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On Reviewing · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:04
  Welcome to pick up and deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder
• 0:07
  as I head out for a walk and delivering episode to you while I stroll
• 0:10
  around. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good afternoon, listeners. It's a
• 0:22
  lovely day here in suburban Chicago. I'm on my way back from the library
• 0:26
  having dropped off a couple of books, and I am anxious to talk to
• 0:30
  you. I thought I would talk to you today about something that was last
• 0:35
  week kind of a big hubbub in the in the right part of board game
• 0:41
  media if you follow it, and that was the controversy regarding and aon Trespass
• 0:49
  Odyssey and the YouTube channel Quack a Loope. What I thought I would talk
• 0:54
  about today is just give you a brief back of the envelope idea of what
• 0:58
  happened and how it was resolved, and then talk a little bit about my
• 1:02
  view on various aspects of board game reviewing and media and ethics in game journalism.
• 1:11
  It's interesting to think about this emerging now because one inevitably makes on some
• 1:18
  level of connection back to the gamer Gate controversy of twenty fourteen, in which
• 1:25
  an argument about ethics and game journalism was used as cover for what started out
• 1:32
  as a personal assassination piece or a personal character assassination piece by a disgruntled boyfriend
• 1:38
  and ended up being a rampaging monster of anti feminist critique and misogynistic harassment hidden
• 1:52
  under the guise of a concern for journalistic ethics. And so one of the
• 1:57
  things I wanted to think about very carefully is making sure that nowhere in this
• 2:00
  conversation is their cover for that sort of malarkey, and I would say generally
• 2:06
  there has not been. I will acknowledge. The one thing, though,
• 2:08
  that Jesse from Quacalope is current, was when this controversy happened in Jerusalem,
• 2:16
  studying at a yeshiva. Apologies if I got that term wrong. And so
• 2:22
  I think that in some places there has been some anti Semitism, but I'm
• 2:27
  understaying that for the most part there has not, and I didn't see any
• 2:30
  myself, except to say that the board game Geek threat about this, which
• 2:34
  ran into the forties in terms of pages. I had quite a few blocked
• 2:38
  entries that were deleted by moderators, so I presume some of those were horrifying.
• 2:45
  Just because the Internet is horrifying. Nonetheless, essentially what happened is the
• 2:51
  board game publisher, or I'll reveal it in the way that it came to
• 2:54
  light to the public, which is that during the Kickstarter campaign for EON's Trespass
• 3:00
  Odyssey, the YouTube channel Quacolope, which had the original game, which was
• 3:06
  done on Kickstar, and now there is a new game coming out that's an
• 3:10
  expansion along with a reprint of the original. The YouTube channel Quacolope, which
• 3:15
  does playthroughs and reviews and whatnot, released a couple of playthroughs, released a
• 3:22
  comparison video between this game and Kingdom Death Monster, which it looks to be
• 3:25
  kind of in the same genre, and then to a two part review in
• 3:30
  a format they call confirmation bias, And essentially what they do is they take
• 3:35
  all the positive things they have to say about the game and they stick them
• 3:38
  into the positive side of the confirmation bias review, and then they take the
• 3:43
  negative things they have to say about the game and put them in the negative
• 3:46
  side. So you can watch the one that says why Aon's Trespass has a
• 3:50
  nine point three on board game Geek. I think the title was as Trespasses
• 3:53
  a masterpiece and then the one this is the one that garnered the most controversy.
• 4:00
  Tresspass is unplayable, and it starts out with the host saying, you
• 4:03
  know, this might be the worst game I've ever played, something like that.
• 4:08
  So when that video came out, the backers of the upcoming campaign were
• 4:14
  mad about it, and some of them were incenseive because they had the game
• 4:16
  and they did not feel that the channel's review was fair, and so they
• 4:23
  went on the Kickstarter campaign and said, hey, what's up with this review?
• 4:25
  Why is this guy such a jerk? And the company that makes the
• 4:30
  game said something to the effective and paraphrasing here, but something the effective when
• 4:34
  somebody tells you they have a negative review that they'll take down if you pay
• 4:38
  them seventy five hundred dollars to make good videos, you don't want to work
• 4:42
  at that person anymore. And that off handed comments started a cavalcade of conversation
• 4:46
  in which people demanded receipts, because making a charge like that is pretty strong,
• 4:51
  And the company showed up with the email exchange, which I think to
• 4:57
  most people does in flact reflect the interpretation they had, although then of course
• 5:03
  the YouTube channel Jesse at Crackalope published an apology in which he said, we
• 5:09
  weren't trying to extort them, but the language has mostly been blackmail or extortion.
• 5:14
  The idea that Jesse had filmed a negative review, or as he described
• 5:18
  it, a review about the game in which they had a lot of trouble
• 5:23
  playing it. Their implication was it was a negative review and that they would
• 5:29
  be willing to scrap that material and start over filming new stuff if they got
• 5:32
  a sponsorship deal with the company for seventy That's where that's where the argument comes
• 5:38
  from. I don't think anybody watching this would dispute that those are the sort
• 5:42
  of basics of basic facts of the case. With the exception, there do
• 5:46
  appear to be a couple of people who think that Jesse never actually said his
• 5:49
  review was negative or said he would take down his review, but he certainly
• 5:54
  did say we'd scrap the existing footage and start over. So this started,
• 6:00
  like I said, a controversy that is probably still echoing today if you go
• 6:03
  look around board game Geek or other board game forums. I don't want to
• 6:06
  go into it more than what I've just said there. I'll let you go
• 6:10
  peruse those things. If you are interested in learning more. What I did
• 6:15
  want to talk about, though, is a little bit of my impression or
• 6:18
  what I think about the board game review landscape and how reviews and content are
• 6:25
  created. Because the board game area is so small, there is a lot
• 6:30
  of overlap between different categories of board game creators and producers. I have,
• 6:35
  myself on this podcast expressed a number of times hesitancy over using the word review
• 6:41
  because I am inherently biased as a board game creator and a part owner of
• 6:47
  a publishing company in the board game landscape that any competition to my games is
• 6:54
  on some level bad for me, or you know, takes away some percent
• 6:59
  of the market share I might be able to get, perhaps, and so
• 7:00
  I have on some level a bias that can affect my ability to review games.
• 7:06
  So arguably I shouldn't review games. And for a while I call I
• 7:11
  tried very hard not to say the things that I do were reviews. Now
• 7:15
  the reality of is I'm treating them like reviews, So I do call them
• 7:21
  first look reviews. Right, I'm using that language. Now, Probably what
• 7:26
  I need to do is be much more overt about that potential bias. So
• 7:31
  listeners tuning into any particular episode would be able to identify that and use it
• 7:39
  for themselves to judge whether they think I am a trustworthy media creator. That
• 7:43
  isn't something I've done super well, I don't think so. I will try
• 7:46
  to do that better in future. And it occurs to me. I didn't
• 7:49
  even do it in the Board Game Espresso episode that I recorded twenty minutes ago,
• 7:55
  So oops. But I thought I would talk a little bit about what
• 7:59
  are some of the ways that reviewers might be biased and how different how different
• 8:05
  reviewing entities have dealt with that potential bias. First one, and this is
• 8:11
  the one that seems to be for me the least. I think this one's
• 8:13
  the least consequential. But depending on the board game, on the reviewer themselves,
• 8:20
  or on the audience member, some people find this particularly galling. Is
• 8:26
  review copies. Now, most people who do board game reviewing at any level
• 8:31
  of significance in terms of audience share, start to receive review copies from publishers,
• 8:37
  and the review copy is, of course a copy of the game given
• 8:39
  to you to free as a reviewer, so that you can review the game.
• 8:43
  Now, legally in the United States, there cannot be an implication of
• 8:48
  quid pro quo. There there can be no means by which the publisher can
• 8:52
  say, hey, if you don't give us a good review, we will,
• 8:56
  I don't know, not send you review copies anymore. Can't say here's
• 9:00
  a copy as long as you give us a good review. However, I
• 9:03
  have heard in conversations about this from different board game media producers that is not
• 9:09
  at all uncommon for publishers to stop sending review copies to people who do who
• 9:13
  review their games badly, which, you know, is an interesting place to
• 9:16
  be as a publisher because on the one hand, as a publisher, when
• 9:20
  you're giving out a review copy, you want people to read the reviews,
• 9:22
  or you want people to do reviews and do them well. And if somebody
• 9:26
  does a negative review of your game, it's probably worth at least examining,
• 9:31
  like, is this person in the right audience for this game? You know,
• 9:33
  Paul Grogan plays all these heavy deep euros. If we make a light,
• 9:39
  fun party game, it's Paul Grogan the right audience for a review copy
• 9:43
  of that game. Now, if we send him one light party game and
• 9:46
  he bashes it, then the question is is it worth sending him a second
• 9:50
  one? If we think he's not going to review it. Well. In
• 9:52
  fact, I remember reading Jamie Stegmaier as a publisher doesn't read reviews. But
• 9:56
  I don't know how he determines who should get review copies. He likes to
• 10:00
  encourage newer channels sometimes, but I think he also sends them to established channels.
• 10:05
  I don't know what his criteria are. I did read that he actively
• 10:09
  doesn't read reviews to keep himself from accidentally engaging in that kind of bias.
• 10:15
  Now, as a reviewer, there are two dangers with the bias of review
• 10:18
  copies. One is that you will value the game too lightly because you did
• 10:24
  not pay for it, and so you might enjoy a game in a different
• 10:30
  way than if you felt like you had a stake in the game from having
• 10:33
  paid for it. Now, I don't know if the argument would be that
• 10:35
  if I pay one hundred dollars for a game, I am incentivized to like
• 10:41
  it more than a reviewer who got it for free, and so the reviewers
• 10:43
  a view would be more pure. Perhaps. But on the other hand,
• 10:48
  if as a reviewer, you make money off of the games that you get,
• 10:54
  which you could do by say reselling them or trading them for games that
• 10:58
  you want. Then there is a disincentive to write a bad review if you
• 11:03
  think the publisher might penalize you for it. Because you write a bad review,
• 11:07
  you get penalized. Then you don't get as many review copies, or
• 11:11
  even if you don't think the publisher will, even if you don't make money
• 11:13
  on it. You make money by having the latest and greatest, and so
• 11:16
  if you get off of the publisher wish list, then you don't get the
• 11:20
  game until all the other schmos who buy it at the store do, and
• 11:22
  your ability to publish that opening day review is dramatically diminished. So review copies
• 11:28
  themselves do create a bias that's worth talking about, which is why I think
• 11:31
  every media creator should be revealing when they are playing a copy that they received
• 11:39
  as a review copy, and they good review groups tend to do that.
• 11:43
  Next up is sponsorships, and there are a couple different kinds of sponsorships.
• 11:48
  There is sponsored content and then just general advertisement with the group. So,
• 11:54
  for example, sponsored content would be the kind of stuff that is often on
• 11:58
  the Quackolope channel, which is where they have been hired by the company to
• 12:03
  make and post material about a particular game, and so good production of that
• 12:13
  content would involve making clear to the viewer that they have been paid to produce
• 12:18
  that content. Now, that content should not be a review generally, there
• 12:22
  is There are actually legal, as I understand it, legal limits or legal
• 12:28
  barriers between reviews and paid content, and a review is not supposed to be
• 12:33
  paid content. But it is almost inevitable that people doing this kind of work
• 12:37
  will often reveal their thoughts about a game one way or another. And in
• 12:43
  paid content it's rarely negative thoughts about the game. Sometimes it is, but
• 12:46
  rarely. Now, of course, I would say good versions of producing this
• 12:50
  content would be to say upfront, I was paid to produce this content.
• 12:54
  So you take anything I say that's not directly about the game with a rain
• 13:00
  of salt, or more dramatically, very directly not saying anything about the quality
• 13:07
  of the game, that you are just presenting the game as an experience and
• 13:11
  letting, you know, users make up their own mind. So that would
• 13:15
  be sponsored content. And then you have advertisement, which is a classic issue
• 13:18
  in terms of conflict of interest. You know, you think about TV news
• 13:24
  channels. You know, the idea that the editorial and news sections of a
• 13:28
  news organization are supposed to be behind a kind of wall between with advertisers so
• 13:35
  that there's no conflict of interest where an advertiser doesn't want to advertise it with
• 13:39
  the paper anymore if the newspaper writes a bad article about them. And you
• 13:43
  know, the same goes for board game media that accepts advertisement from board game
• 13:48
  companies. Right if a board game YouTube channel produces takes ads from a board
• 13:56
  game company, particularly adds where they've been paid directly, as as to say
• 14:00
  YouTube serving ads into their feed, which often you don't get control of.
• 14:03
  As as far as I understand it, if you were to have a sponsorship,
• 14:07
  like through advertisement of a particular brand, then it would not be ideal
• 14:13
  for that reviewer to then publish a bad review of that company's games. That
• 14:18
  I mean, they should be able to do that, But the reality is
• 14:22
  that a bias can be created when one finds oneself in that situation. And
• 14:28
  then finally, I did want to talk a moment here to talk about.
• 14:31
  Alex from Board Game Co made a video about this, particularly in response to
• 14:35
  the Quacklope situation, talking about where one could see biases in his work,
• 14:41
  and one has to decide and he's got a number of things he works.
• 14:43
  His job outside of board game reviewing is working for a crowdfunding platform, and
• 14:48
  so when he does anything for a game that's on that crowdfunding platform, he
• 14:54
  has an inherent conflict of interest that should be made clear to the readers or
• 14:58
  listeners. But more generally, some people see him as just tainted by the
• 15:03
  fact that he works in board games. And you know by that regard to
• 15:05
  my part ownership of a board game company may taint my review voice and is
• 15:13
  worth thinking about when you're listening to me review something more dramatically. And I
• 15:18
  think Alex very forthrightly and earnestly reflects this idea that the bigger for him,
• 15:26
  the bigger worry about bias is not, like I say, a business relationship,
• 15:33
  right. He feels like if he's paid to do content of a game
• 15:35
  and then learn he reviews that game, he feels like he's generally able to
• 15:41
  distinguish between the two and be fair in that distinction. However, what he
• 15:46
  says is harder is the relationships that emerge in the board game community. So
• 15:54
  the board game industry is really small, and if you go to cons particularly
• 16:00
  as a media creator. With some access, you can very quickly meet and
• 16:04
  become friends with a lot of the people who make the thing that you then
• 16:08
  are reviewing. And he says that is the harder That is the harder bias
• 16:12
  to overcome. Is if you are friends with someone and they put out a
• 16:15
  bad game, the risk to that friendship of putting out that bad game,
• 16:19
  of putting our review of that bad game is higher. And you know,
• 16:23
  again he says he works hard on that, but it's it is difficult.
• 16:27
  So I respect him for calling that out. So I to wrap this up
• 16:32
  here, I wanted to talk about a couple different review reviewers who I think
• 16:36
  have the highest standard of ethical separation. The first is going to be so
• 16:42
  very wrong about games. I think they do a couple of things to really
• 16:45
  maintain a very high standard of reviewer integrity. One, they are very open
• 16:51
  about any relationship they have with any game they publish, you know, when
• 16:55
  they review, when they review game, this game was sent to us by
• 16:56
  the publisher. It was sent to us by the designer. One of the
• 17:02
  main guys from that Mark is friends with the designer of Spirit Island. So
• 17:08
  even though Spirit Island is one of his favorite games, he says every single
• 17:11
  time he mentioned Spirit Island, you know, designed by Eric Royce, a
• 17:15
  personal friend of mine. He outs that distinction every single time he mentions it,
• 17:21
  and they do this consistently. Two, they do not generally cultivate a
• 17:26
  lot of relationships with publishers. They have some relationships with other media creators,
• 17:30
  they have very little in the way of relationship with publishers or publishing people,
• 17:34
  and this is deliberate. This is part of their goal of maintaining the ability
• 17:40
  to be frank in their reviewing voice. The third thing is that they don't
• 17:42
  have financial relationships with any board game companies other than through review copies. They
• 17:48
  don't accept advertisement, They don't do sponsored content. They do have advertisements on
• 17:52
  their podcast, but they are served through a feed in their podcast publisher,
• 17:57
  and they are not about board games. So they actually have a further line
• 18:02
  they draw where they won't take advertising from board games because they need to keep
• 18:06
  that maintained. So I would put them at the kind of the highest echelon
• 18:08
  and very close to them, I would say, are shut up and sit
• 18:11
  down and no pun included, both of which are similarly podcasts and video venues
• 18:18
  that do reviews but don't generally have paid relationships with publishers. Now shut Up
• 18:23
  and Sit Down does do a bit more connecting with publishers. They have connected
• 18:29
  a little bit more with designers. They may have done one or two paid
• 18:33
  things, although I think not like they're There was a lot of discussion about
• 18:38
  their glowing preview of Blood on the clock Tower, and people were very critical
• 18:45
  of that, in part because they seem to know the designers, but apparently
• 18:49
  they insist they weren't paid for that work, and no pun included, I
• 18:53
  think, is in the same boat that they are funded by their audience.
• 18:59
  They don't get paid by publishers. The best the most they get is review
• 19:03
  copies of games, and in fact no pod include is indicated. They often
• 19:06
  don't get review copies anymore either, either because they don't want the pressure of
• 19:10
  having to review them on a schedule, or they are too lazy to go
• 19:15
  through the effort of doing it, so they end up just buying their games.
• 19:17
  And then the other way that I think reviewers can maintain a very solid
• 19:22
  wall of distinction between the different podcasts or between their different potential biases is to
• 19:30
  not do reviews at all. The example of this would be like John gets
• 19:33
  Games. I think does this mostly although he might do a little bit of
• 19:37
  reviewing. Or the gold standard is Rodney Smith. Rodney Smith is a pond
• 19:42
  is a YouTube board game personality and on his channel Watch It Played, he
• 19:48
  does not do reviews. Now has that water has become muddied a little bit,
• 19:53
  I think by some of the videos that he and his crew make on
• 19:57
  Watch It Played. But these to be news focused videos that maybe reflect the
• 20:03
  tastes of the people, but they don't reflect reviews. So like they'll do
• 20:07
  the top five things I'm excited about this month that is a long way from
• 20:11
  a review. They will kind of highlight what's going on, but they don't
• 20:14
  review them. The two different media creators who do have fiscal relationships with publishing
• 20:22
  companies and who express editorial opinion content that I sort of have come to terms
• 20:30
  with where they are is blue Peg pink Peg and the Rota runs through channel
• 20:34
  on blue Peg pink Peg. There's is the form of sponsorship that they have
• 20:40
  advertising or their episodes are sponsored by publishers. They have like three publishers that
• 20:42
  they work with most of the time. The Secret Cabal is also in this
• 20:47
  categor tier. So they have publishers that they work with who sponsor episodes,
• 20:52
  and they talk about who is sponsoring the episode, and they talk about them,
• 20:56
  and then they do ads for those Those are very clearly delineated in the
• 21:02
  episode when it's an ad, So that's not that's not a problem per se.
• 21:06
  The place where it could become an issue, I suppose, would be
• 21:10
  in the reviewing of games from those publishers. For example, Queen Games is
• 21:14
  one of the one of the sponsors of the Blue Peg Ping Peg podcast,
• 21:17
  and they regularly review games published by Queen Games. The same is true of
• 21:23
  games from Grand Gamer's Guild, although less often. I think Blue Peg Ping
• 21:30
  Peg does a pretty good job of reminding us that these are sponsors of the
• 21:33
  show. Although I can't recall if during the last review of a Queen game,
• 21:38
  if they reminded us, and of course, remember Queen Games as one
• 21:41
  of the sponsors of Blue Peg Pink Peg, I don't recall them reminding us
• 21:45
  of that during the review itself. They might have, but I don't remember
• 21:49
  it. Nonetheless, I feel like they do a pretty good job of calling
• 21:52
  out who their sponsors are and maintaining generally a pretty good limit or at least
• 21:59
  expressing when they have close social relationships with the producers. For example, blue
• 22:03
  Peg pin Peg has a very good relationship with Connor mcgouy of Inside Up Games,
• 22:08
  and when they review one of the inside up games, they always mention
• 22:14
  that, so it feels like blue Peg pin Peg is staying on the right
• 22:18
  side of that line, but has practices that are a little bit less chased
• 22:23
  than say, shut up, so very wrong about games. And then the
• 22:27
  last one I want to talk about is Rado Richard Hamm rodo runs Through.
• 22:32
  So Rado has always had a sort of interesting approach in that his primary form
• 22:37
  of media of video that he produces is called a run through, in which
• 22:41
  he plays the game and you watch him play the game to figure out if
• 22:45
  you'd like the game. What's interesting about this mode is that it's not meant
• 22:48
  to be editorial, but after each play he does another video called final Thoughts,
• 22:52
  where he does editorialize on the game a little bit. He talks about
• 22:56
  what he liked about it and what he didn't like about it. And for
• 22:57
  a long time he did those run throughs for free. He just did them
• 23:02
  because he felt like yet if it was a Kickstarter, and he thought it
• 23:03
  sounded interesting, he would do it for free, and he was sponsored by
• 23:07
  his channel. In the last few years, specifically for kickstarters, not for
• 23:11
  published games, Roto has started charging a fee to do run throughs for Kickstarter
• 23:18
  games. He is very upfront about when a kickstarter is paid, and you
• 23:23
  know, I think in terms of maintaining the appropriate level of distance, he
• 23:29
  manages that. But it is again a little bit more complicated because he gets
• 23:34
  paid. Now. One thing I think that he does that's really good about
• 23:37
  that is at the end of the month. Each month they do a top
• 23:41
  ten games of each person does the top five or top ten games for themselves
• 23:45
  of that month, or they read all the games they played that month and
• 23:48
  put him in order. And one of the things they do in the channel
• 23:51
  is all the paid content does not get into that list. So they take
• 23:55
  the paid content and they put it in a separate list, and then they
• 23:57
  talk about the games they played. I can't recall if his top ten.
• 24:02
  I know in his top ten he does mention which games were paid, but
• 24:04
  I think he still does put them in order. So Roto is a little
• 24:07
  bit more mixed. He is very clear which parts he's being paid for and
• 24:11
  which parts he's doing on his own. But again, that line is murkier
• 24:15
  than the sort of very religious distinction that's drawn by those sort of top tier
• 24:21
  creators I mentioned. So I'm curious to think what do you think about the
• 24:25
  current state of affairs of board game reviewing board game media. Would you like
• 24:29
  to see people being more careful or more avert about what where their physical relationships
• 24:34
  lie? Do you think? I'm just curious what you think about all of
• 24:37
  this? Maybe most importantly, do you think I need to change anything about
• 24:41
  the way I do? Is there anything I do that makes you suspicious or
• 24:45
  uncomfortable about my reviews or my I don't know, game discussion habit. I'd
• 24:51
  be interested to hear if you found yourself thinking about that in the context of
• 24:53
  pickup and deliver. So thanks for the way you can do that is head
• 24:57
  over to board game Gee Guilty two SI nine and post those ideas again our
• 25:02
  guilt. You could also email me Brendan at Rattlebox Games or send me a
• 25:04
  demac direct message on four game geek Wombat nine two nine gets my user name
• 25:08
  there. Thanks for joining me on my walk today. I hope your next
• 25:11
  box is posed as mine list. Bye Bye, brought to you by Rattlebox Game