Game reviewers need a bill of responsibilities, not rights

MTV's Stephen Totilo posted a very interesting "Game Reviewer's Bill of Rights" on the MultiPlayer blog last week, based in part on feedback from other reviewers (all from the enthusiast press, it's worth noting), and prompted a healthy discussion in the comments.

I spent a little while thinking about what I might want to add to the bill of rights and then realized (just as I was writing this) that I have nothing to add. My main thought is that a "bill of rights" is the exact wrong approach.

The problem is that a "bill of rights," as exemplified by the one in our Constitution, is a list of rights that the governed declare are inherent to their existence and that the government, which rules with the people's consent, must protect as a condition of having its power. But the comparison doesn't hold in the videogame world. It implies that publishers are the government and reviewers are the governed and they owe us something for the privilege of "ruling" us by, I suppose, providing the content we write about.

But here's the thing: Publishers don't owe game reviewers jack sh*t. They can and should give us material as they see fit. It's not Rockstar or EA or Activision's job to make the lives of game reviewers easy or make sure we do our work with integrity. It's their job to sell videogames. Period.

Sure, reviewers have some leverage over publishers because our readers are the publisher's buyers. So it's often in their interest to treat us well. But it's not their responsibility.

The only people who have "rights," to my mind, are the readers/buyers. They pay for our publications or consent to look at the advertisements and in return we owe them honest, high quality content. (Of course, we don't have to provide it, since readers can always go elsewhere, but we really should if we want to be taken seriously.)

So what I would propose is not a game reviewers' bill of rights, but a game reviewers' bill of responsibilities. These are responsibilities that we promise to fulfill because we owe it to our readers. And by the way, the more reviewers who commit to these responsibilities, the more leverage we'll all have over the publishers to help us to fulfill them, rather than make it difficult, because the publishers will have no other way to reach our audiences except to cooperate on our standards.

These are the six responsibilities that occur to me. Obviously I would welcome feedback from anybody and everybody out there, be they readers, reviewers, or industry folks.

1. Reviewers shall not have any financial dealings with the publishers/developers they write about. This means not being involved in selling ads in any way. And it means not accepting gifts of any significant value beyond the game or other items necessary to play it. (And giving away any schwag of high value that reviewers receive without asking for it). It also means if the reviewer had to accept some kind of travel paid for by the publisher/developer to do the review, at a minimum it should be disclosed (and it really shouldn't be accepted at all, IMO)

2. Reviewers shall neither seek nor accept deals for "exclusive" reviews that forbid other publications from running a review at the same time. For a detailed explanation of this one, read my post prompted by IGN's "exclusive" review of "Grand Theft Auto IV." Note that obviously reviewers can't be held responsible if a publisher gives them a review copy but doesn't give it to somebody else. But they shouldn't be involved in any shady deal to shut out the competition, thus tainting the integrity of their review.

3.  Reviewers shall not trade other other editorial coverage in order to obtain review code. Also inspired by IGN, which admitted they did this on "GTA IV." Just as with item 2, there shouldn't be any kind of shady business dealings going on that make a review possible.

4. Reviewers shall make every reasonable effort to finish the games they review. If it's not possible, or if there is no definition of "finished" (like in an MMO), reviewers should be clear about what they played and what they didn't. This was inspired by Totilo's discussion on Multi-Player a few weeks ago about whether reviewers have to finish a game. I told him that I hadn't finished the campaign mode of "GTA IV" and while I'm not convinced reviewers always have to finish a game, I think they should be as straightforward as possible about what they played and what they didn't. Which is what I attempted to do with the blog post connected to my "Lego Indiana Jones" review, for instance. It's something I'm going to keep doing going forward.

5. Vidoegame reviews shall be based on the same (or virtually the same) code that gamers will be playing. Reviews based on early code that's significantly different from what ships are not cool. Obviously if review code is tweaked a tiny bit before it ships, that's probably fine. But that should be the limit. If reviewers for a long lead publication need to use early code, they should at least disclose it.

6. If the game is not played at the reviewer's home or office, s/he will disclose where they played the game and under what conditions. Reviewing a game in a hotel paid for the publisher or at a developer's office is generally not cool, but sometimes necessary so long as the reviewer feels there isn't any interference going on. But if that is the situation, the reviewers should definitely disclose the situation and how it was different from the way most gamers will be playing.