A little while back, Naughty Dog Games released the sequel to their GOTY 2013 critical and commercial triumph, The Last of Us. And, to basically nobody's surprise, The Last of Us Part II has met with similar commercial and critical success. Unlike TLOU1, however, TLOU2's audience reception has been... decidedly more mixed, shall we say.
TLOU2 is hardly the first pop culture release of recent years to show this sort of dramatic disparity between critical opinion and audience opinion. The disparity can just as easily break the other way, too, as in the case of Netflix's Bright. And, just as with Bright, the immediate, knee-jerk response from those who disagreed with the critical take on things was to cry foul.
Specifically, and in basically a mirror image of the Bright situation, TLOU2's detractors were quick to claim that Naughty Dog had paid off enough video game critics to give glowing reviews that it resulted in a metascore that was simply not representative of the released product (with Bright, it was allegedly major movie studios paying for bad reviews, to tank the first major movie release from a competing business model which threatened their own).
Full disclosure time: I have not played either game in The Last of Us franchise. At the time of its release, TLOU was a PS3 exclusive, which held little interest for me as a life-long PC gamer who'd never owned any gaming console; also, I was busing playing the PC GOTY for 2013, Path of Exile... which I'm still playing now... literally; the Harvest is ready, and game client is running in the background as I type this.
But I digress. My point is that I don't have a horse in this race. I wasn't a huge fan of the original; even when they finally did release a PC version, I didn't rush to play TLOU1. Maybe I was just zombied out; maybe I just didn't feel any urgency to experience a story which had been well and truly spoiled for me at that point. Whatever the reason (I really don't know), I wasn't all that excited about TLOU2. I mean, it looked good, but it's a AAA release: top-notch visuals are the baseline expectation now, and not a selling point.
So it is as a disinterested outside observer that I tell you that I don't believe the conspiracy theory on this one. That's partly because I'm distrustful of every conspiracy theory, just on principle, but it's also because of the nature of conspiracy: they only work if they're kept secret, and secrets become exponentially harder to keep as more people are let in on the secret. And industry-wide secret that would involve dozens of people, at a minimum, just at Naughty Dog, and possibly hundreds more across all of the sites and magazines that were supposedly either bribed or threatened to give positive reviews? There's no way that secret keeps, especially in an age where social media is omnipresent, and where "spilling tea" is a wildly popular internet past-time.
So it struck me as somewhat misguided for Alanah Pearce, YouTuber and former IGN staffer, to post a lengthy piece defending the honour of video game reviewers everywhere, one of whom she formerly was, and many of whom she knows personally. (Apologies for not embedding the video, BTW, but Blogger's new interface for doing that is crap).
I want to make clear that I don't disagree with anything she said in that video, nor do I believe she was being insincere: what she said sounded reasonable enough, and I believe that she sincerely meant every word of it. Ms. Pearce seems like a genuinely nice person, and I believe that this honestly was her thought process about this conspiracy theory when it started circulating.
I also think that her video rather missed the point. Because her video is all about conscious bias, or deliberate payola, which I don't believe is at all likely here. Meanwhile, the real problem with video game reviews in particular, and some aspects of media coverage in general (e.g. Washington political coverage), and a big reason why the conspiracy theory got so much traction in the first place, isn't so much a matter of conscious bias, or deliberate attempts to "buy" better access with favourable media coverage, as unconscious bias.
Reporters (good ones anyway), must and do have contacts that feed them information. Many reporters spend years cultivating those contacts; people who are willing to talk, both on and off the record, about the topics of reportage. And, I don't care who you are, it's really hard to spend years interacting with someone, even professionally, and not develop some sort of personal rapport with them. It's much the same with critics and the PR people who provide them with quotes, and review copies, and maybe a little inside info about the titles that they're reviewing.
PR people are mostly charming. It's a major part of why they became PR people.
This can lead to a sort of groupthink, where the press attendees of these events walk away having been unconsciously predisposed to think well of the company, or the game, or both, without even realizing that it's happened. Big gaming companies are well aware of this effect, too, and generally do everything they legally can to maximize it. Like, for example, sending out limited-edition press versions of games, which are full of expensive-looking swag and which basically function as low-key bribes... without being actually called that.
I was struggling for some way to show this, though, something visual and tangible, something which really illustrated the problem in a way that all the words I've written to this point just can't. And that's when Linus Media Group came to my rescue.
I mean, really. Just look at that box. Just look at how excited he is to be opening the box. Notice that he makes a point of saying how cool Naughty Dog is.... and also straight up tells his audience that they should play this game. LMG's various channels boast a viewer count in the millions. Do you think Naughty Dog knew what they were doing when they sent this TLOU2 press kit to them, even though they're not specifically a video game channel?
Do you think Naughty Dog got their money's worth out of that fancy box full of TLOU2 swag?
Now, again to be clear, the point of this post is not to throw shade at the LMG team, who are generally pretty transparent and ethical in everything they do, and whose various YouTube channels I've subscribed to for years. I like LMG, and I don't think they did anything ethically dubious here. But it does serve to perfectly illustrate the problem of unconscious bias which lies at the heart of so much distrust of new media right now, of all kinds.
LMG's fancy TLOU2 pretty kit was 169/200. 199 other game reviewers and social media influencers were sent huge boxes of swag identical to this one, apart from the number stamped on the outside. Were some of them iron-willed enough to refuse the unexpected gift? Were they cynical enough to take the swag, and yet still post unflinchingly unbiased reviews of this game. In some cases, I'm sure they were, but in 200 of them? Well, just watch the video to see how a good percentage of them probably reacted... and how just how quickly that enthusiasm for the swag box can turn into an enthusiastic endorsement of the game itself, almost by reflex.
This is a textbook example of working the referee, imparting unconscious bias into supposedly impartial observers and commentators. And at the AAA level, this is clearly not some sort of anomaly; the sheer quantity and quality of the loot in this lootsplosion appears to be above par, but at no point does Jake react to the box's existence with incredulity; he's surprised to have received one, but he's not surprised that such a thing exists. And this is the heart of the problem, a clear, in-the-open example of unconscious bias at work, of how it works, and just how much effort goes into making it work.
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| A Path of Exile Lootsplosion |
This is not a conspiracy; there is no effort to keep this secret. 200 of these were sent to media and influencers, and whoever decided to do that absolutely knew that someone was going to make an unboxing video. There was no way this could be kept secret; but it doesn't have to be secretive to be effective. And that's the problem.
So, if that's the problem, what's the solution? If good reporters must cultivate these relationships with their sources, and good reviewers cannot help but deal one-to-one with very charming PR people on a regular basis, how do you avoid having this sort of unconscious bias creep in?
I don't know the answer to that one. What I do know is that attempts to handwave this issue away, no matter how honest, sincere, or well-intentioned, do nothing to move us closer to any kind of a solution.