, we're not certain pop culture critics that don't want to push out their own narrative and not allow the free market to talk about it.
We disagree with that completely.
If we write something and everyone thinks that we are stupid twats for writing it, they have the entire right to call us stupid twats.
So we agree with that.
Good.
Glad to hear it.
Right.
Okay.
So the next thing I'd like to talk about is take responsibility.
If a reader calls the company or a staff member out on a policy violation, technical error or misunderstanding, be reasonable and try to understand their concern and feedback.
And that also goes on to the first conflict of interest points you've got, the always disclose personal conflicts.
If, for example, one of your journalists has been caught having an inappropriate relationship with a developer they may or may not cover, what would be your policy on that?
Well, it's the whole idea of professional distance.
And it's so incredibly important that it's something that not many people can sort of work out correctly in terms of what constitutes breaching that professional distance.
Now, I have a background in journalism, so I can easily sort of tell someone, you can do this, you can't do this.
Things we just can't work about.
And in that regard, certain games we just won't cover.
And we will maybe tell people that we're not going to cover them because of the reasons, but that could be probably seen as pandering, which is one of the things that we're kind of against.
We don't want to tell everyone every single time we have to recuse ourselves of coverage every single reason.
Because at the end of the day, that'll be publishing a non-article saying we can't talk about this game because of this.
So that's one of the things that we're focusing on.
How exactly is that going to work for me?
Are you just going to put a statement saying we've recused ourselves from covering this game for various personal reasons?
Or what form would that take exactly?
We'd have a writer in place that doesn't have a conflict of interest with that regard, and they would cover it instead.
And we will make note of the writer or the staff member that does have that conflict of interest and say the reasoning behind why we chose, for example, Sean to write this article was because Chris has a conflict of interest because he really, really likes this person, you know, for example.
Right, okay.
Okay, so the next hypothetical then.
Say you were planning to cover my game Necromancer, self-promotion, there can't be it, but I'm giving you guys a platform to talk about your website as a whole.
Do you feel that you wouldn't be able to review my game?
Well, it would depend on the situation at hand.
Essentially, right now we're in a professional setting in the sense that you're interviewing us and that you offered us this interview.
So essentially, Our biases, we wouldn't really have that many biases.
Now, me, for instance, I'm perfectly comfortable saying, you know, like for about a year now, I've been watching your YouTube channel.
So I personally could not review you or interview you with, you know, I would have to recuse myself.
So it's a very strange line that we have to tow in that regard.
Like, if any of us was supporting your Patreon, then our site as a whole probably could not review it.
Because that gets a little bit like one of our staffers is supporting you economically, then one of the others reviews it.
That's kind of problematic.
What we ideally would do if we felt like our readers needed to know would be to get an outside writer.
I think that would be a way to go around that.
But it's, you know, if one of us was friends with you, say, then you'd say, well, generally, you can just have somebody else review it.
Well, that's why I actually thought that my case was different.
I was actually talking to my co-developer about this conversation, and he asked me, you know, are you going to ask them to not review our game because you're going to be providing their website with a platform?
And I was thinking about it, and I thought, well, if nothing else, if any of your writers did happen to cover my game, I think that at least you should probably put a statement at the beginning of the article saying this is a game made by someone who has helped us in the past or something.
At least disclose that this event has occurred just so people can know.
And I know that sounds like I might be a bit overly sensitive about the issue or something, but it really just, I'm not even sure what's right and wrong in this situation.
So it's something that was actually quickly.
But one of the things that we do, which is very different to many other sites, is with every single game that we review, we throw out all of our predispositions and our biases towards it.
So like say I'm reviewing, I don't know, like the new Metal Gear Sword game, I could be a huge fucking fanboy of Metal Gear Sword.
To the point in which I will say, you know, look, I'm a massive experience with the series.
I fucking worship the ground that everything this guy does.
But that's there at the top as a sort of disclaimer.
So people know my experience within the sort of, you know, with that actual game and that franchise.
And likewise, predispositions as well we throw out there.
So say like I'm reviewing Dragon Age Inquisition and I think EA is Satan and I hate them for closing down Westwood Studios and Bullfrog and Origin and all these other systems and stuff.
That's there as well because that could also cloud my actual review.
So we could obviously talk about your game.
However, we would have all of that clarification there.
But the thing is, we wouldn't let that sway.
And everything that we do has to be peer-reviewed by three different members of the site.
Myself, Kenton, and Sean.
And we basically make sure that there's any sort of biases or leanings towards that.
And we sort of purge it out.
Anything that's unfair is what you're saying, yeah?
Yeah, exactly.
To use a real example, we recently had the Binding Visa Rebirth review come out.
And the person who reviewed it said he pre-ordered the game, got a discount on it.
He's a huge fan of Edmund Macmillan, and that he was one of the 0.4% of people to actually complete the game in its entirety.
That's just some of the things that he had set aside to explain, this is where I'm coming from on the review.
Right, okay.
Using this example, then why didn't you have someone else review the game if you had someone who had such a favourable bias towards it in the group?
I mean, I just want to say as well, there's nothing necessarily wrong with, in my opinion, with having biases.
The problem is when you don't account for those biases.
And like you said, your policy is specifically designed to account for your own biases primarily by admitting them first, just so everyone can see it.
Because I think in a way that really does force people to kind of be slightly biased against something.
Like Total Biscuit said, actually, one of the things when you've got something you really like and you're dealing with something you really like, I find myself being a lot more harsh, harsher critic on the things that I actually really genuinely like because I genuinely like them.
But again, that's just me.
Sorry.
Well, no, no, no, I totally agree with that.
The reason why we had Tim do that, because he had a lot of love for Isaac, was he is the most qualified out of all of us to talk about it.
I mean, Christ, he's one of the 0.4% of people that's 100%ed of that game, or 110%, or wherever it is.
He was the most qualified to tackle it, and he has a lot of experience with the franchise, more so than pretty much any of our stuff.
And that's one of the things for me.
Like, I fucking love Silent Hill.
And every time a new Silent Hill game comes out, I hate the fucking thing.
But I always hope the next one's going to be great.
I don't know.
It's something about Silent Hill fans.
I think we're all masochists.
It's just really horrible.
And when Book of Memory comes out, fucking, you know, but like, that's what it's been always like.
And we're a lot more harsher on things that we do appreciate.
And that's one of the things.
We'll have the person who we think is the most qualified past experience and biases or predispositions aside and get them to review it as long as they outline all of the shit surrounding it.
Because you want to know that about someone, because you want to know if their reviews are subjective, you know?
And if we outline all of that information first, people can have an objective review on whether or not our subjective opinion on the game is valid to them.
That's the thing.
If I've got two guys, one's review, they're both reviewing DMC Devil May Cry, someone's never played a Devil May Cry game, someone's played all of them and loves the series.
I value one of those opinions more than the other, personally, for me.
And I can make that decision if they outline that.
Otherwise, I don't know, because we're supposed to take it for face value and granted that they do this.
Right, yeah.
I mean, I think that's a it's it's a it's both a good and bad point in my opinion because I feel of I feel the same way about Total War games.
I have an innate bias towards the franchise.
So you can imagine how heartbroken I was with Rome 2.
And so I mean, but the thing is, in a way, I'm probably more likely to be decidedly biased against Rome 2 just because it kind of failed to fulfill any of my expectations, really.
And I think that, yeah, I think there's definitely the argument for the person being more experienced with the game and so having a greater depth of knowledge about what they're talking about.
But again, I can't help but worry that There would be a great deal of bias there whether the person's trying to account for it or not.
But again, this is it.
I'm just kind of throwing it.
It works, really.
It's a double-edged sword in that sense because I'm a big fan of the Elder Shrolls game and the Arkham games.
And I have my opinions on those.
Like, Arkham Origins, I think, is one of the most disappointing games I've ever played.
Yet I still love the franchise.
But at the same time, someone who's never played Arkham Origins might enjoy it, or the Arkham games might enjoy it because they've never experienced it mechanically or seen the corner, were able to see the corner cuttings that I saw with the studio that handled Arkham Origins.
So it's, you know, being a fan of something, you tend to look at the best parts of it, and the worst parts of it is just shine through easiest for that fan.
Yeah, that's one of the big things as well, though, quickly jumping on what you said, Sargon.
The thing with us, like, obviously with us outlining this, a lot of people say, you know, oh, well, look, you've got all these biases, and you've got maybe this, that, and the other.
And that's the thing.
Like, no, like all of the sites will have the same sort of biases and leanings towards certain products, but we put ours out in the open.
And that's the thing about is we want to be transparent.
And that's the thing with us.
It might open a fucking kettle of fish for us.
It might be an even easier way for people to point the finger and say, gotcha.
But at the end of the day, if we wear it on our sleeve and we say, look, this is what we think about this, this is what we're like, then it's more out in the open then, as opposed to not disclosing that information.
I totally agree, actually.
Sorry, just to jump in quickly.
One of the things I think is important is, obviously, everyone has biases.
But the thing that impressed me about your mission statement was the fact that you're striving to account for them to provide an impartial and objective review as far as is possible.
Because one of the things I'm sick of hearing from the anti-Gamergate people is the Nirvana fallacy: the, oh, we can't be perfect, so we won't even try.
That really, really, really annoys me.
Sorry, what were you going to say there?
Just, you know, suppose you were running a piano piece review site and a new piece comes out by Beethoven.
Who do you want to review it?
The master pianist or somebody who's just taking the first class?
Certain games have a huge amount of mastery to them.
Like a Total War game, for instance, I'm sure there's a depth of mastery that is quite high.
They'll be on me as well.
If you want somebody who's even capable of examining the minutiae of the ways various tactics are encouraged, they have to have mastery to an extent.
And that only happens if they're fans of this franchise.
But on the other hand, somebody who's going to be able to appreciate that advice is also going to be a fan.
So the motivations line up.
That's okay then.
Then it becomes a service for the reader rather than a disservice to the reader.
So long as the reader thinks are disclosed to them and they're not surprised when they purchase the game or when they play the game, then everything worked out.
Then it's fine.
The problem is if they are misled.
Yeah, no, I completely agree.
I think that one of the most important things these days is transparency.
I can't see a reason not to be transparent.
And it's good to see that you are.
So yeah, I just thought I'm just, again, I'm going through various points of interest that I found in your ethics policy.
If a staff member has supported the game's development or developer financially through Patreon or is being supported by Patreon, recusal is a requirement.
Why are you allowing that to happen at all?
I'm not saying that it's good or bad to do so.
I'm just wondering why it's acceptable for you to let any of your journalists support developers via Patreon.
I was the one that actually wrote to include that in the article.
Basically, one of the big things about it was I kind of really love Patreon, the idea behind it, but I also hate Patreon.
And that's the thing with it, because it's great on paper.
But in terms of professional distance and stuff like that, obviously it's something that requires immediate recusal.
Now, the way that we didn't really want to constrain our staff too much, at the end of the day, if someone really wants to support someone like Frederick Brennan for 8-chan and stuff, if we were on, say, a technology piece on 8-Chan, we would have to then recuse ourselves of it.
We weren't allowed to cover that at all.
That's only one of the smallest things.
But the thing that we have, if we had, like, say, one staff member who wants to support one game or one developer specifically, then they are just completely recused of commenting on it whatsoever in any way, shape, or form.
But at the same time, we don't want to put thumbnails on them and say that you can and cannot do this in your own personal life.
And that's the thing.
That's one of the things that we're very against.
I'm as appreciative of personal liberty as anyone.
And I think that what you're saying is completely legitimate.
I don't see any problem with your policy.
I personally, though, would think that this is kind of the problem that we're having with the anti-Gamergate people.
Even if, say, Nathan Grayson didn't necessarily review Depression Quest, someone that's friends with Zoe Quinn and Nathan Grayson may have done.
And it's not necessarily that the individual does it, but when, given a long enough period of time, you end up building this interconnecting web of relationships.
So whereas you might not personally be doing it, you may well be, you know, a friend of yours may be doing it.
And you're not going to suddenly attack someone that your friend is supporting, are you?
And again, I'm not making any accusations or anything like this.
But I personally find that the line between developers and journalists should be a lot clearer.
And I personally would push for an ethics policy that suggested no Patreon backing at all.
And yes, that does mean that in their personal lives, journalists shouldn't be supporting developers.
And my answer to that is tough.
In a lot of ways, I do agree with what you're saying.
And it's the beauty of the actual ethics policy that we put out.
The entire idea behind it is that we answer to our readers.
And this is literally our first draft.
That's why there might be a couple of spelling errors if those are the really keen idle point out.
But there's things like stuff like we haven't had anything in terms of freelance writers.
If they work for a site, there's a lot of things that need to be added and need to be worked on.
And it's one of the things about it, that if people have a call and our readers have a call for us to change that and agree with that, we will tweak that and we will change that.
And we are very happy to do so.
Because at the end of the day, that's who we answer to, and that's who are important to us.
Again, I'm not suggesting that this is happening or anything like that.
But I think that what we can see is that it can happen.
We've very clearly can see it that it can happen.
It's absolutely happening with the anti-GameGate people.
And so it's something that I would think would just be a precautionary measure for the future.
I find it unlikely that gamers in people who are actual gamers and not social justice warriors would actually do this.
I think that it's far more likely that you'll end up with a lot of professional distance because I get the feeling that you would probably be in competition with various other sites and whatnot.
So it wouldn't be necessarily about forming a culture to defend.
But again, we know that it can happen.
So it was just something that struck me that might be worth considering for future-proofing it.
Yeah, it's so what the idea is, you know, what if there's an unseen bias?
What if there's something that cannot be disclosed really or cannot really be detected?
Suppose that I have 10 friends who all support some game developer.
What do I do then?
How do I say at the start of the article?
you know, I have a problem writing about this game because 10 of my friends, and then I list them, and then I list the amount of money donated, and I say I'm not a part of those.
How do you even work with that?
Having disclosure at that point, I mean, the piece would be worthless.
With that type of disclaimer at the top, nobody would trust me, right?
Even if because it has the appearance of impropriety, right?
That's definitely something.
That's basically what I'm trying to say: is that even if Nathan Grayson didn't review the Depression Quest, none of them in his circle of contacts should really have been commenting on it at all.
And that's what I mean with the web of interconnected personal relationships, that even the one direct, it might not directly be the case.
It just, as you said, it just presents a problem.
Yeah, it does.
There's not really a good solution for it.
Because suppose, you know, like we're supposed to read up on the news and report them, or figure out the news and report them.
So just having no coverage at all is not always the best way to go.
However, I feel like in many instances it would be.
Okay.
And in cases where impropriety was proven, what would be the result for the journalist involved?
Would they lose their jobs?
Would they be reprimanded in some way?
What would be the course of management?
Well, I mean, we all have a share in the website at the moment.
So losing their jobs doesn't really happen.
I mean, they're still going to be part owner contractually.
It depends on a case-by-case basis.
If they make a major thing, like sleeping with a developer and then reviewing their game or reviewing a friend's game or something like that, that's big.
That's something that I would say everyone at the website knows is unethical and would know better than to do that.
That did happen.
What would the punishment for that be?
Yeah, that's what we're talking about, right?
Yeah, punishments.
Well, that's what I'm saying.
We couldn't fire them, but at the same time, we could at least put them under a microscope or prevent them from writing for a period of time, if not permanently, depending on the severity of the action that they did.
Right.
So I do think that it's all a good saying you're going to hold people accountable, but if there are no actual punishments for infractions of the ethics policy, then what would it matter?
Exactly. We've postulated that these things are wrong when you develop content for the site itself.
It should be noted that if people go out on their own on their own Twitter and say stuff, then that's not presented directly to the reader.
To an extent, when you have this kind of group-owned thing, people are somewhat more free agents.
I'm not going to be held responsible for what Kenton says if he goes and says something really ridiculous, right?
But yeah, what suppose somebody was abusing the website, right?
Then they're abusing the readers, they're abusing everything.
Well, we would have to take action.
And I think in the contract we do have some provisions about the possible removal of ownership.
The issue is we are an LLC.
We are a limited liability corporation.
And there are rules about how to remove owners.
If it was just an employee, then the matter is somewhat simpler.
But at the very least, we can prevent people who turn out to be toxic or who don't follow the ethics policy.
We can prevent them from writing stuff to our readers.
I don't think I was necessarily thinking of the nuclear option, removing the part owner.
But I mean, you know, I think this is really the thing that kind of kicked off of Kotaka.
It wasn't that, I mean, it wasn't even that Grayson actually needed to be fired.
You know, he just needed to be told off.
And then when they all decided, you know what, no, he didn't even do anything wrong, then, you know, it became the momentum to try and pressure to get him fired, which obviously didn't happen.
So it's not that necessarily it needs to be the nuclear option at the very start, but I do think there should be reprimands along the way.
One of the big things that we are really pushing for, if that ever happened, one of the big things that we would basically demand of the person that was responsible for this was for them to make a formal and public apology to our readers, because at the end of the day, they're who matters to us.
And after that, if the readers are happy with that, then great.
If the readers want more, we will take their comments on board in terms of how long we would put them on a probationary period or go through all the sort of minutiae of removing them in the more nuclear option, as you put it.
That's the way that we would sort of set it up and how our contracts are all written up at the moment.
I think that's very reasonable.
Because I think most of the time when someone's done something wrong, it's not necessarily out of malice.
A lot of the time, I think that people kind of get caught up in the cultural society they're in, and they don't really realize.
And then if it's just brought to their attention, you've done this wrong, you shouldn't have done this.
I think most reasonable people will say, you know what, I was wrong.
And it brings humility to publicly apologize.
And that's, I think, one of the main problems with the current gaming press is the abject lack of humility for their own mistakes.
Yes, certainly.
That's one of the things.
We don't like the idea of being on pedestals at the end of the day.
We want to be held accountable by our readers.
And if something like that goes wrong, that's who we should give the focus to and say, look, we're really sorry, we fucked up.
And we apologise for that.
I think which is probably the best way to go as opposed to shutting yourself off in your own little fort and screaming out of your own megaphones.
I totally agree.
So, okay.
Moving on to then news items.
The first point is always attempt to gather multiple sources and verify first-party evidence.
Sorry, you're probably hearing a siren go past.
Sorry about this, everyone.
I live in the ghetto.
Yeah, so tell me about your investigative journalism practices and how you plan to basically find out what you know.
I'm currently in the middle of a rather lengthy piece that's potential allegations of corruption within the industry.
And the way that I'm doing this is I'm reaching out to those that have been affected by it, and I'm also reaching out to the people that allegations have been met to and allegations that they are facing.
And essentially, I'm doing interviews with those that have been affected in a negative way by, say, an individual.
And then I'm also interviewing that individual to answer those allegations.
And the thing about being non-partisan, I can't say which is right and which is wrong.
And it's one of the things that really fucks me off about my day job, that I will yeah, I'll interview like, say, four or five people, then that goes back to the broadcasting station in which someone plays Barbara Ardejio for strings in the background while it's in sepia tone in slow motion.
You know, it just hammers the point home.
This is a sad story, so you need to feel sad.
Like we don't like the idea of that.
Instead, we're going to present the information, both sides of the argument, regardless of how crazy or vitriolic or hate-filled one side of the argument may be, and let readers themselves make their own choice and not misrepresent either person.
And that's one of the big things that we're going to focus on.
Because at the end of the day, we respect our readers enough to have a modicum of intelligence as opposed to telling them exactly what they should think and feel.
Right, okay.
So what you're saying is you're not activists.
We kind of are by not being activists.
That's the thing.
Yeah.
That's one of the things.
It's like instead of forcing opinions, we're not a gender or ideologically driven.
Like we all have obviously our own agendas, our own ideologies, but the site has to be devoid of that completely.
That's one of the things.
I might be pro-gun, Kenton might be anti-gun.
At the same time, neither of us will talk about that in our articles.
And that's why we're going to screen it for shit like that.
You wouldn't expect an anti-gun stint, would you?
It'd be irrelevant to the subject.
Yeah, exactly.
So suppose Alexander Pinsoff had come to us, right?
That would be quite the conundrum, because we're not a big outlet, right?
And he would be bringing us a really big story.
I'm not actually aware of who he is.
Do you want to tell us that?
Oh, that's the ex-Destructoid writer.
Give me the quick backstory.
And for people listening, of course.
So Alexander Pinsov was a writer for Destructoid, and he was laid off.
And it turns out that on the Games Journal Pro list, the managing editor of Destructoid was talking about how a specific problem child, that's the wording he used, was going to probably contact the other outlets.
Now what that implied was obviously that, you know, a heads up, be careful as this guy contacts you.
And it was clearly meant to favor one side over the other.
Obviously, Pinsov didn't know this.
He didn't know that there were people talking behind his back discussing him.
And I would say that the allegations of Destroctoid made at the Game Journal Pros list.
Like those allegations, we don't know whether or not they're true, but the story was incredibly it is an incredibly tense story, so to speak.
Because anybody who speaks out about it, because a person was fired, right?
A person was fired from Destructoid over something, right?
How do you how do you as an uh as another news outlet cover it?
Do you like clearly at the time nobody was willing to touch it and we only know about it now because Milo Giannopoulos was able to release emails from the Game Journal Pro list.
So that that type of thing is incredibly complicated.
Okay.
Well since you brought up the Game Journal Pros list, that actually is a question up for me to ask.
How do you feel about collusion with other gaming websites?
Whew, that's a bit of a minefield.
There's sort of an awkward thing right now because it's weird because we get a lot of suggestions from readers to do some event with Niche Gamer or TechCrafter and it's towing this very strange and very iffy line to do something like that because we're sort of i in the same boat as them.
So you know it, it's.
It's this weird situation that we, we get into in the sense of sorry, I stutter a little bit with collusion or the idea of collusion, because if we do an event with Niche Gamer, or we had it, or we all did some sort of game, sham.
It would look like that to some people.
When Stephanie left a lot of people had all these very strange ideas and were very distrustful of us at first because they were very confused on why she left.
So right now within the gaming community we're already walking on eggshells and we don't want to have to start walking on tax essentially is the point I'm trying to make.
We can talk to other news outlets and say, look with that article you did, can you give us your source for that because we want to actually talk to him about something else?
Collusion in that sort of sense is fine because it's professional.
It's like the guy that you talk to in this regard.
No, not at all.
But the difference is when these people come together and they say, right, what do we want the gaming population to think today?
That's I'm totally against.
You know, the whole idea that they can push agendas and narratives, that's the only thing.
So in terms of events and stuff, that's okay.
But in terms of us talking about what sort of narrative and agenda do we want to push today, that's what we completely want to divorce ourselves from.
Right.
Because of that.
The one thing is that you're not going to be part of a secret journalist mailing list then.
We can neither confirm or deny that we already are.
Literally, we would avoid that, like the plague.
We wouldn't want to be in that sort of boat anyway.
It's disgusting, quite frankly.
And as a journalist, I find it rather worrying about the actual collusion that goes on between a lot of these larger outlets.
Yeah, what's so like, so insane about this thing is that these were arranged by not editors in chief or anything, but the leader of it was a senior editor, right?
And apparently only two co-workers of his at the site, where 30 people worked.
Like that's three people who are on a secret mailing list and keeping it a secret from the rest of the site, apparently.
Or at least, you know, the rest of the world.
Yeah.
Like, how do you even that that's that reeks, right?
That reeks.
If like the editor-in-chief at least ought to have known or to have been informed that his staff member was participating in a journalist mailing list, right?
Of course, we can't be sure that none of our co-writers is in some type of list, but it's completely against everything we stand for.
Of course, you can you can't know something if you don't know that it's there to be known about.
But yeah, d I I just wanted to clarify your your position on this.
I mean I I also think it's absolutely abhorrent.
Um just the The idea of jealous and a secret mailing list who are supposed to be in competition with each other or colluding and pressuring each other.
Just no, just raises many questions.
Many, many, many questions.
Especially with the Gamers Are Dead articles.
Very much so.
On the Gamers Are Dead articles on August 28th.
Well, all gamers died.
They respawned and went in for level two.
That's basically it.
That's the thing with Gamergate.
It has a gamer mentality.
You can't kill it because all it does is grind it out for more experience.
And a lot of us jumped to want to work on this site for different reasons.
For me, it was the censorship.
For some of our members, it was the Gamers of Dead articles.
For some of the members, it was things that have been going on in the past for a long time, like the Nathan Grayson scandal and stuff like that.
Sorry, Jeff Goertzman scandal.
Things like that have sort of pulled different people in.
And yeah, the whole idea of Gamers of Dead articles, when you are purposefully inflaming your audience, it beggars belief why they would do that.
I mean, this Howard Stern effect is one thing, but actually, you know, trying to rile up and incite your audience for short-term ad revenue clicks is something that I don't understand as a journalist.
Well, it seems to have been like an open declaration of war against gamers.
If you read Le Alexander's one and Devin Wilson's A Guide to Ending Gamers, it literally sounds like the sort of thing that people engaged in the culture war would do.
But yeah, I think it's self-evident that it was ideologically driven above everything else.
Right, okay.
So I'm just curious about the reviews.
You say at the beginning of the review, a detailed note of how the game was obtained will be put.
And do you want to tell me more about that?
Well, it's not necessarily how it was obtained.
It's setting our biases aside.
We could mention how we obtain it.
Again, a game I'm reviewing, which is Captain Toad's Treasure Tracker, I bought out of my own pocket.
I spent the money myself.
I don't know if it's something I should mention or not.
I might put it in there now that you bring it up.
I might not.
If I got it for free or got it half off or got it on some deal or something like that, I think that might be worth mentioning.
But essentially, the intro that we do is setting our biases aside.
And if we pay out a pocket or pre-order a game to review, I really don't think there's much of a bias there.
If we get the game from the publisher or the developer ahead of schedule or on day of release, then yes, there's a clear bias that we need to set aside and let the readers know.
Yeah.
Okay.
So talking about interviews then, you say at the beginning of an interview, a link to a raw transcript or unfiltered recording must be provided to the readers.
What made you do this?
Well, this is the thing that I do a lot of interviewing in my line of work.
And it's very easy for me to sort of grab what you're saying and jumble around the order in which you answer questions to frame a narrative and frame an agenda that I want to push.
And it's incredibly easy for that.
I can sort of give you the question of what do you think about horses?
And you may think all equestrians are wankers, and I hope they all die.
And then afterwards, I'll say, oh, what's your opinion of Mighty Number 9?
You go, oh, this looks like a great game.
I can't wait for it.
And then I can just cut out the whole thing of what you've said about horses there.
And I can shift it around very easily.
You see a lot of larger publications do this sort of thing very often.
And it's a very horrible tool that people use in terms of pushing sort of things.
And it happens in the actual journalism industry itself.
But by having that sort of raw transcript, it shows that we're not misrepresenting people that we actually talk to.
Because at the end of the day, we wouldn't want to make a developer that we're talking to look worse or better than they already are.
Because again, that comes to telling people what they should think by doing underhanded, horrible practices that are prevalent within the journalism industry, I'm afraid.
I totally agree.
I totally agree that they are shockingly prevalent.
Look at the interview you did with the BBC, right?
Yeah, you uploaded the full version.
And in the full version, I am impressed that they managed to get the recorded version from the full version because I think you did very well in the full version.
I don't know who was interviewing who at one point.
It was nice.
Yeah, right.
And the BBC comes off better in their version, I would say.
So providing a full transcript.
The BBC in that case, just to say they didn't actually misrepresent what I was saying.
It really to me just struck me as a case of they just weren't interested in just displaying any kind of interested in the Gamergate side.
And so they were just looking for a short soundbite, say that, look, we've represented what you said.
There's 45 seconds.
Oh, that's absolutely true.
It's the thing with the current state of journalism nowadays.
It's more about reporting emotion and pushing emotion than it is about reporting facts to make people think up their own emotions.
And it's a horrible trend.
I work in Australia and it's even fucking worse here.
And it's only getting worse across the board now.
Right.
Pretty bad.
Yeah, the point is, you know, the transcript reveals or discloses light onto the journalists' work ethic.
In this case, the BBC, yeah, they did right by you, but clearly they had not done their homework.
So it revealed a whole lot about them, even though the piece itself was alright.
Right, okay.
That actually brings us nicely onto the next subject I wanted to bring up, which was editorials.
I'm just going to read out your four points for editorials just so everyone can hear exactly what we're talking about when we say this.
So you say to ensure quality content, editorials must serve to serve, you need to fix that, serve to inform, educate, and inspire positive discussion amongst readers.
Editorials must discuss games, the industry, or the culture surrounding it.
If outside subjects are touched on, they must have a primary connection to the gaming realm in some form or factor.
Editorials may not inflame, incite, or talk down to our readers.
All editorial topics must go through a review process of three staff members and approved by a majority to be published.
And editorials should refrain from being clickbait in nature, focusing on worthwhile content rather than over-hyped nonsense.
Yeah, so do you want to tell me, just in more plain language, what your thoughts on editorials are?
I'll answer that because I was the person that kind of pushed to have people write more editorials, if we could get it.
Because if you look at, say, some of the other websites, they publish very out there editorials, and I think that does a disservice to what an editorial should be, which is an ability to critically think about a game mechanic or a game series to provoke thought in the readers.
It can be used very positively.
And it's something that we probably won't do every week, but it's something that I'm hoping to see at our website enough and that when it is there, it's very much consumed by the readers.
Because the whole point of editorials is to provoke thought and not promote agenda, basically.
Right, so to spark discussions on certain topics.
Yes.
Okay.
I agree with that principle.
I absolutely do.
The thing is, I guess how are you going to be sure that you're going to inspire positive discussion amongst readers?
That seemed a bit well, I don't know, just it seemed a little bit kind of corporate speak, perhaps.
Well, you know, with we have had articles that we called the Great Debate, which is a series where two of our writers who have a disagreement on something, you know, the one that I just did, which was which is better, DLC or expansion pack, and we go back and forth discussing our various sides.
And it's a written debate, basically.
And so far, it's provoked discussion and it's been fairly positive.
So I think so long as it's not provoking the readers and there's a line of respect when writing the editorials for the readers, it would be fine.
I don't think the general population to read articles are opposed to it.
No, I actually think that's a really good idea.
Like you said, like a written debate in the form of an editorial between two members of staff.
I think that's actually a really good idea, especially when they've got opposing views and it's an interesting topic.
The big reason why we chose that wording with editorials is that they need to have a point.
You can get certain editorials that I won't name discussing horses.
And you scratch your head wondering, what purpose does this serve?
Other than it made me click it to read some words that were jumbled together in a random order.
And it's one of the things that we want to sort of avoid.
Essentially, every editorial has to have a purpose.
It's not something that we can just sort of have someone publish or push out stupid ideas that will get laughed down at.
We want to actually have a place in which we can create quality content and get people engaged with us and we have a sort of interaction with them on it, because that's more exciting than saying why something is bad because you like this.
Things like that we don't agree with and we don't want to have anything around that sort of ideal.
Right, okay.
Okay, so factual mistakes and error correction.
What happens if one of your writers writes an article that is wrong in certain ways?
We can go back if it's if it's grammatically wrong, we can go back and edit it.
I'm in factually wrong.
Oh, factually wrong.
Well, we could either write a second piece stating it or we could update it and we actually have a policy.
Yeah, we actually have a policy.
Do you want to tell me about it?
Yeah, basically we always note altercations.
So any time something has been altered, we will edit the actual page itself and make a note of everything that we have edited.
So basically if an article is even outdated in terms of news that's come up, we will edit that to be more prevalent in terms of new things that have been found.
Or if things have been found to be incorrect, we will issue the update with the actual correct factual information and an apology on behalf of that.
It's one of the things we will not try and publish things that we know aren't true.
That's one of the biggest things that we will avoid.
But when there's allegations, we will post it in a sort of we will say they are allegations.
We won't say this happened.
Like a couple of other sites do.
But that's the thing.
Whenever we sort of edit and change, we will still have links to the original raw article itself.
Right.
That's good.
Because one of my biggest bugbears is the sneaky retconning of things that they have said, made foolish about, and then just slide the change in there without informing anyone to prevent any admission of wrongdoing or mister Marshall.
We will actually have a wall of shame.
That's fine.
We will have a complete list where you can see which places we were factually incorrect and you can go through them and you can laugh at us.
Right, okay.
That's good.
And what about commissioned content?
What about if a games company says, here's £10,000, I would like you to write an article or something on our latest game?
What's your policy there?
Well, we couldn't do that.
That would be a clear bias.
I'd be breaking our ethics policy clearly because of conflict of interest.
Right.
So you can't.
Well, we may work together with them to do certain giveaways and special events and stuff.
You know, you see a lot of these developers and these games journalists that'll say that they are completely impartial and we'll all walk away from a Ubisoft convention with all keynote tablets and they're blogging about them online.
One of the things that we're going to do, we won't accept materials like that, because obviously that's going to sway things, but we will actually accept them and throw them on to our readers.
Essentially, be bought out by Ubisoft competition, which we think is the best and most fair way to do it.
Because it sort of shares the love.
Yeah, so basically, if they were going to do what is effectively a paid advertisement in the form of a competition, it would be very clearly marked, right?
Yes.
In terms of advertorial content, we don't like the idea of it, because obviously that comes in the process of swaying our opinion.
And the last thing we want to do is push those opinions that advertising executives and PR agents want us to sort of regurgitate to our readers.
We're kind of against that.
So instead, that's one of the things we're going to really focus on and stuff.
If they ever sort of invite us in to do a sort of special testing session, that will be removed of our own testing environments.
Because of which, obviously, that's a no-no for us.
Okay, that's very interesting.
Because I'm not a big fan of advertising, but I understand that in some ways.
Oh, sorry, yeah.
It's not unethical to advertise, especially if it's clearly saying this is a promotional piece by Electronic Arts for their latest game.
Here's a competition that we're doing for it, blah, blah, blah.
But there's something about it that's a bit unseemly, isn't there?
It's just not good.
It's quite mercenary.
Yeah, well, mercenary.
That's a good way to describe it.
Well, When it comes to stuff like that, you know, we've already decided that we would discuss it with our readers first and have them decide if they were comfortable with it.
You know, that that's that's one of the biggest things, is we don't want to take a step in the wrong direction against our readers and make them feel slighted.
Okay.
I think that's a good position.
Okay, I think we're running out of time there, unfortunately, because I unfortunately have things to do.
So we've got about ten minutes left.
Do you want to just, you know, is there anything you guys want to talk about or bring up that I haven't covered?
You know, I do.
It's slightly off topic and it's slightly shilling, but we did start a YouTube channel and we are going to try and get more regular content off of that.
Right now we only have a podcast, but we are, you know, various people are working on their own things and the way we have it is they'll shoot a test pilot at us or I will shoot a test pilot at them for what I'm working on.
And then if it goes good, then we'll shoot what is essentially a pilot to YouTube and see how that turns out.
Yeah, that's all I had to say right there.
Another big thing as well, to any of those that want to visit our site, one of the things that's really important, go on our ethics policy and tell us what you want us to change.
Right now we're in the middle of a huge redesign and the backs, you know, they're sort of like working on behind the scenes and stuff.
And hopefully we can deliver on this promise and we want to.
And the only way we can is if we have a load of people telling us what we've done right and done wrong.
And we need to kick up the ass in that regard to push us in the right direction.
Yeah, generally, we're taking ideas.
Whoa, Sagon disappeared.
And he's back.
It's famous for not working.
And yes, everyone, I am still fighting with my internet service provider.
So can you just say again, I missed all that.
In a nutshell, we're working on a redesign right now for the actual site.
The first keystone was this ethics policy that we've pushed out.
We'd urge everyone to look at it, read it through, and if there's anything that strikes you that you want us to change and you want us to adhere to, tell us.
Because at the end of the day, if you're going to keep going back and you're going to be one of the ones that we're going to be writing for, your input matters.
And we've got a YouTube channel running to get more content out and stuff.
We'll be testing a lot of pilots and stuff, throwing a lot of shit at the fans, seeing what sticks.
So yeah, hopefully, you know, you hear about us a lot more in the future.
Yeah, like we go on.
No, no, no, please.
Sorry, Karen.
Yeah, we are taking suggestions.
It should be said that we've known each other for, at this point, around four months.
That's not a very long time to get to know each other.
We are very fortunate in that we have an amazing group of people.
We literally ended up very lucky that we are qualified in the way we are.
We have a law student who's working on the contract.
I mean, we have Moose, who's a journalist.
We have a web designer who's working on the back end.
There's a lot of things that have come together, but we're still not a professional outlet that have run for venture capital funding.
We don't have some kind of senior manager running the place.
We need, to some extent, all the help we can get, simply because we wanted to provide a really solid alternative.
So it is kind of a grassroots uprising of a I would say a website, right?
Not a company, but that's what we are.
Okay.
So yeah, help us.
Okay.
And if we fuck up, hold us accountable.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, personally, I'm with John Milton on this, that luck is the residue of design.
So I think that if you start out with the best intentions and you adhere to a good ethics policy and you work hard for it, then luck kind of follows.
But again, thanks a lot for joining me.
I really appreciate you coming on.
And it's been very interesting to hear your take on things.
Thanks for having us, Sargon.
It's been a pleasure.
Not a problem.
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