The issue in the mind of the “source,” who I know and have spoken with
since your blog went up, is whether a game score should be discussed
internally, as part of a staff, and externally with a publisher prior to
scoring and finishing the game. Discussing the score of a game with a
publisher can be a tricky business. Will they try to influence the
score? Will you change the score to get the exclusive, and how can one
maintain journalistic integrity in such a situation? If handled
correctly, you can indeed have these conversations without breaking any
ethical codes. You can discuss the score of a game without selling your
soul to the devil–if you know the rules and you have personal and
professional integrity.

I have never altered the score of a game to get an exclusive. If a game
sucks, it sucks. If it’s good, it’s good, and as a reviewer, it’s my job
to call them honestly and fairly. In the last 13 years, my personal
motto has been that I have to be as brutally honest as possible when
scoring a game, and that remaining honest and transparent with your
readers is a must. I made a lot of friends in IGN’s reader community
who, year after year, said they trusted my reviews. What’s more, I have
talked with many publishers, all of whom said they appreciated my
honesty in reviewing their games, even when the score wasn’t in their
favor. I’m far from perfect, I have indeed overscored games and
underscored games. But sell out a review to get an exclusive? Hell, no.

Here is what happened. I entered into several phone call conversations
with the PR director at 2K Games; the content of our discussion was
about whether my former company, IGN, should get the exclusive review
for Prey, which was the biggest game of the summer 2006 (clearly a dry
summer :-)). IGN has always been keen on attaining exclusive reviews.
The tricky part of the equation is to get exclusives on games that we A)
liked, and B) got traffic. That’s a big, if not the biggest, portion of
the driving force behind media sites. They want to drive traffic to sell
ads to make money, while performing the journalistic matter of
entertaining and informing its readers.

It’s difficult to gauge whether a game is worth getting an exclusive on,
and it is a sensitive matter, but for anyone who has been an editor in
the entertainment business, negotiating exclusives happens all the time.
In this situation, the PR person wanted to know a range on what we would
score the game, so she could make a decision on whether to give us the
exclusive or not. Part of the PR person’s job is to look for an outlet
that he or she thinks really likes the game, and then hope they give it
a good score. In this case, and it’s not unheard of, the PR person
wanted to know the score before hand. We didn’t have a score yet because
the writer at hand, Tom McNamara, an excellent writer and reviewer,
hadn’t finished the game. Even if I had known the score and Tommy had
finished the review, we could not have given out the final score. But we
would have provided a range of scores.

There were several phone calls. I felt 2K was being assertive (or you
could say aggressive), but I decided to gauge whether the game was worth
getting an exclusive on. And I was persistent about it because I wanted
to make a decision on whether we should reschedule our front page, get
the artwork, and go through the motions of making this our top story or
not. More importantly, I wanted to know whether the game deserved an
exclusive.

The whole “issue” brought up by your “source” is that a game’s score
shouldn’t be discussed with the PR side prior to completion because that
somehow breaks some code of ethics. I don’t share this opinion. There is
nothing wrong with talking with staff members about how good a game is,
how one should score it before it’s reviewed, and whether it should be a
top story or not. What bothered the “source” is that I was being
“pressured” into providing a score before the game was completed. But
having been in the business for 13 years now, I felt I could handle the
“pressure” from 2K Games.

Tom didn’t know the score because he hadn’t finished the game. I said,
“Tom, what do you think of this game? Could you score it now? If so,
what would you honestly give it? I need to know your honest opinion
because we might have an exclusive here.” The themes here are clarity
and honestly. The emphasis on the conversation wasn’t by any means to
pressure anybody into scoring the game higher. IGN never did that. The
point was to gauge whether he could determine how good the game
was, and whether it was worth getting an exclusive on. This way I could
provide a range (for instance, “The game is between a 7 and an 9″) which
could then help the publisher decide whether they wanted to go with us
or not. Tommy never came up with a score because he hadn’t finished it.
I felt satisfied enough with that answer because I have scored numerous
games, and I have been in the exact same situation. Based on this
information–not having finished the game, and not knowing the score–we
told 2K that we weren’t going to take the exclusive. It turns out that
1UP also refused the exclusive.

Looking back, Prey was a tempest in a teapot. IGN scored the game a 9,
1Up, an 8.1, and Gamespot, a 7.5. I’d say now that the score should have
been somewhere between a high 7 and a low 8 at best. At the time (less
than a year after Xbox 360 launched), Prey showed off some great
graphics (in fact, it’s still very good looking), offered some cool
physical puzzles, and an intriguing alien-abducts-native-American story
concept. In hindsight, which is always 20-20, Prey was only pretty good,
offering mediocre enemy AI, a story that was cooler in concept than
execution, and rough-and-tumble multiplayer gaming. I even felt that
Tommy overscored the game. But it was his game to review, and his
opinion that shaped it. Reviewing a game is an art, a subjective affair,
not a science.

There was not wrongdoing, no ethical misconduct, no big conspiracy. The
matter was simple. 2K’s PR team wanted to determine a score to decide
whether they should give us, or a competitor, an exclusive; we angled
for an exclusive that, in the end, we learned wasn’t worth it, and stuck
to our guns. As it turns out, nobody got the exclusive. It’s true and
unfortunate that, on occasion, a small minority of PR folks use
assertive tactics, but it’s nothing a professional journalist can’t
handle.