On Plagiarism, IGN's Filip Miucin, and Loving to Write

This past week there were two huge stories in the video game world. One was a damning piece by Kotaku's Cecilia D'Anastasio 'Inside the Culture of Sexism At Riot Games'. This is everything that journalism should be: cutting, exhaustively researched, and deeply important. I feel a natural tendency to support fellow writers in this age of "fuck the media" and "choose your own reality". GamerGate loves to target Kotaku in particular as some conspiracy house creating nonsensical hot takes. But this article is definitive proof they're wrong: Kotaku is doing some of the best work covering this industry. Great job, I'm actually jealous of it.

The other big story is a much more unfortunate one, and that's this shit with IGN. That's the one I'm devoting this entire post to. I just wanted to bring up the Kotaku article because not every journalist is the newly unemployed former-IGN Nintendo Editor, Filip Miucin. Miucin in a single review made IGN look bad and ruined his career forever. I've been obsessing about this case for the past few days, which you'd know if you follow my twitter. As somebody who likes writing, would die to have Miucin's former job, and wants gaming media to be improve, Miucin's stupidity (there's no other word for it) is deeply disappointing to me.

My first reaction to the accusations that an IGN Editor stole a Dead Cells review was to assume it was bullshit. It made no sense to me. The original review was written by a very small Youtube channel called Boomstick Gaming. Not knowing who they were I could see this as being some smear piece or just somebody misunderstanding the situation. As I said, I want to support my fellow writers and wanted to give Miucin the benefit of the doubt. Games media is accused of all kinds of things, and we need to band together. I watched Boomstick's video and for most of it still thought this was a mistake. A lot of the sentences were just standard things you write while making a basic review. However by the end of Boomstick's video it was clear this was not a coincidence. This was a big problem.