I’ve been writing about games in some capacity since 2011. If we want to include my time writing for the school newspaper, we could go way back. But let’s not do that, k? When I started writing for The Game Effect, a plucky little website full of talented writers, we were mostly concerned with hits, because hits grew the site and brought it revenue – something we needed in order to survive. Breaking news before anyone else, and getting information nobody else had; that was the way to succeed. It was cutthroat and exhilarating. Speaking for myself anyway, it was also pretty amateur.
I recall one specific instance that occurred while I was just sitting down for dinner at a Chipotle restaurant one evening in Santa Clara, California. I was just talking with my girlfriend (now wife), and about to sit down, when I got some information that I thought would be a huge news item for us. I wasn’t near a computer, and I hadn’t even taken a bite out of my burrito yet (incidentally, this is the visit to Chipotle in which I realized that I hate Chipotle). So I messaged my fellow writers and asked if anyone was available to knock out a quick news article about it. Luckily, someone was able to get it done in a flash. The article was published and posted quickly on N4G, Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook. And… it did ok.
What was this revelatory scoop we had snagged, you ask? Braid creator, Jonathon Blow had answered a question I sent him on Twitter, asking about the progress of his next game, The Witness. His curt response: “It’s basically finished.” That sent me into a tizzy. I had deemed that worthy enough news to go through all that trouble (and a cold burrito) to get it published before anyone else. That was in late 2012. The Witness released in January, 2016. See the problem? Though the game may have been “finished”, the development process clearly continued far beyond that. Game development doesn’t work in straight lines, and any number of factors could’ve played into the game’s delay, but I didn’t concern myself with that. I could’ve sent a follow-up question, or gotten his email, but time was of the essence. I just wanted raw information and I wanted hits, and fast.
It was with that mentality that I began work on what would become the most successful article I’ve ever written - at least, from a numbers standpoint. In 2012, I wrote an article entitled “The Truth Behind I Am Alive’s Development Disaster” about the *ahem* truth behind that game’s rather tumultuous development process. This post is all about that article, so I recommend reading it if you want to follow along, but it’s not necessary to understand the point I’m getting at here. It began when The Game Effect sent me to PAX East. Though my schedule was mostly packed with appointments, I carved out some free time one day and spent it wandering the show floor, seeing what I could see. I noticed a strikingly modest booth for I Am Alive, which had already released a few weeks prior on Xbox 360. Since I hadn’t yet played Ubisoft’s budget-priced survival action game, I decided to try the demo. Nobody else was playing it, so I figured, why not? A man approached me and introduced himself as Stan Mettra, the game’s creative director. Of course, this got my wheels churning, and I asked him if he had some time for an interview. He checked with his PR handler, and we set a time to meet at the dining hall for a chat the following morning.
The interview wasn’t revelatory by any stretch of the word. As I noted in the story itself, Mettra was not easily forthcoming, for fear of getting himself in trouble with his employer. I got enough information out of him to be intrigued, but not enough to make an interesting article in and of itself. As I look back at what I did right and wrong, I can at least take pride in the decision to not simply write a fluff piece based on the small morsels of information Mettra gave me that day. I knew there was a story there, and I wanted to find out what it was. Not only did I want to tell the story, I simply wanted to know it myself. So that motivated me to research further.
When I got home from Boston, I started doing some digging. The trailers and previews I could find online provided a clear through-line tracing the game’s progression from overblown triple-A disaster blockbuster to the understated survival adventure game that Mettra’s team at Ubisoft Shanghai eventually released in 2012. I was even able to fill in some gaps with nuggets of information from interviews and news stories here and there, but for the most part, the game’s development was still shrouded in darkness. So I started to reach out to some people for information. I knew that I wouldn’t get Ubisoft to tell me anything I didn’t already know. I was going to need to talk to people who either, 1) didn’t work for Ubisoft anymore and would be more forthcoming, or 2) people who had worked for the defunct Darkworks, the original developer of I Am Alive prior to Ubisoft taking over development. So I used various social media to reach out to some folks who I thought would speak with me candidly, even if off-the-record, about what exactly happened in the eight years it took for I Am Alive to come to life.
Out of about fifteen people, I had three potential sources respond. Only one would speak to me on the record, but that was enough for me. That was probably the biggest mistake I made. Though I had corroborated what my source told me through my interview with Mettra, and some off the record information I had received, that didn’t come through in the final draft of the article. I wouldn’t publish this article today without at least one more on-the-record source. That’s not because I didn’t trust my source, since I had vetted them, but rather because the reader didn’t yet trust me – I hadn’t earned it. People have been skeptical of games media for years, and in 2012, an unknown writer for an unknown site garnered even more skepticism. So I had to prove my credibility, which I failed to do without more corroboration of my source’s narrative.
That narrative was interesting enough for sure, but reading this article again, even as the person who wrote it, I still come away with questions. Questions I should’ve answered. For example, my source made a point to emphasize that the original version of the game that Darkworks had been working on, included several “roller-coaster rides”. When they told me this, I didn’t think to ask what that meant. I should’ve, because I don’t think it means roller-coaster rides in the amusement park sense of the word. I think it means highly scripted action set-pieces like those common in the Uncharted series. I could be wrong. It could mean big wooden roller coaster rides scattered throughout the world. But I doubt it, and the fact that even I don’t know what my source meant by this is confusing for the reader and embarrassing for the me.
As I corresponded with my source via email, they offered to send me a 50 gigabyte file which contained an alpha build of the Darkworks version of I Am Alive. This would have been a huge get. I don’t think I need to explain how big a scoop this would’ve been, as not only would it have been a neat thing to see, but it would’ve instantly corroborated much of the information my source had provided. I didn’t have a computer capable of running it at the time, so we decided against it. But I should’ve had them send it to my Editor-in-Chief, or someone who could’ve received it and analyzed it for the story. That I didn’t do this, and that there’s still no public record of what that game would’ve looked like, is just another thing I regret about my handling of this story. Plus, it would’ve clarified that pesky roller-coaster mystery.
After learning some of the more sordid details of the history of the game’s development I reached out to Ubisoft and former Darkworks CEO, Guillaume Gouraud, who had a prominent role in the story. Both parties declined comment, which I noted in the story. At least I did that part right, but I should’ve continued to press them for comment, and I didn’t. An official statement from either party would’ve only strengthened the story’s credibility. As I began to see sites like IGN, Eurogamer, and Destructoid cite the article with caveats such as, “Take this all with a grain of salt,” I knew I had messed up.
Are there other things I could’ve done to improve this story? Absolutely. I could comb through the whole thing with red ink and mark grammatical errors, redundancies, and many other issues. But that wasn’t the point. My main purpose in writing this was to show the importance of fact-checking and corroboration, especially when dealing with anonymous sources. This is true no matter what field of journalism we’re talking about; games or otherwise. And it’s not only important for aspiring writers to keep this in mind, but it’s important now more than ever for audiences to maintain a healthy bit of skepticism as they browse the world of online journalism.
Anyway, thank you reader, for indulging my navel gazing. I hope it was helpful.
Comments
Post a Comment