While I have a bunch of things that I could talk about in this edition of My So-Called Live (like the new 360 Dashboard update), pretty much everything that I've been doing for the last week has had a constant, almost subconscious undercurrent. I'm of course talking about the ongoing controversy over the termination of former Gamespot Editor-in-Chief Jeff Gerstmann. Let me begin by saying that I think the number of people that actually know the truth behind this dark episode could be counted on a single hand and so I don't want to go into it too much, because none of us have enough data to form a final opinion one way or the other.

Four Heroes Had Risen

When I was in Kirkland at Bungie's studio playing Halo 3 for the review, I spent most of my time cloistered in a darkened conference room, intent on putting an end to the Covenant once and for all. Do you know who else was there with me? That's right, Jeff Gerstmann. So, while that was the only time that I'd ever met the man, we charged through Halo 3's co-op multiplayer together (along with IGN's Hilary Goldstein and Team Xbox's Will Tuttle) so we were automatically made blood brothers. Not really, but the point is that he seemed like a good guy and, more importantly in this case, a thorough game critic.

Suffice it to say that I liked him immediately.


Now, fast forward to the current furor over his termination from Gamespot and the lingering finger-pointing occurring all across this fine Internet. I really don't know how to respond to this event, because it is so far out of the typical day-to-day experience of writing for a videogame website. On one hand, I'm astonished at how far-reaching the implications of Jeff's termination seem and the way some people (including our own forum-dwellers) have locked onto the situation as though it were a giant X marking the spot where shady deals have been going on since the industry's inception. On the other hand, I know that I don't take bribes and I'm relatively certain that none of my colleagues do either.

Still, after reading N'Gai Croal's excellent piece today, I can definitely understand how people could think that there's something fishy going on here. His main suggestion as to how to clear our name and the name of game enthusiast pubs in general was to come clean regarding the practices employed by game publishers.

Sadly, it's not as exciting as some might think, although I have noticed a recent increase in not-so-subtle coercion lately. Of course, keep in mind that we deal with public relations agents mostly, so we always have to contend with quite a bit of cheerleading. I mean, the people we talk to are responsible for putting the best face of their product out into the world, so they naturally have a vested interest in the gaming press saying nice things. To that end, PR people ask all kinds of crazy things of us: can they see the review early, could we increase the score and would we like to post an exclusive early review (provided it is a positive one)? In my experience, that's as bad as it gets and our stock answer is always a polite but firm, "no."

So there you go. Does coercion happen? Well, it tries to, but it's not very good at hiding from us journalists so we typically have no trouble in simply ignoring it until it shrugs its shoulders and walks sheepishly back into the darkness. Our responsibility is to our readers and nobody else and we attempt to act in your interests by asking the questions that we think you want asked and posting the information that will benefit you. Still, it couldn't hurt for us to actively pursue advertising from other sources that have zero vested interest in what we actually say and, like so many things, we're working on it.