Something I Wrote Four Years Ago

Time really does fly doesn't it?

A Problem With Gaming Sites

By Raycevick

Last Updated December 17th, 2017

Recently, a Twitter user brought something to my attention. A Steam account with nearly 800 reviews that were positively received.

But in the case of his Rainbow Six Siege review, it seemed oddly familiar. That’s because the final three paragraphs were mine, copy and pasted from a review I did in 2015.

The rest of the article itself was plagiarized from other gaming websites, typically smaller ones with less traffic than giants like IGN, Gamespot, or Polygon.

It’s not a case of someone ignorantly echoing someone they like, this is a heartless human being who blatantly stole the work others put in for their own benefit, no matter how merger it may be.

Now, thanks to SirDeath’s excellent investigating, and contacting people like myself, the plagiarist’s reviews were flagged and banned.

Case closed.

But, what concerned me more than this person’s actions, was what enabled him to do it in the first place, and that’s how we review video-games.

You can’t just plagiarize a few genre authors from the shelf in fiction or non-fiction without some serious tweaking, you can’t throw ACG, Turbo Button, and Bunnyhop into Premiere and get a sensical critique; but for Reviews of our chosen pastime, it’s easy.

That’s because game-reviews across dozens, maybe hundreds of websites, sound so alike, when a paragraph leads to one from an entirely different website, most readers didn’t even notice.

Tour through each review on Open or Metacritic and you’ll find legions of writers following the same structure, topics, criticism, and even beats.

Quick setup, technical information, type of game, how it feels, what features does it have, some positive sentences, some negative sentences.

Here’s the score you scrolled down to skip to.

When gamers mention their declining preference for gaming sites, things such as outdated revenue models, desperate amounts of clickbait, or hypocrisy are brought up, and while those are contributing factors where they exist, I believe the ubiquity in our reviews is the big culprit.

Now, to clarify a few things before we proceed; I don’t hate games journalists. There’s obvious cases of incompetence or douchebaggery, but that’s true for any industry; and the majority I’ve interacted with are kind, intelligent, and passionate about the industry they cover.

Also, I’m not counting myself out of this race. My review was one of many copied, so the following argument establishes that I’ve contributed to this problem.

This video isn’t about witch-hunting or starting controversy. It’s about recognizing issues from multiple perspectives.

The ubiquity of reviews or more accurately, their style, has led to a swath of media outlets that echo each other to the point where individual critics end up sounding like a single person. It’s easy to try and pin this on said individuals, to call them unoriginal, but I wouldn’t be so quick.

Because it’s not so much a choice, as it is a habit.

This is PC Magazine’s coverage of DOOM from 1994.

Despite being the same age I am, it reads very much like a current game review; setting up DOOM’s recent success and impact, laying out its technology and platform, what type of game it is, how its inputs feel, and what it offers to the customer.

And with publications dedicated to Arcade Machines and Atari, it’s doubtful that this is the format’s debut.

When something is done for over twenty years, it won’t be questioned why. Now I’ve never worked for a large entity, but I have written for websites in the past and while there’d always be discussion between the writer and editors about specific reviews, no style was ever established, no conversation was ever had about how to evaluate or critique games, because anybody from the novice writer to the head-chief, has the same expectation of what they’ve experienced for decades.

Websites follow tradition for the same reason anything does, tradition is proven.

If people spent money to read material like this in the past, why wouldn’t they read it for free today?

Thing is, magazines wrote columns this way for reasons that had nothing to do with familiarity. In 1994, many people didn’t have free access to information in the way we do today, back then you had to pay for things such as DOOM’s list of features, details, and guides about things like setting up internet death matches, or mod tools.

It’s written as plainly as it is in-order to leave the consumer with as much clear information as possible, as that’s what readers paid for.

Conveying information for paying customers is not at all the context modern reviews are written under.

Most websites are free relying on traffic and are rarely specialized to a handful of topics, or perspectives. The giants do reviews, previews, interviews, news, articles, podcasts, spoilers, Top 10’s, Features, Events, Forums, Videos, and Film Coverage.

The lack of specialization is important because in-order to provide this much coverage, you need lots of staff, making it nearly impossible to offer consistently.

When you’ve got so many editors across so many genres, often with different people covering installments of a franchise despite holding completely separate opinions, it’s just one of the reasons a lot of gamers don’t take mainstream game coverage seriously, because they’re not able to effectively connect with the work that’s done.