When David "God of War" Jaffe posted an infamous blog entry last year, complaining about how members of the gaming press kept referring to themselves as part of the game industry, a lot of them were understandably hurt. For of course the gaming press is part of the game industry— and E3 is the proof.

In the next few days of hard sell, the marketing and publicity departments of every major publisher will spend millions of dollars trying to convince retail buyers that 95% of their games aren't the mediocre and unoriginal rehashes they really are. (And have no doubt, while the gaming press likes to flatter itself thinking E3 is all about them, they merely supply the lubrication for an intercourse between the bloated corporate powers who really matter, the Walmarts and Best Buys of the world, represented in the main by middle-aged men in hotel suites who couldn't care less about any of the games on the roiling Convention Center floor below.)

Read what ruffles James' feathers after the jump.

The gaming press' real job is to ease that transaction, writing breathless "news reports" that are almost always indistinguishable in content from the press releases they're usually cobbled from. Most of the games on display aren't worth even a second glance, but nearly all of the gaming press is reluctant to tell you that. At the end of that sordid week, they'll hand out a series of Best of Show awards that highlight a few genuinely worthwhile games, but gestures like this are designed so as not to deviate from the main task: to keep the product flowing, crappy or not.

After five consecutive E3s, I've decided to sit this one out, but Joel and Brian of Team Kotaku are there, offering their show floor insights with opinions unfiltered. If you can't be there with them, or you're foolish enough to read other gaming sites, here's a few tips to at least read them with a skeptical eye.

Beware Staged/Limited Previews

Any E3 preview written without the benefit of extensive, unmonitored, hands-on play is useless. Actually, even worse than useless, since it's really just a preview of a cinematic ginned up to seem like a game. It's like reading someone's description of the trailer of a Milla Jovovich movie.

It gets even worse: games on the showroom floor are almost invariably just a single level, so even a hands-on preview says nothing about the overall quality. Still worse are the "exclusive" demos held in closed meeting rooms off the floor, usually demonstrated by a developer and a prim-but-sweaty PR girl giving you a carefully controlled walkthroughs.

It's About the Parties, Stupid

"The way to get into the big parties," a game press writer told me happily once, "is ask the PR ladies for a demo, and while they're setting it up, hint that you're looking to get in."

During E3, most of the gaming press spends an inordinate amount of time trying to rustle up party invites. (Not the main editors, who've gotten their invitations in the mail weeks ago, but the low level functionaries who write most of their Expo coverage.) The greatest effort is spent trying to gain access into the crown jewel, the E3 Sony Party. The Japanese mega-corporation is legendary for leveraging its wallet and top artists in its music division to throw parties the size of a city block, lit up by electric blue. One heroic friend regularly runs an "underground railroad" into the party, smuggling out the mylar bracelets that act as invites, so we can secretly hand them to our comrades huddling in the cold outside. (Security is so tight it resembles East Berlin during the Cold War, except all the good shit's inside.)

All this fun wasn't such a bad thing when Sony undisputedly ruled the game industry. (And while I can honestly say I've never written about any game because of them, I'm not above going a few times. Hey, Foo Fighters, live. I mean, come on.) But now that they're struggling in the console wars, it's incumbent on the company to keep the game media mesmerized. (My guess is Sony will be a lot more generous with invites to the gaming press this year.) And though it's too simple to assert one-to-one payola, party invites definitely buy attention.

Picture a Cheering Press

If you think game press previews are hyped up, you should see how their authors act, when they're supposed to be reporting. I can't count the times I've sat in on Expo previews and press conferences where reporters for top gaming publications actually cheered. (One guy next to me got so openly enthused during an E3 demo for Max Payne that I actually turned to him and said, "Dude, are you even trying to act like a journalist?") But while they're entirely over-excited about the graphics or cool power-ups, I've never witnessed a game writer once ask probing questions about design or story. It's the image you should keep in your mind when reading the coverage coming from E3, almost all of it written not by passionately engaged journalist gamers but for the most part, by uncritical enthusiasts who are unwilling or unable to discern originality from retreads.

Which is, I guess, a good way to bring us back to David Jaffe's exasperation with the whole charade, and his frustration at not being taken seriously by the fanboy reporters clustering around him at these things. He could show them finger puppets hitting each other with wooden dowels and call it God of War II, and he'd still get a nice blurb the next day. ("While all the art assets for GoW II aren't totally finished, everything we saw at David's demo suggests it's on track to be a contender for BEST GAME OF E3 2006.")

Send samples of egregiously fawning game previews and information on backroom deals that influence them to au@kotaku.com. Tips from editors and writers in the game press especially welcome—all correspondence kept strictly confidential.

By: Wagner James Au

In this column's March debut, we laid out the basics that gave life to Preview Ho, explaining how hyped-up previews are the enemy of good games, since publishers use them to secure shelf space from the major retailers, no matter how crappy the ultimate title. (And read this great Escapist story to understand how dependent the industry is on chains like Walmart.)

Later in the month, we found out it was even worse than that, with major gaming sites selling premium editorial space to publishers. When called on it, one editor adorably defended the practice by saying it was "pretty common both in print and online".

I was curious what the game industry's leading advocate thought about the practice, so I contacted the press office of the Entertainment Software Association but despite repeated requests, received no answer. Though they're sponsored by publishers, you'd think the ESA would be disturbed by a "pretty common" practice that's totally at odds with its goal of presenting the industry as a respectable medium with fair, ethical standards for promoting their product. (What, they'll take a controversial move like banning booth bimbos from E3, but they can't say anything about this?)

But hey, maybe the ESA doesn't check their e-mail much.

Anyway, let's roll out the two top candidates for April's biggest Ho, and explore how they work, like most of the gaming press, to serve the publishers' interests (who are also their advertisers) at the expense of you, the gamer. (And yes, we started with way more than two; believe me, Preview Ho could be a daily column.)

The first Ho contender was spotted by Kotaku editor Brian Crecente on the blog of a site called, appropriately enough, RedAssedBaboon. (If a Preview Ho were a baboon, he'd have a...) Props to Red Assed's "Rappateng" for joining us, whether he knows it or not, in a bloggers' call to arms against the gaming press. His post focused on "Splinter Cell Essentials" for the PSP, a game that was, on review, almost universally slagged, even by Gamespy, which gave it a withering 2/5 review. But Gamespy's preview by Will Tuttle called it "One of the best games on PSP".

And that's the line Ubisoft used in the advertising for the game.

Pause and consider that. Gamers like you stop at the PSP retail shelf, presented with a few dozen games to choose from. You pick up "Splinter Cell Essentials", maybe because you like the Clancy franchise— and hey, since Gamespy says it's among the PSP's best games right on the goddamn box, you blow your $40 on that one.

I contacted Gamespy editor John "Warrior" Keefer for an explanation. Staggeringly, Keefer says he authorized Ubisoft to use the "best games" line in their advertising copy for "Essentials".

"It is the publisher's job to try to make their game look as good as possible in their marketing of the game," Keefer e-mailed me. "My job is to make sure they don't use our quotes out of context. All quotes have to be approved through me." For the preview, Tuttle actually played just three levels made available at the time by Ubisoft, which is also a Gamespy advertiser— and that was enough, both of them insist, to nominate "Splinter Cell Essentials" into the Best Game pantheon of an entire platform.

"Bottom line is that it was unfortunate that the game was radically different from what Will originally saw," Keefer explained, "which makes our quote stand out even more. He said he stands by the original quote because at the time he made it, the graphics and lighting were phenomenal and it did a very good job of fleshing out the universe. Unfortunately, the rest of the game did not pan out with the demo."

The qualifier "at the time" is particularly delicious— sort of like a Nevada working girl who says you're her favorite client ever, because at the time, she's trying to pry a $40 tip from your fingers. Still, we have to credit Keefer for at least attempting an explanation.

The other nominee in this month's Ho search is PC Gamer, as helmed by editor-in-chief Greg Vederman. As it happens, Vederman brought himself to our attention by publishing a widely-praised editorial announcing that his magazine would no longer accept ads from "virtual gold farming" companies which sell gold coins from World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs.

In the US at least, this is still a small cottage industry, so it's hard to believe a teeny company like IGE could afford to spend much in advertising, certainly not compared to multinational corporations like Microsoft, Sony, Vivendi, and EA that already swamp the front pages of magazines like PC Gamer.

But still, it's at least some kind of stand, isn't it, with Vederman the lone hero of the gaming press drawing a line in the sand?

Maybe in his own imagination. Because here's the thing: the pages of PC Gamer may not run ads from virtual gold companies, but the magazine's entire preview section is an advertisement.

Have a look at May's issue:

Preview for "Medal of Honor Airborne" from Electronic Arts, by Chuck Osborn: "[This game] has already done something I previously thought was impossible— it's gotten me excited about yet another WWII shooter... I'll be there, ripcord at the ready."

Preview for "World in Conflict" from Massive Entertainment, by Logan Decker: "ITS UPCOMING RTS PHENOM... ABSOLUTELY BLOWS OUR MIND." [sic... and sick]

But the clincher is the cover story, an extensive preview of BF2142, also from Electronic Arts (via DICE studios). Now Battlefield 2 is a great game for its genre (though hardly 2005's all-time best), but judging from advance gameplay footage, BF2142 is basically just a mech warrior-themed add-on, with little new added to BF2's basic design. You'd have a hard time convincing preview writer Dan Stapleton of that, however, since when shown a library of futuristic weapons and vehicles in action he is capable of achieving orgasm:

"Come the end of the year," he promises, "DICE will be giving you an all new reason to practice your skills... [in a game] that fundamentally changes the nature of warfare. Could BF2142 be our Game of the Year in the making? It wouldn't surprise anyone here and... we're not so bad predicting the future."

I guess it wouldn't surprise me, either, since in May's Letter From the Editor, Vederman speaks obscurely about how he "inked this month's Battlefield 2142 cover contract" with Electronic Arts, and that he personally "brokered the deal". In my experience, a "deal" that is "brokered" usually involves an exchange of money or services, so it's unclear what Vederman means here, unless it was just that; his phrasing certainly leaves that impression. In any case, something was expected by Electronic Arts when they let PC Gamer have exclusive advance coverage of their unfinished game. (What that was, exactly, will have to remain secret between EA and Vederman,. Greg Vederman didn't reply to my e-mail asking for his commentary for this article.)

Here is what Vederman said in his acclaimed editorial denouncing gold farming companies: "For the record, PC Gamer's official stance on these types of companies is that they are despicable... [because] they all-too-often ruin legitimate players' fun." Call me crazy, but it will also ruin players' fun when they pre-order copies of BF2142, Medal of Honor Airborne, and World in Conflict, based in part on the hype PC Gamer gave them, then discover all-too-often that they've wasted their time and money on ass product. (For by simple iteration of Sturgeon's Law, they'll be lucky if even one in three of these games truly lives up to the magazine's hype.) This is not even mentioning how press previews like PC Gamer's are used by publishers to promote and market their product, or as we saw with Gamespy and Ubisoft, actually made part of their advertising campaigns.

It's why Vederman's refusal to accept gold farmer ads is so disingenuous, considering all the thoughtless, unqualified boosterism of incomplete, undistinguished titles PC Gamer does on behalf of its potential advertisers. It's sort of like the madame of a Paris whorehouse waddling into her lobby filled with clientele and pointing a chubby finger, not at the banker or the Parliamentarian or the bishop already paying their bills, but at the peg-legged dwarf with 20 Francs waiting his turn in the back of the room, and thundering "ZIS IS A RESPECTABLE ESTABLISHMENT! WE DON'T TAKE ZE MIDGET AMPUTEES IN ZIS PLACE— GET OUT!"

Which is also why, after a close race, Vederman helps PC Gamer take April's Preview Ho crown.

For in the end, there's no bigger Ho than a Ho on its high horse.

Send samples of egregiously fawning game previews and information on backroom deals that influence them to au@kotaku.com, including previews that are used in advertising copy. Tips from editors and writers in the game press especially welcome—all correspondence kept strictly confidential.

Update: Although we try to give companies opportunity to respond before a column is run, PC Gamer's Dan Morris had this to say, "Wagner James Au made a ridiculously cursory attempt to contact PC Gamer for comment on this article, sending one email to a general reader mailbox. Our spam filter killed it, probably due to his misspellings in the subject line. He failed to follow up, despite the fact that editors' email addresses are prominently published in the magazine, or, for that matter, that I have repeatedly invited him to contact me by phone for comment on stories such as this.

If he had made a serious attempt to get comment from us, we'd have told him that PC Gamer accepted nothing from EA for our Battlefield 2042 cover story. I continue to be dismayed that Au is allowed to skirt the most basic ethical consideration of his trade — a good-faith effort to get comment from his subjects.

Sincerely, Daniel Morris, Associate Publisher, PC Gamer" We have offered Mr. Morris a comments invite which he may or may not use to respond to any questions from readers in the comments.

When I launched Kotaku's Preview Ho column a couple weeks ago, I did so on the assumption that the gaming press hyped up their previews primarily to stay in good stead with the publishers, whose access and ad revenue they depend on. But in the case of the top two gaming sites, at least, I quickly learned that the story is more complicated—and disturbing— than even that.

Shortly after the first Preview Ho, I was contacted by a former media buyer for various game publishers. This person was irked by the game media's pretense that previews were pure editorial. But unlike their readers— or for that matter, me— my source had hard proof they were much more than that.

"I was the media buyer who made the purchase," the source told me, "signed the insertion order, and then followed up to make sure that what we had been promised was in fact delivered."

What was delivered, my source went on, was editorial placement on the two largest game websites for a sizeable fee.

This source sent me some invoices for a game studio client. (For good measure, I faxed copies to my Gawker editors.) Several were from Gamespot, and while most of the items referred to legitimate ads, a couple mentioned something called "Front Door rotation"— or what Gamespot staffers refer to as a "gumball". Gumballs are those thumbnail screenshots you see on the front page of Gamespot, when you visit the site— clicking on these takes you to an article about the game.

In the Gamespot invoice I looked at, a gumball for two weeks cost the media buyer's client over $7000.

"You can purchase messaging plus units that increase the likelihood of an article about your game showing up on their front page," the source said. In other words, if you want your game to get more editorial prominence, you pay extra.

Then the source showed me an invoice for the same game, this one from
IGN/Gamespy. What Gamespot calls a gumball, Gamespy calls, less charmingly, a "Gamespy Spotlight". But the content and the principle is basically the same: the Spotlights are those thumbnail screenshot links that you see on the site's front page. "What you're looking at on the front page is not what the editors decided is the best game," the media buyer informed me.

Reached for comment, both the editors of Gamespot and Gamespy, unsurprisingly, have a much different way of looking at their policies.

"I can confirm that GameSpot does offer publishers programs that promote their content on our site using a variety of means," Gamespot Executive Editor Greg Kasavin acknowledged. "The promotion causes gumballs linking to specific content to appear more often than other gumballs (which are auto-generated for all new content and displayed randomly and dynamically upon page load)." But for the "vast majority of cases", he goes on, the gumball doesn't feature Gamespot editorial, but an official asset like the game's trailer or a playable demo. "Our editors have the authority and responsibility to decide which content gets top billing," Kasavin added.

I asked Kasavin about this "vast majority" of gumballs— what was an exception, where a paid gumball linked straight to Gamespot editorial?

As it happened, he said, such a gumball is currently in play, for Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter for the Xbox 360. "I wouldn't want you to jump to the incorrect conclusion that the extra push being given to the review must mean that the game's publisher somehow influenced the review in the first place," Kasavin added hastily. "My guess is this promotional deal was negotiated after we decided to give the game a positive review, but since I'm not privy to the details of these types of deals, I don't know for sure." He insisted that Gamespot maintains a strict separation between editorial and ad sales.

IGN/Gamespy had a similar explanation for the selling of their editorial space.

First noting that the practice is "pretty common both in print and online", Peer Schneider, IGN's VP of Content Publishing, described their Spotlights as "'sponsored' slotting, sometimes called 'digital reprint.' This is a practice where advertisers want to make sure coverage of their titles is seen. For example, some magazines sell their cover image (or part of it) to the highest bidder." Schneider insisted IGN and GameSpy don't sell their "top story" placement to anyone. "We have, however, designated spots that can be 'sponsored.' What this means is that a publisher interested in exposing more users to a title (including games, movies, etc.) can book a one-day sponsorship in what we call 'spotlights.'" Like Kasavin, Schneider enunciated a principle of strict separation between editorial and ad sales.

"In the time I have been here (six years now)," Gamespy editorial director John "Warrior" Keefer added, "there has never been any deliberate intent to deceive our readers. If anything, we try to err in the other direction. I am a strong proponent of editorial integrity. My staff knows that the quickest way to get on my bad side is to mess with GameSpy's name or reputation. We have made a few mistakes (Donkey Konga, anyone?), but those we have never shied away from or tried to sweep under the carpet (I spent three days after Donkey Konga answering questions and posting on boards)."

Hos, or honest brokers? We leave that to the readers of Gamespot and Gamespy to decide. To us, however, their answers raise more questions than they answer. Can any indy game studio really compete for attention against publishers who can afford to stack the deck? With so much money at stake, how separate can editorial and ad sales truly be? And what would happen if it were discovered that, say, the websites of Premiere and Entertainment Weekly charged the studios extra to put their trailers (no matter how mediocre) in a prominent place on their page?

We leave readers with those questions to ponder, as well. For now, consider this a glimpse inside the sausage factory, where games often reach the public awareness not because of their quality, but because of the billing that goes with them.

And the search for Hos continues.

Send samples of egregiously fawning game previews and information on backroom deals that influence them to au@kotaku.com. Tips from editors and writers in the game press especially welcom—all correspondence kept strictly confidential.

The games writer for Salon and the embedded journalist in Second Life rallies Kotaku readers in a war to save games from their worse enemy—the gaming press. This is an expanded version of a talk delivered March 11 at South by Southwest s ScreenBurn Fest in Austin, Texas.

Why do games, for the most part, unrelentingly suck such ass? If you happened to hear veteran designer Greg Costikyan s acclaimed rant last GDC 2005, you d think the trouble was due to the rising cost of development, and outdated distribution models. He is right as far as it goes— but right in a way that doesn t leave much hope for change.

After covering the game industry for some five years, I think I ve found the primary source of the trouble. Not the only source, but the weakest link in the greater chain of suck and more key, the one that can be hammered at by blogs like Kotaku.

I found it at an E3 cocktail party in Beverly Hills, shortly after I d begun introducing myself not as a journalist but as a writer with the virtual world Second Life—not a game per se, but close enough, evidently, for folks on the business end of the industry to lower their shields. The topic was the gaming press, and on that subject, the opinion of a top exec from a major publisher was decidedly bottom line.

Press previews are very important to our sales, he casually mentioned to me over martinis, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. Retailers don t know anything about games. So we show them previews of our titles from the game press, and they reserve shelf space for our games on the strength of those.

And just like that, the gaping mouth of suckage was staring me in the face. Or rather, it had always been there, but I just hadn t noticed until then.

For the thing of it is, game magazine previews are almost uniformly positive, even for the most undistinguished titles. So it unrolls thus: publisher makes mediocre game; press previews depict mediocre game as being good or at least worth a look; excited gamers read previews, foolishly believe them, start making pre-sale orders of mediocre game; driven by preview press and pre-sale numbers based on that press, retailers stock up on mediocre game; publisher makes money from mediocre game, keeps making more games like it.

And the circle jerk is complete. All started by the gaming press, in their preview section.

Consider these excerpts selected at random from game magazine previews from last year:

Batman Begins and The Incredible Hulk No longer are you limited to just reading about your favorite superheroes for once, you truly are the superhero.

Rainbow Six: Lockdown we re quite certain that the new online career mode will justify a purchase.

Call of Duty II We don t need any more convincing [on the studio s qualifications to make this game.] The hard part now will be waiting until this fall, when Call of Duty II hits shelves.

These aren t impartial descriptions, let alone critical evaluations. These are words that directly drive sales. None of these previews had a single critical word to say either, except perhaps to point out easily fixable technical issues and missing content.

Ask yourself if you ve ever read anything like the following in a preview:

While technically impressive, there s really no design feature here which hasn t been done before in previous games.

The story looks like one more series of boring cutscenes you ll be skipping past, since they re pretty much derived from a dozen movies you ve already seen.

If one more slightly different looking set of futuristic weapons is so goddamn important to you that you re willing to part with $50, why, this is the game for you!

None of this is meant as a slam at all individuals in the gaming press, many of whom are personal friends who have my respect and sympathy. Generally they are just as pained by the compromises they feel they must make by running non-critical game previews. (I m not claiming purity for myself, either; in retrospect, for example, I regret over-praising a technology demo of Molyneux s Black and White without ever asking uncomfortable questions such as, Where s the, um, game? ) I don t even think the press does it in exchange for all the free trips, gifts, and other benefits that publishers ply them with. They do it for fear of losing early access to games and their developers, and endangering their advertising revenue.

But they are gamers, too, and they must feel just as keenly the indignity of hyping crap. Like any dedicated gamer, they can tell when a game is fundamentally bad or undistinguished, even in Beta; they know that a game with unoriginal gameplay will still be unoriginal, after all the bugs are rooted out and the unfinished levels completed.

Talking with them, I can sometimes seem to see a mortified look in their eyes, a kind of Stop me before I hype again! plea. We saw an example of this personal tumult in recent months, when Electronic Gaming Monthly editor Dan Hsu unleashed a rant about fellow editors who sold coverage for ad space—a groundbreaking story that most of the gaming press cravenly failed to follow up on. It s gotten so bad, members of the game industry are themselves begging for the press to reform witness God of War s David Jaffe much-discussed critique of the gaming media. (Both Hsu and Jaffe s editorials, it s worth noting, didn t show up in game magazines, but in their personal blogs.)

If editors were to break this unspoken agreement they ve made with publishers to write groveling previews, they d be heroes to gamers everywhere. They d also be out of a job. Which is why it s up to gamers to save them from themselves and in the process, to help save games.

This is where blogs like this come in.

Starting in April, Kotaku will launch a regular feature called Preview Ho of the Month , and the object is to name and shame.

Preview Ho will be a compilation of the most egregious, blatant promotion for unreleased games from across the gaming press. We will challenge the editors of these magazines and websites to justify their hype on behalf of their advertisers products. We will ask them why they gave so much glowing press to games that were so unfinished as to be design documents with conceptual art, or gave any attention whatsoever to yet another movie spin-off with no perceivable originality at all. In doing so, we will go after previews as they exist now for what they are: the mortal enemy of good games.

This is a task that will require the help of every reader of Kotaku who also reads game magazines. Go hunting for these handjobs, clip them out, and e-mail (au@kotaku) the text to us. Help us find the biggest Hos and win public praise—and the satisfaction of knowing you helped create a future of better games.

Think what a gaming press which no longer acted as the publishers fluffers would look like, where journalists felt free to state their actual impressions of a game in preview Beta. There would be some pissiness in the beginning, yes; some publishers would threaten to yank their advertising, after particularly harsh previews. All for the better: this would push magazines to court more non-gaming advertisers, and thereby, expand their audience demographic. The less dependent on game ads for revenue, the more editorial freedom they ll have, in future issues. No longer able to rely on the gaming press booster-ism, publishers would be forced to take more creative risks. They d also put more effort into creating playable demos early on in the development process, to generate a fan base the old-fashioned way, by earning it.

Meanwhile, the gaming press would actually become a genuine force for good and innovation in games; honestly harsh previews would kill or suspend projects in early development, or force studios to rethink crucial elements of the design. In the same way, honest positive previews would build up buzz for the titles that deserved them. We would see more games like Katamari Damacy, which began its life in the US on a single demo machine on the E3 floor, while the publisher devoted its promotional resources to less worthwhile games only to see gamers (largely gamers who blog) drag it into the spotlight.

Bloggers have transformed the mainstream media (think Dan Rather and those fake memos), US politics (think Trent Lott s hasty retirement after praising a segregationist), and Hollywood (think Ain't It Cool News, an ur-blog that forced the film industry to improve their geek genre films.) It is time for blogs to do the same thing for the game industry, breaking the closed circuit of suck once and for all.

Sometimes game journalist/sometimes game developer Wagner James Au writes the New World Notes blog, the journal of the online world Second Life.