Last week I went to Hawaii. I spent three nights in room to myself with two full size beds and a view that consisted entirely of ocean. I ate like a king, drank beer and cocktails while lounging in the Pacific Ocean, and sucked down the sunlight and mild climate as though I were an escapee from a Siberian gulag. I paid for none of it. Thank you, Capcom.
I bring this up as we’re about to launch several posts worth of coverage from Captivate, Capcom’s annual presser. Keep checking back over the next week as we’ve got several cool things to share. First, our thoughts on two great-looking DS titles: Ghost Trick and Okami-den. Then some cool footage from our time with the co-op mode in Dead Rising 2, and finally an extremely candid interview with Keiji Inafune about Japanese vs. Western gamers and game development as well as his new, big-whig post as head of Capcom’s R&D world-wide. Yes, a new Marvel vs. Capcom was announced at Captivate, but there was nothing to see but the trailer which you can find anywhere, so we don’t have anything new to show you.
I was conflicted about accepting the invitation to attend Captivate. Not conflicted enough, mind you, to not take a free trip to Hawaii—which, of course, begs the question as to whether I was actually conflicted at all or merely wished to be conflicted so that I could then write a blog post about how conflicted I felt. Most gaming websites and magazines (and those individuals with any sense of integrity whatsoever) have a standing policy to not accept gifts from publishers, developers, or their PR reps. Accepting travel and accommodations is more complicated. Some accept only air travel while others will simply not go to any event unless it can be funded entirely from their own company coffers. Bully to them, I say! Why even muck about with questions of editorial integrity if you don’t have to?
Not so simple a proposition when you’re faced with an either/or of paying your way to an event or paying salaries next month. Melody Pfeiffer—a Capcom PR exec who’s much beloved amongst gaming critics and journalists—was predictably candid when I posed these issues to her on our last day there: “If it wasn’t for us paying for you guys to come out, you wouldn’t be able to come out here.” “You guys,” in our case, means Cesar and I; there’s always a two-person minimum necessary to any video endeavor. She’s right, of course. She makes several other good points in this interview that I won’t regurgitate in text—we are, after all, a video team.
There’s another aspect to this. Robert Fisk, a journalist for The Independent in the UK and for whom I have the utmost respect, has said that one should never be “friends” with those whom he is covering. Granted, we’re critiquing products, not people and governments, but you understand the principle. You can get to know people. You can even get to like them, but being a friend is perhaps too far. Melody is my friend. I have several other friends in PR and amongst the game development community. How “compromised” I am is perhaps something I’ll never be able to answer, but if it’s a question of distancing myself from the wide variety of wonderful, talented people I’ve gotten to know so well over the years in order to maintain my untarnished image to the Internets, then compromised I shall remain.
I figure full disclosure is the least that we can do so that anyone viewing our content after this sort of event can have the information to judge for themselves as to how slanted or (hopefully) un-slanted we and our opinions appear.
In our defense, if defend I must, I get far better looks into games at focused press events than I ever do at E3, GDC, or even PAX. Also, Dark Void sucks.
matt chandronait;)
