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.
Some points first off: I don't read IGN. I don't have a lot of experience with Filip Miucin. Like most of us, I've never heard of Boomstick Gaming before this week. And I've never played Dead Cells. Dead Cells is on my To-Play List of 2018, so maybe I'll cover that later. It will be a great thing to play on my Switch, but I might pick up Iconoclasts instead. (Shrugs.)
Second off, people have been quite shitty about this situation, and I don't just mean the writers in question. The internet and gaming in particular is a hive for the very worst of hate mob behavior. In Filip Miucin's response video he posted last night he said people were threatening him and his family. Do not do that. Also don't attack IGN. They responded quickly to these accusations, took responsibility, and Miucin was fired within a day. Miucin's career is over forever, he'll never be hired anywhere ever again. He's been punished and he doesn't need to be harassed further.
However what Filip Miucin did is break the one of the cardinal rules of journalism and writing. There aren't many cardinal rules but plagiarism is one of the them, along with "don't make up stories like Stephen Glass", and "don't be a racist". And like all plagiarism, it was incredibly stupid. I really cannot make it clear enough how stupid this was.
I don't know how many reviews I've written at this point, but I'm experienced enough to know a somewhat dirty secret about criticism: it isn't that hard. Especially for the kind of writing in question. Plagiarism is totally unnecessary and again unspeakably, unfathomably stupid. So stupid in fact, I thought Miucin had to be innocent at first because nobody is this dumb. (Once again I've underestimated the depths of human moron-itude.) Filip Miucin risked his career to write a four minute review with maybe 600 words to it. If he had played the game, he should have been able to pull off a rough draft in two hours at most.
All you need to do to get a review done is to be passionate about what you're writing. It really does not take much. You answer two questions in a piece like this "what is Dead Cells?" and "Why is Dead Cells fun (or not)?" If you need to pad things out, throw in a few jokes or anecdotes about playing. Make a reference to Metal Gear Solid 2 or something. And more importantly than anything else: be honest. Tell the audience who you are and what your experience with this game and its surrounding Metroidvania genre is. You don't need to hide from them. Writing is a social activity, even if you're doing it at 2 AM after being locked away in your room for six hours and are too neurotic to talk to a human being. I think of my pieces as the opening to a conversation. If you're plagiarizing, you're making a boring conversation.
I don't think I'm being that arrogant when I say I could have done Miucin's writing task here in my sleep. In fact, editing the video, recording the audio, and capturing the gameplay are all way more difficult than writing the draft. Miucin cut the easiest corner and lost everything for it.
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| I'm slightly mad while writing this, so here's Captain Toad being adorable to calm me down. |
I'm trying to write better pieces and be a better writer myself. I'm also juggling writing with what I hope is a balanced life with social interactions and a job that keeps a roof over my head and trying to finish all 10,000 hours of Octopath Traveler before Spider-Man comes out. So if I only manage like two pieces a month, don't be too rough, okay? I don't think of standard reviews as "below me", just somebody else will have gotten to them first, so why would you read me? Instead I'll point out how toxic Kratos is and still I'm very proud of that take. Yet if needed, I could throw up 600 words of a Captain Toad review. When do you need it?
Writing can be hard, but that is the job if you're an editor at one of the biggest gaming publications out there! Maybe Miucin wasn't interested in Dead Cells or was unable to finish the game. IGN still aims for Day 1 reviews, I can understand if he was on a deadline and was desperate to shit something out. But to fill out 600 word doesn't take a deep character study or anything. Maybe you won't come up with some brilliant metaphor or a cutting take, but trust your own voice. When writing I don't pretend to be anything other than myself, and luckily I find myself I find myself very interesting. Maybe Miucin was just an empty person who had no creativity in him, or didn't know how to find it. That thought makes me sad.
What infuriates me about this guy is that even without his own voice, he somehow managed to get so far in games journalism without the simplest thing: actually enjoying writing. I get the desire to be internet famous and wanting the position of an IGN Editor. (IGN, if you're reading this, I understand you have an opening, call me.) However, there's probably ten thousand people from bloggers to freelancers to poor bastards writing for "exposure"* who are busting their ass finding takes, grinding out five pieces a week to get by, who all deserved the job more than Miucin did. I can't blame IGN for not handling the plagiarism situation well, but I can question how this guy got hired over everybody else.
All those other writers have voices screaming to be heard. Filip Miucin apparently had no voice at all. He stole it from other people. Jason Schreier at Kotaku has found a whole history of Miucin cribbing reviews and padding out his thoughts. You can't trust anything Miucin has written - his whole output might be poisoned.
I don't want to be too cruel to IGN. However, it says something about the state of that site that they hired somebody like Miucin. He wrote what were frankly very boring and very generic pieces. There's a reason I don't read IGN reviews. Filip Miucin was generic because he had nothing to say. Not every piece can be like Rob Zacny's excellent review of MLB The Show 2018. That review used the game as a jumping off point for an entire discussion on the state of baseball and its conservative politics. Some people just need to know if MLB The Show is worth buying or not. So a standard review that just says "what is Dead Cells, and why is Dead Cells fun?" is necessary, even if a bit bland. But again, that was Miucin's job and he couldn't even do that!
IGN should probably do some soul searching and ask themselves how Miucin snuck in. I've heard his hire was not their first choice and only happened after a long search. I can't comment on IGN's hiring practices. Everybody gets fooled sometimes and Miucin fooled them. But instead of being mad that Filip Miucin stole some words, we should really be mad that his work was thought to be good enough. It just wasn't. It had no passion.
"Passion" is something of a toxic word in the industry now. Too many employees both in games development and games journalism are overworked and taken advantage of by their bosses thanks to it. You have to prove your dedication and break your back. Maybe your employers will fire you anyway because you're a woman at Riot Games and you don't fit a traditional definition of "gamer". But all I ask for anybody that wants to write about games is this: love it. This is a hobby for me, I wish it could be more, I don't know if ever will be more. I am deeply jealous of Filip Miucin because he achieved things I may never get to do.
But he didn't love writing, and he did not deserve his place in this industry. You have to be nuts to want to be in media when as Dan Ryckert on the Giant Beastcast pointed out**, there's fewer and fewer positions every year. If you just want social media followers, this is not the way to do it. I don't ask for much from a critic, but at least love your craft. And love yourself.
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* Not that I would blow two year of my life and over 100 pieces writing unpaid on a website that had no intention of ever taking me seriously. No way ol' Eric Fuchs here would be that much of a fool.
** By the way, avoiding plagiarism is really easy: just give other people credit. You can take other people's ideas all you want. Just cite them. It's as easy as taking responsibility.
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