Whatever your experience of Stuart Campbell, owner of World of Stuart, everyone agrees he’s a tireless campaigner for accuracy, honesty and justice in journalism and blogging. About three days ago he started investigating a seemingly minor infringement, the too-glowing review of an expensive office chair by Olin Coles, executive Editor of Benchmark Reviews (270,000 monthly unique users being misled there.)
The issue was that the chair seemed to have been reviewed by lifting ad-copy from a second site Smart Furniture and elements from the PR brochure of Herman Miller, the manufacturer. It was quite clearly a case of corporate shilling, giving a glowing review in return for unspecified benefits, which Olin Cole has admitted doing in the past;
“I used to take anything that manufacturers would offer, back when BmR was starving for donated products. These days, we work more closely with proven manufacturers to help launch their upcoming products“.
The problem is that the staff don’t seem to be able to stop lying, admit they made a mistake, and restart their careers as honest, albeit damaged, journalists. Once challenged the editor altered the article to properly attribute the paragraphs that plagiarised the press release and then denied Stuart’s claims, despite Google Cache showing him to be a liar. He’s also deleted any comments on the article criticising it, deleted similar forum posts, and generally behaved like a bad egg. So far, so scummy.
However, thanks to the DMCA, Benchmark reviews has now enforced a takedown notice on Stuart’s blog, claiming he’s reproduced copyrighted material. Of course, the copyright-infringement isn’t their primary concern as much of the material is copyright of Smart Furniture, so if they took it to court there would be problems – but I’m not aware of a parody defence against the DMCA and some of the material is copyrighted, so Stu doesn’t really have a leg to stand on can only rely on the news reporting defence.
Personally, as a PR and one-time journalist I find this despicable; there is no point paying for coverage like this. Morally, it’s disgusting and practically, the media always end up getting caught out – whether it was PC Zone’s appalling Kingpin debacle or OPM’s Driv3r review, you get caught. Doing it in this manner, stealing other people’s copy, is lazy and stupid; not admitting your guilt and going on a vendetta against a well-respected, well-connected and avowedly honest journalist is even more stupid. EAVB_IUMHYIXDFT
I was on a train stuck between cities, heading for the engine and the drivers, and I passed a family of khazars, entertaining themselves by taking turns on it.
I had to push past a shtarker in traditional dream dress, a white archaic tunic with red piping, his small flat red cap pinned to the side of his head, focussed on a lugubrious old man playing.
The instrument was a like a clockwork squeezebox a cubit long with a rubbery grey bald human face at one end and a limited keypad at the other.
They played it by struggling against the clockwork and bellows; it only played one tune, which sounded like something from Kroke, and which I was humming when I woke up.
The artistry, as I saw later when a wizened granny took over, is in putting your own interpretation on the tune by distorting the sounds.
She kinda stretched and crushed the head to distort the sound, made it sound childish and whiny, like a nursery rhyme.
He played it straight and slow, hardly touching the face, so it sounded sonorous and, yes, meaningful.
My brother says, it’s like the interpretation of a song, theme and variations, that’s all we can ever do…
Buy a PC Gamer-approved product every day this week and you get reward points. You’ve levelled up, now you’re a PCG Ambassador, so you get a PCG fan kit. Meanwhile, your health insurance is incentivising you to walk as it’s worried about your heart rate, and a tobacco firm is incentivising you not to read The Guardian because of its coverage of cancer risk. You get an achievement from the local council for not giving money to a tramp, and your eyetracking device is giving you bonus points for reading every line of an advert (but not the small print). It’s a nightmare and it’s coming.
What no one is mentioning is a crash, a bubble bursting. There’s a risk that social gaming could collapse overnight. Yet this is unlikely, because the place where it’s based, Facebook, is now so central to our lives. Instead, social gaming is spilling out virally into the world, and its effectiveness in altering our behaviour means it’s soon going to be affecting you in ways you may not even notice.
An excerpt from a feature I wrote for PC Gamer, in the issue on sale now. I’ll put up the uncut version when my contract allows.
This is a new music-shooter from the chap who made Rez, Tetsuya Mizuguchi – it’s operated through Microsoft’s new Kinect motion-detection system and is meant to convey the sound-colour linkage of synesthesia. Sadly, as it’s colour-oriented, I’m aware that I’m probably never going to be able to enjoy this, in the way I couldn’t enjoy Space Giraffe.
I sincerely hope that this is all in-game footage – mainly because I can’t believe that it could all be rendered and because I’ve been hoping for something that’s a graphical leap forward, not in terms of quality necessarily, but in terms of smooth integration of divergent thematic elements.
As an MMO reviewer, I’ve felt both privileged (at occupying a niche few are equipped to explore) and also terrified (at a reviewer’s complete inability to perceive the whole game). As Quintin Smith found last week, and Ed Zitron found previously, reviewers, no matter how professional, can’t just hop back into an MMO when it’s been updated and hope to review it. Especially not, as those two found, when the audience they think they’re talking to isn’t the audience that actually reads and responds to the article. Here’s a putative structure for reviewing MMOs that deals with the problems caused by trying to employ time-poor professional reviewers.
Cpl Smith, M.I.A.
Problems
Must experience enough of content in proper way to do review.
Different experience types for player types – solo, casual, hardcore, obsessive.
Need for humour, quality writing.
Cost of review process must be kept down.
Content alters substantially over game’s lifetime.
Many professional reviewers provide 3, can attempt 2 but usually fail, don’t keep playing so can’t do 5, and to provide 1 would be to disregard 4.
Solutions
Multiple reviewers
Multiple reviewers
Mediated by co-ordinator
Co-ordinator is paid writer-editor – incentivised to find free reviewers and collate & polish their opinion.
Reconvene with original panel at regular intervals.
It's all about getting a good team together.
This system as a narrative.Un-paid enthusiasts are given early access and review title in return for thought-access. Primary writer becomes interviewer, co-ordinating impressions from many different groups. Individual, subjective experience is not of primary relevance, but collation of views is. Common problems can be identified, and the game rated on these – whilst problems specific to groups acknowledged, represented. Panel reconvenes to alter score when game has altered substantially from previous score. (This also provides you with an evaluation structure for up-and-coming writers, as you can test their analysis, reliability and writing ability through these panels.)
Here’s a question I don’t know the answer to – is this process applicable to reviews other than MMOs? Should all reviews be done this way?
@nicholaslovell Back in June, IIRC. No publicity about it. I wrote a quick internal summary, but haven't had a chance to read it properly. 6 hours ago
@gamesbrief funnily enough, I was just looking at the latest ISFE report: http://ow.ly/2ihgB 6 hours ago
@JoeThreepwood really? But the sweetener is so obviously not sugar - it's softer, blends worse and is longer - and there's no sugar rush...! 6 hours ago
