It’s an issue that flits across the internet every once in a while: the fact that game, film and music companies sometimes employ marketing agencies to sign up at specialist forums and subtly promote their products amongst the users there.

The idea flow goes like this: in the Internet age, grassroots enthusiasm and peer-influencing has enormous marketing power. There is a level of community trust implicit in a specialist forum that advertising billboards, with their misleading, out-of-context quotations from press reviews, simply cannot lend. So PR companies sign up for forum accounts and, if they’re good, they subtly and carefully promote this band, that film or those videogames in the speak and manner of the community they have latched onto. By influencing the surrounding key movers and shakers they hope to create a peer-level buzz that spreads, all the while converting good hype into good sales.

AEG (Arbuthnot Entertainment Group), who do this for Xbox, Atari, nVidia, Warner Borthers, Gamespot and a host of other goods and services, describe their business as “community relations tactics”. Microsoft has employed them for eight years, presumably to provide stealthy positive spin right from the planning stages of Xbox through to 360’s birth.

AEG take the concept of forum marketing to its logical conclusion by “working with a wide variety of online game sites, entertainment and lifestyle publications, communities, discussion groups and bloggers to secure maximum coverage for our clients”. This sounds harmless enough, especially when they say that they merely provide “consistent and compelling content”, presumably new screenshots and game details.

What is more ominous is that they aim “to empower a community’s key influencers so that the customer is being guided by one of his or her own as opposed to a corporate ‘imposter’”. So they bribe key members of an online community to turn PR junior through the use of that most worrisome word: “empowerment”. This could signal anything from the promise of free games to actual payment in return for a blogger or poster to enthuse and hyperbolise about a certain product. When the innocent users of a forum get wind that all is not as it seems and start to flag up suspicious topics (e.g. Xbox is one smoking console) it creates a domino effect of outraged accusations, broken trust and gentle PR backlash.

The reasons for this are clear. Companies with products to sell are ‘them’ and the communities that dissect and discuss said products are ‘us’. Never the twain should meet. It creates distrust within a community; after all – how do you discern if someone is having a genuine response or a bought one? The carrot for those that enter the contract is either one of self-esteem, peer one-upmanship or, for the forum owners paid to turn a blind eye, a way to ease the financial burden of running a successful forum.

But is it harmless? Some say yes. It’s no different from the usual over the top forum exuberance and, beside, how can something like that even work what with all the different opinions that circulate forums. But that’s to miss the point. Grassroots marketing does work (especially prior to a game/ album/ film’s release), and is extremely effective in raising profile if it targets the right kind of people with the right kind of people saying the right kind of things. However, ethically, what you have is clear deception. It is a completely different practice to say, displaying a banner ad for a forthcoming videogame at the top of your site. Here, you have hired salesmen posing as average consumers.

In print and television media, advertisers have clear guidelines to adhere to and it must be always be clear that and advert is an advert. Hence, advertisments styled like a Daily Telegraph news item and dropped into a early news page will have *advertisement* at their header in order to alert readers to their tactic. Likewise, the ASA will not allow a television programme to sprinkle through products and advertisements for specific companies. So perhaps the problem is a lack of Internet legislation to protect consumers from unscrupulous marketers that would seek to influence through cloak and dagger bribery.

The easy solution touted at this point is to only trust the ‘real’ critics. But here the problem sadly doesn’t always dissipate. Bought front covers, biased coverage and weighted scores are all widely and joyfully cited by internet users as hallmarks of bad magazine practice. The ethics are often more complicated than you might think and have givien rise to some playful scenario discussions from the likes of Keiron Gillen.

I have only ever been gently leaned on by a magazine reviews editor to give a certain score once. It was phrased like so: “We are expecting this game to score in the region of…” Carefully worded but with explicitly clear intention. I don’t write for the magazine anymore but not because of that incident. Nevertheless this issue has got me wondering if I should have taken a stand at the time. The fact is, the game should have scored in the region of the mark quoted so I had no qualms complying: there was no need to protect my integrity in an argument that would have likely ended with me bing struck off the freelance roster. But my apparent compliance was illusionary; a coincidence brought about by the happy fact the inherent quality of the game matched the commissioner’s expectations.

But even so, by not saying anything was I just agreeing to play my part in an unhealthy shady PR relationship?

It’s easy to criticise in the realm of theory but I was reminded while chewing this over of a time I had to review a point and click adventure game a little while back for that very same magazine. This was a game in a fondly remembered but vastly under-populated genre and, while it was a good game, I scored the game higher than I might have done so in a vacuum. This was because I wanted to promote the game to readers that would never usually have given it a second look. My internal argument was that, if this game sells better because of this high score, more gamers get to experience a style of videogame they might never have been exposed to before. The floodgates might just subsequently reopen to a style of gaming that has been tragically sidelined as publishers see there is still a demand.

The motivation was different from the previous examples, but the resultant effect perhaps not so much so. I had been placed in a position of clear trust by the readership and chose to mildly abuse that trust by weighting my judgement to promote a personal agenda, however harmless and relatively insignificant that might now seem. It’s something I’m sure many critics that love the form have to contend with; when a good game/ film/ album comes along in a rare genre or a style that will traditionally be overlooked by the masses it’s difficult not to convince yourself it’s a great game, and help fight the underdog’s corner with them, especially if writing for a wholly mainstream audience.

However, the game received a score and critique more generous than it deserved because, in return, I wanted to see the genre revitalised, perhaps generally to promote a healthy and diverse industry but, specifically, because I like those games and want to see more of them made so I can play them. In those terms my selfishness is hard to justify.

Is there a difference between that and being paid (either with free games for forum-dwelling consumers or with free holidays for morally-drained journalists) to promote certain videogames? I like to think so but, at the end of the day it’s only the person being lied to that can truly answer that.

Suicide and blame go hand in hand. That a human being would choose to end their life is an incomprehensible tragedy to surrounding friends and families and so blame becomes the crutch on which emotions can either lean or be used to beat others round the face with.

The suicide of 52-year-old lawyer Katherine Ward, who threw herself from the Jury’s Hotel in South Kensington two weeks ago, is currently embroiled in various tugs of moral war; blame here is the rope on which different parties involved pull, each trying to draw the other into a submission that will never happen.

Professional press photographer Jonathan Bushell, who works for picture agency Matrix, caught Katherine’s suicide mid-jump on a compact camera. His photo was used by numerous national newspapers to illustrate a story that would never have been carried had there not been such shocking visual evidence or the high-class overtones provided by her job at Rolls-Royce.

A suicide, whatever the unfathomable reasons and circumstances, is always a selfish act: it leaves those around you who know and love and care for you devastated. A public suicide, however, lays a peculiar type of blame with the deceased. Though Katherine attempted a private overdose in her hotel room the night before, to jump onto a pavement, in full view of the locality, involved any number of bystanders and onlookers, causing unimaginable distress, confusion and therapy-fodder the moment the life flew from her broken body.

This is the most useful place to apportion blame for the media: a silent cadaver that made itself fair game by its very public creation. But it’s not that simple; the distress felt by onlookers was opened up to the wider world not because of her choices but those of others.

So, on to the photographer, who, last week in the Press Gazette, tried to bat blame back onto Katherine saying he had endured terrible flashbacks every day since witnessing her death. Bushell then tried to squirm out of any appropriation of blame saying he photographed her “by accident” when taking a “general view” of the hotel. “I only found the picture was on the film when I returned to my office,” he said before adding, as a final puff of hot air into his balloon of innocence: “A friend of mine said that 99 per cent of the time they don’t jump so I didn’t expect her to go through with it.”

Right. So he took photographs because he didn’t think she was going to jump? How exactly would his employer have rewarded that? I can see the headlines now: “Woman climbs onto ledge from hotel window before climbing back in again”. Scoop.

Still, let’s grab hold of the atomically small benefit of the doubt and consider that he didn’t actually see the woman flying through the air to her death in his viewfinder the moment he took the (presumably) final photograph of the scene. But this merely partially absolves him at the point the shutter closed. It doesn’t sidestep the ethical issue of then releasing it to the wider press.

There was still a clear, decisive choice to take it further on his part.

Bushell has an answer for that: “Matrix didn’t hesitate to put the photo out to newspapers on Tuesday afternoon.”

So, it’s now the agency that gets to clutch the ball of blame. He’s just a humble photographer: it’s apparently only the powers and principalities of the photo agency employer that have ultimate jurisdiction over what leaves the lens and enters the public consciousness.

Let’s hand over to their spokeperson: “We are a photographic agency and make our money from exclusives, not small £50 news photos. All we asked for was a space rate and sent it out to everyone, it didn’t cross our minds to try to sell it exclusively.”

Ouch. There’s so much between those lines my eyes ache. So, justification for putting the photograph out is that they didn’t profiteer (significantly) from her death: after all they only earned £50 a shot for this ‘small’ news photo. Also, am I the only one to sense more than a seasoning of financially-inspired regret in the line: “It didn’t cross our minds to try to sell it exclusively”?

Surely it would have been more noble to say: “It didn’t cross our minds to not offer a photograph of a woman’s last few seconds of life because it’s in hugely poor taste and a completely superfluous illustration to the news piece”.

Perhaps not.

So, next on to the blame of the papers that ran the picture: The Evening Standard on Tuesday, The Sun on Wednesday and The Times on Thursday. Now the stakes are raised because, at the time of writing, the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) has received 50 complaints against the three publications for “intrusion into public grief” mostly from people “unconnected to the deceased” but also from “two friends of the deceased.”

The complaints have been brought under the extremely vague Clause Five of the editor’s code which states that in cases involving personal grief or shock, publication must be handled sensitively.

The Times’ justification reads: “Discussions over how to use the photograph (eventually it was used on an early page stretching from the top to the bottom) were extensive and went to the highest level at the paper.”

Well, how wonderfully right and proper and, sure, saying “highest level of the paper” does lend a gravity and earnestness to the tone. But really. Come on.

The Standard’s justification was safety in numbers: “We took our lead from The Sun.”

And, as for The Sun. they refused to comment. So perhaps the buck stops there…

“I was personally shocked when I saw the photographs in the Standard,” said former Sun editor David Yelland, “but it would be a very brave editor who didn’t run them.”

Brave? That’s an interesting choice of word: ‘Having or showing courage when facing danger’ says the dictionary. Was there really danger in not showing those pictures to a readership? As the PCC now weigh the arguments over whether there was a breach of conduct on the papers’ part, it would seem the only danger now is for those editors who ran with the images for no good reason other than to sell more papers.

Samaritans chief executive David King pointed out in a statement, that at very least, The Times and The Standard can be blamed for not offering any information on support or a helpline for people affected by the images adding that, while many programmes and articles have been beneficial effect in highlighting suicide and the issues surrounding it “The Evening Standard and The Times are likely to have precisely the opposite effect.”

Which leads us, finally, to the readers. The hundreds of thousands of people that read the papers, looked on the images with a strange mixture of disgust and intrigue but didn’t complain; a blame of inaction and indifference.

So, as usual, the legislation that will follow from this case is due to the extreme minority: the 50 that objected. They have prompted a decision of major importance: on its judgement hinges the door onto suicide/ death imagery in the press, one that will either swing open or slam shut.

Whichever way the decision goes it will never be exactly clear who was to blame.

The Megaman franchise has a staunch following, especially in the US, but I’m pretty certain that amongst all gamers I know the two Megaman game quota that I talk about in the review rings true. Outside of the average gameplay, the interminable incremental cash-in revisions on Capcom’s part are inexcusable. On another note, my Edge content won’t be appearing publically on Chewing pixels anymore for a few reasons. Commissioning editors that would like to see print-published content should e-mail me at: goz[at]chewingpixels.com

Mega Man games have always looked great (courtesy of one of the most iconic videogame character designs of the last twenty years) but left a slightly bitter, aftertaste. You’ve probably played two Mega Man games in your life: the first because the artwork and animation seduced you and, gee, if he has this many children, Mega Man must be doing something stimulating. The second you played because you wondered if the gameplay might have gotten significantly better this time.

When it didn’t you left it there. And so repeats the generational cycle of people that buy Mega Man games; a perennial conveyer belt of young consumers wooed by its striking silhouette and vibrant colours then put off by the crusty, smelly underbelly you only get to see once you’ve jumped into bed together.

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I stood at the W. H. Smiths magazine rack in London’s Victoria station for a good couple of minutes last night debating what to do.

This month, Future Publishing’s official Xbox 360 magazine is carrying the Beta version of Square-Enix’s sprawling online RPG, Final Fantasy XI. So for the £5.99 cover price you get the full game and all the expansion packs that have been available for PC and PS2 for a few years now. The beta is going to last around three months – after which time you’ll “hopefully” be able to emigrate your character over into the full game.

Ostensibly a short-sighted decision to port over a three year old last-gen videogame onto the 360, it’s actually a canny move on everyone’s part. The PS2 version of FFXI, out long before the PC version, was only available in Japan and the US and required Sony’s ill-considered hard-drive add-on and a couple of night’s worth of instillation to persuade it to work. So for European gamers that don’t own a gaming spec PC, the Xbox 360 version is the first and simplest way to play. Plus, it comes with the bonus of being fully integrated into Xbox live so there is no screwing around with complex sign-up screens or additional detailing of credit cards (yet).

For Microsoft it’s clever because the game is quintessentially Japanese, something always lacking from their game roster, and it also offers that genre which the original Xbox promised but never delivered: the MMORPG.

For Square-Enix it reinvigorates a world which has recently lost many inhabitants to newer, brighter, younger universes such as World of Warcraft. The impending immigration will also continue to provide revenue where other streams of income from similarly aged games have long since dried up.

For the magazine it’s obviously a good move because, as the only place to get hold of the beta code, they will sell out over the next few days. At between £40-50 a go, 360 games are expensive and to get a fully playable game for the price of two pints will ensure that the current copy of the Official Xbox 360 magazine will be selling on gaming forums and ebay for double it’s cover price next week.

So why the debate at the news stand?

I reviewed Final Fantasy XI for Edge magazine just over a year ago. It was long before the PC version came out so I had to import a US PS2, hard-drive add-on and the game (new as used pass keys are non-transferable). It was expensive and a hassle but the game, my first real entry into an MMORPG, was generally easy and painless. Too easy and painless in fact.

The MMORPG is a genre for people with few commitments. When you take one on you take on a new life: one that makes almost as many demands of you to succeed as in real life. The key difference between its reality and ours is that if you follow the game’s guidebooks and fansites and tirelessly chip away at life in the game, you will slowly but surely succeed – at least in the traditional western ‘get-more-powerful, have-more-things, be-able-to-beat-bigger-monsters’ type way.

Real life isn’t so simple and perhaps therein lies the appeal. For teenagers or reclusive twenty somethings and northwards, the MMORPG provides an Avalon-esque escape; A preferable world where the other players largely share the same interests as you and where the rules and boundaries are clearly defined and easy to work within – providing you have the time. Perhaps then the MMORPG genre is best for the young – those yet to fully find their place and purpose in real life – or the old – where the game allows a fresh start and challenge from the bottom of the social ladder when all your cards in this life have already been played.

But for me, I left the magazines where they rested. I have real mouths to feed and, short of buying three copies of the magazine to sell at a profit in two week’s time, bursting into the world of Vana’diel once again isn’t going to provide anyone any nourishment – save perhaps, staying the pangs and fears of failure this side of the screen.

01 – Where Damage Isn’t Already Done – The Radio Dept.
02 – I Just Feel like a Child – Devendra Banhart
03 – Parakit – Suburban Kids with Biblical Names
04 – Welcome to Jamrock – Damien Marley
05– Magic Step – Sam Prekop
06 – La Ritournelle – Sebastian Tellier

Friend of Chewing Pixels and Sufjan Stevens’s violinist for his recent UK tour, James, has submitted the first Guest Chewmix for consideration! So here it is! Enjoy!

You can download the full .mp3 mixfile here or or subscribe in iTunes (’Advanced’ > ‘Subscribe to podcast’, then paste this link).

I bought an Xbox 360 on Monday from a shop, which was obviously a bit of a surprise considering current shortages.

I went into town on the off chance one might be in stock, baby strapped to my chest in a carry sling, a six month old cute and gurgling staff with which to part the red, dead sea of dull-eyed sales shoppers. There was a scrawled sign in the window of Game whispering that 360s were back in stock. I queued for quarter of an hour behind thirty-odd fidgeting 10 year olds clutching pre-owned GBA games to play on their Christmas Micros.

Waiting in line I got increasingly annoyed thinking they would be all sold out by the time we managed to actually face the spotty assistant at the checkout. I began planning a spit-flecking tirade in which I demanded to see the manager, bitterly chided his disgraceful sales practise of putting a sign like that up on the window just to con people into their shop when he clearly didn’t have any machines in stock anyway and, besides, I’d been standing here for twenty minutes and, anyway, THINK OF THE BABY YOU JOYLESS SCUM. All before storming off never to visit their rubbish shop again.

But they did have them in stock after all so I walked out with a Premium pack and a surplus of saliva.

No games though because, at the checkout, I decided there really weren’t any launch titles that were 1. Good 2. Good enough to warrant the shameful £49.99 price tag and 1. Good. When I got outside I realised that was probably a little silly of me and maybe Project Gotham Racing 3 wouldn’t be too bad after all. So I went to Gamestation, because I clearly wasn’t going to spend any more money at a shop that NEARLY CONNED ME INTO NOT BUYING A 360 WITH THEIR NEARLY FALSE ADVERTISING.

It’s crashed three times on me so far but I’m not going to return it for replacement just yet – not until they start making units that work properly, like, when technology actually catches up. Anyway, comfortably the most interesting part of the experience so far has been Microsoft’s implementation of in-game achievements. Milestones and goals have been written into each and every game which, when completed, earn you status points. Next to your gamertag sits the number of points you’ve earned in your 360 videogame career and you can compare your stats to those of your friends or indeed, the rest of the world.

Now it’s an empty kind of status really, I know. Real kudos is being 12 and playing Street Fighter 2 at the seaside arcade and beating a bigger kid in front of a delighting, cheering, envious crowd.

But, grasping at numbers in virtual space is completely different. It’s farming for your worth; being strong-armed into unlocking largely meaningless achievements in your games. Sure, there is an element of skill attached to gaining these achievements and yes, there is a grain of truth in the assumption that the higher your gamer score the better a player you are – but it’s just as much to do with time investment as any innate ability. Spend more time playing 360 games than doing other things and your score as a 360 gamer increases.

Nevertheless, over the last few days I’ve found it compulsive. I’ve been suckered completely into poring over what needs to be done to unlock the next achievement in this area or that. And, as with anything that grabs my attention and wins my time, it’s got me wondering why.

On the plus side this development in gaming’s evolution compels us to more fully play our games, diligently eking out more value from their mostly overpriced, underdeveloped worlds. But, negatively, it also gets you chasing goals that no-one really cares about for no real, tangible benefit other than a mite of peer respect and a fleeting moment of self-satisfaction followed quickly by the creeping sense of guilt that you spent a few thousand of your heart’s depleting beats chasing nothing for no reason other than to look good in front of faceless people who weren’t looking anyway.

So it’s empty competition for the most part. In fact, it makes playing games more like a job than recreation: you have targets you need to hit and achievements by which you are assessed. How good are you at having fun? Marks out of ten.

It’s subtly transforming our leisure time that bit closer to the framework of the workplace.

Writing about games for money has a lot to do with making your passion your job; earning a living from going that little bit furthur doing something you’d probably be doing anyway. If you’re wired with a critical eye, unbiased mind and lucid tongue, then it’s a combination that can mostly work – providing you don’t want to get rich.

So as someone for whom the distinctions between leisure time and work time are peculiarly blurry, it got me thinking. Is there any way to turn the time required to become a successful gamer with 360 acheivements under belt into any kind of monetary recoupment?

I’m sure Microsoft will be issuing various challenges over 360 to earn prize money through various competitions in the future so that reailty is probably not very far away. The concept of career gamer might be an embryonic one in the West, particularly outside of the PC gaming arena, but elsewhere, it’s far from ficiton. Jim Rossingol has today put up an amazing feature on Korean gaming. The segments on career gamers is like a flash-forward to an alien world where the train of thought you’ve been riding the last three minutes has derailed and taken off into a flight of fancy. Expect it’s real and it’s happening today on the other side of the world.

Have a read through his piece and imagine. This is where the acheivement-based template of Microsoft’s 360 online expereince is pointing: an endgame of cameras, stardom, tears, big-baangs, cathode-drenched deaths and the slow, lingering strangulation of the offline videogame market at the hands of online publishers. Perhaps.

Happy New Year. Sorry to start on a 3/10 note but, well, this game… I’ve tried to have some fun with this review, at least, as playing the darn thing certainly didn’t yield any pleasure. I did toy with just doing a straight review but then I figured the text had better do something different otherwise when people scroll to the score after reading the first couple of lines of text then they’d probably not look back. Luckily I was playing the DS’s Phoenix Wright over the Christmas holidays and it’s unabashed, sparkling brilliance more than made up for the time lost to this game.

Lunar DS is a disastrous, ruinous game. It devolves every RPG convention to its lowest common denominator until all that is left is a primeval abortion of a videogame. It’s an embarrassment to its Lunar parents; its MUD ancestors are probably blushing zeros and ones that their DNA is scratching around anywhere near this touch-screen. Set 1,000 years before its predecessor, it feels like it was designed then too.

Its errors extend even to the choice of platform: The dual screen set-up exacerbates and highlights the game’s ill-conceived form, ill-presented format, witless dialogue and a litany of design choices made by a developer seemingly with eyes clenched shut, fingers entombed in mittens, hammering random, ugly, soulless code into a prehistoric keyboard.

You can read the rest here