Margaret Robertson

It was around the time I was starting to lose faith in gaming magazines in the US. I couldn't go two pages without seeing the word "badass," previews were hyper "rah-rah," and the magazine had the overall tone of a 13-year-old boy. I stopped my regular visits to the games magazine section of the bookstore altogether. Dark times, indeed.

Skip forward a bit to my freshman year of college. I found my Journalism 101 prof was into games, and it didn't take me long to start a discussion about games journalism. After I whined about the current state of game mags, he pointed me towards Edge, a gaming magazine from the UK.

From then on, I was sold (Aaand, this is where my media bias starts to show—this magazine really is a favorite). Edge covered games with an even-keeled, intelligent maturity that I hadn't witnessed in the gaming enthusiast press before. The letters from the readers were all... insightful. Sure, the grammar and spelling from across the pond seemed a tick funny at first, but it's well worth the $10 I pay the local bookstore.

So, after three paragraphs of gushing introduction, you can bet I was excited when I got to speak with a former editor-in-chief of Edge.

Margaret Robertson, former writer and editor of Edge, is now primarily a consultant for game developers and publishers, but still does opinion pieces and features for the BBC and international newspapers. You can see more of her work at her blog. Read the interview below.

What I learned:

• This is how Margaret Robertson broke into the business: EDGE magazine forum reader/participant > mod > writer > editor. You… you can do that??
  
• Emphasized yet again that the flaws of games journalism aren’t just tied to the games enthusiast press, but expand to other enthusiast areas like travel writing. Yeesh, I need to get out more x_x
• Writing for the enthusiast publications isn't too different from writing for mainstream publications
  
• How aggressive the games industry is sometimes in chasing the elusive 10/10 review score. Competition is a good thing, but some practices can be destructive to the industry. For instance, Margaret gave some good examples of what kind of effects MetaCritic, GameRankings and Gamespot's Trax have on publishers, retailers, games journalism and the rest of the industry.
• The answer to the last question really gave me a bit of hope in seeing that enthusiast publications, who are so dependent on good relationships with publishers that will provide them with information and game demos, can have a good working relationship with developers and publishers, even if review scores aren’t favorable.

Interview:

How did you come to start working at Edge?

VideogameJournalism: So how did you come to start working at Edge?

Margaret: Actually, it was really from being involved in their forums. I'd read the magazine for years, and loved it, and in those days the forum was quite small and really articulate. I started writing a lot on the forum, and got some good feedback on what I was doing. I started moderating and got to know some of the staff a bit, and they were very encouraging when the staff writer position came up and I was thinking of applying. So I really did go from reader to forum mod to writer to editor.

Do you think the articles you've written for the BBC differ from what you wrote at Edge?

VideogameJournalism: So now that you're a games consultant, what kind of gaming articles do you mostly focus on? I've seen you have a good number of articles on the BBC site. Do you think those differ from what you used to write at Edge?

Margaret: Actually, a lot of my work now isn't writing - it's internal reports and consultancy advice for publishers and developers, but I still do some opinion pieces and features for the BBC and international newspapers. I don't do much for the specialist press any more - I wrote hundreds of pages of that when I was at Edge and was ready for a change.

It definitely differs, because you can't assume the same depth of interest or knowledge on behalf of your readership.

In some respects, though, it isn't as different as you might think. I was always very intolerant as an editor of writing that was too impenetrable-- too full of acronyms, or made too many assumptions that readers would know or remember about old or obscure games. Good writing should be as transparent as possible, even for non-specialists reading specialist publications.

And, on the other hand, I think mainstream publications often underestimate the knowledge and enthusiasm that their readers have for games, so when I'm writing for sites like the BBC I err on the side of assuming an informed readership than an uninformed one.

There's a lot of lazy shorthands in games writing ("It's GTA crossed with Sam and Max!" sort of thing) which is meaningless unless you happen to know both games.

VJ: I see... and that stems mostly from the differences in audiences?

Margaret: Well, you find that kind of thing in both mainstream and specialist writing, but I think quite a lot of the differences that are there stem from the writers not from the readers. Often in a mainstream publication like a local newspaper or a lad's mag (do you call them lad's mags? Maxim or FHM or the like) the games coverage will just be written by someone on the team who happened to volunteer for it first. So, they won't necessarily know a lot about the industry, or understand how games are made, or care about the fact that some hot new game isn't really a new idea, because there was a thing a bit like it on the PC Engine years ago that no-one remembers

Now, some people argue that makes them *better* game writers, because they're approaching it from a mindset more like the one the majority of gamers are likely to have, but I don't agree. I think the ideal writer is someone who knows all the background, but is skilled enough and knows their audience well enough, to only present what's relevant.

Do you think games journalism taken seriously? Also, some very interesting stuff on MetaCritic, GameRankings and GameTrax...

Margaret: I don't think it is taken seriously, but then again I don't think much specialist journalism is. Certainly the pay is too low to retain talented or experienced journalists (in most cases), and that's a very big problem for improving standards. I'm not sure it's prejudice that's stopping it, though—I think there's very little game writing that's deserving of the respect shown to the best travel or sport writing, say.

I'd also say that my experience is that the mountains of free swag isn't actually a problem. Most game swag is awful cheap tat that just gets thrown away, and bribes of any kind are pretty rare at an individual level. The big questions of propriety in game journalism are at a corporate level, where you have to look at the level of influence a big advertiser will have with a publication

VJ: Right... like there was that incident where Eidos, publishers of Kane and Lynch, paid Gamespot tons of money for a huge Kane and Lynch advertising campaign. Then the Gamespot reviewer [Jeff Gerstmann] gave the game a 6/10 and was fired a couple weeks later [see the bottom of this post for more on "Gerstmanngate"]. That was really upsetting to see. Do you see any solution to this kind of problem?
[*Note: While Jeff was fired from Gamespot, it is only rumor that it was because of his "controversial" review ratings. Anonymous sources hint that this was the case, but no one outside of this incident really knows what happened. And it will probably stay that way.]

Margaret: Well, I'm sure Gamespot management would tell you there wasn't a problem :)

VJ: Haha, yes, they did try. The other problem with those situations is that no one outside of the main characters of the incident ever find out what really happened :/

Margaret: I think the big problem is that the only people who can really police this are the readers. Good, responsible journalists are more likely to quit than whistleblow, which just exacerbates the problem, because it's the people with the stronger stomachs for unethical behaviour that stay on and gradually get promoted.

And it's hard to whistleblow, because a journalist is very unlikely to have any hard evidence that anything unethical has happened, as you say. A lot of the pressure can be unspoken, or be delivered by quiet informal chats, so it's hard to construct proof that anything untoward has happened. And since review scores will always be subjective, it's always possible, if not plausible, for a publisher to say 'well, we really did think that was a 2/10 game, or a 10/10 game.

I think the games industry is being shortsighted in how aggressively it chases scores, and how much weight it puts behind aggregators like MetaCritic and GameRankings. I also think there aren't enough questions asked about whether or not it's ethically sound for both of those sights to be run by CNet, which also runs GameSpot.

Certainly, I know that many publishers and retailers judge the success and likely popularity of a game purely on the basis of its Metacritic score, which I think is an incredibly crude and poorly understood metric, and one where we don't know enough about the methodology behind it.

So, for instance, Metacritic weights scores from different publications differently, but doesn't disclose how, so on Edge we would find that a 'low' score from Edge - say a 6, which wasn't a low score from us at all - would have a big impact on an average based on websites that really only score games from 70% upwards.
[...]
I think it's also worth thinking about the ethics behind things like GameSpot's GameTrax system, which is a service retailers can buy to help them gauge enthusiasm about a game. So, GameSpot tracks how many people read the previews and features about a particular game on its site, and then lets retail know how that compares to the level of interest in other games.

But, of course, the amount of traffic that an individual game will get depends heavily on the amount of advertising and access the publisher gives GameSpot. So, without any actually unethical activity--no brown envelopes of cash, or bribes, or phone calls to get people fired--GameSpot has created a system where publishers can feel pressures to give more access and advertising money to GameSpot, to protect their GameTrax rating, to ensure retailers buy into their game. It's a very clever system, but one that makes me uncomfortable, even though there's no reason for it not to be totally above board.

When you were editor-in-chief of Edge, what kind of policies did you have to ensure quality, professional and mature writing, and avoid these pitfalls to games journalism we've been talking about?

Videogame Journalism: And finally, this is also a very broad question: when you were editor-in-chief of Edge, what kind of policies did you have to ensure quality, professional and mature writing, and avoid these pitfalls to games journalism we've been talking about? To what do you credit Edge's reputation of maturity and professionalism?

Margaret: To the maturity and professionalism of its staff, pure and simple.

I only hired or commissioned people who I knew had the talent and maturity to produce work I would be proud to publish, and then everything was scrutinised and discussed very carefully. I didn't ever feel under any pressure to do anything that I had any ethical qualms about, but I also made it very clear to everyone involved that any pressure of that nature wouldn't have been successful.

You are up against very serious commercial pressures--you have to make a commercially viable product, which means you have to be sensitive to what the market wants and to the need to attract and retain advertisers, but I always found there were creative and professional ways to do it

Sometimes game publishers would be upset about a score and ring you to express their displeasure, but we'd just have a conversation where I'd explain our reasoning behind the score and it would always be resolved amicably

VJ: Oh, I see. But, would the game publishers continue to work with you in a favorable manner, even after they receive what they think is a less than favorable score?

Margaret: Because they hope the next game will do better.

They understand that not every game will be brilliant, and that if they want the buzz and commercial success that a 10/10 score can bring a game, then it has to be offset against other games getting low scores.

"Gerstmanngate"—The Internet's Reaction
When this rumor/story first appeared, gamers and readers were pissed. They got mad. Forums exploded and Gamespot had to temporarily disable comments on the Kane and Lynch review. Here's a roundup of interesting reactionary stuff that should leave you with a simple message: Gamers are a passionate, crafty crowd. They're generally good-natured, sometimes a little brash, yet generally good people. But anger them and you will pay.

• Penny Arcade comic on Gerstmann's firing
• Someone hacked the poll at GameFAQs another site owned by CNet
• Forums at Gamespot and NeoGaf
  
• the EGM/Ziff Davis staff rallies!
• A Youtube video of a fake trailer for the fictional movie satrizing "Gerstmanngate"