John "TotalBiscuit" Bain - Complete answers to Kotaku's Titan Souls questions lyrics

(Unsurprisingly, those ignorant of the situation are making allegations that I took a "harmless joke" way too seriously. In reality, this fellow has been sniping at me for months (the first tweet that I found taking pot shots at me was in January) and the fridge photo was bookended by several insulting remarks. I would ask you not to comment if you do not understand or do not care to look at the full story, because your conclusion is useless and inaccurate.) Yesterday Kotaku contacted me asking for comment on a story about the decision to recuse myself from coverage of Titan Souls. They asked me 4 questions and as sites do, they used very little of the answers in the article. I don't blame them for that, it's standard operating procedure for people attempting to write short and snappy articles. However, I think the answers give some nice additional context so I'm going to publish the whole lot here. These are the questions Kotaku asked and the answers I gave via email for the article in full. The article in question can be found here. Q: In the Soundcloud clip, you say that Andrew Gleeson's behavior makes it difficult for you to a**ess the game fairly, without bias. His comments were antagonistic toward you. But in that same clip, you're able to clearly and even-handedly explain some of what you did and didn't like about Titan Souls. What is it about the way Gleeson's tweet biased you that seems insurmountable? The issue is two-fold. Firstly, the knowledge that someone on the dev team "has it out for me" plants a seed of negativity which affects my ability to properly critique the title. There are various ways that could occur. I could overcompensate and be more generous than I should be in an effort to either make peace with the artist, try to be the "bigger man" or to "prove him wrong". Alternatively I could go the other way and be overly critical because I've been personally attacked by a member of the development team. It is very easy to suggest that one can try to rise above it all and remain unbiased but the reality is that everyone is biased one way or another and the dangerous thing is when you don't have the ability to realise where your bias lies. As a result of that, any opinion I give on that game is guaranteed to be compromised, what I said in the Soundcloud was merely a repetition of what I'd said prior to his unpleasant remarks, so I don't think that really counts as any sort of new critique, not that I view my original comment on Twitter as critique of any sort, I simply said the game was "not for me", which is an entirely subjective personal preference and not something I would factor strongly into my critique of the title in the first place. I cover plenty of games that I don't personally enjoy, but my question is, would my viewers enjoy them? My dislike of platformers for instance does not stop me from covering them when I think they have something interesting to offer the consumer. The other concern is my credibility. Because of the artists actions and the subsequent dogpiling that ended up happening over social media, any negative criticism I give thereafter to the game could be viewed as an attempt at "petty revenge". This puts my reputation and credibility into question. Am I the sort of person that would be overly harsh on a game because the developer went after me personally? That's the question that would be in everyones mind as they watched that video. It would present an additional attack vector to my detractors and would no doubt start yet more social media drama that nobody needs right now. As a direct result, the only professional and ethical course of action in my mind was to recuse myself from coverage, because even if I were able to approach the game and keep my biases in check, the audience would be questioning whether or not that was the case, due to the social media bickering. Q: Do you at all worry that your personal feelings about the developer might get in the way of informing your viewers who might be interested in the game? In the past, have you recognized times when your personal opinions of game-makers got in the way of your criticism? While I sympathise with the viewers who want to hear my opinion on the game and I'm of course very humbled that so many people will wait for my view before making a purchase decision, I dont have time to cover all the games that get sent to me, in fact, I can maybe cover 1 in 20 right now, since we get at least 5-10 titles a day from various developers. Titan Souls slipping through the cracks would not be unheard of, but it's unfortunate because I had genuine interest in the game, in particular since it has a striking art style and an intriguing soundtrack. However, there are other places to get information on the game that aren't my channel and my viewers know they can't rely on me to cover every game there is, so I think while some of them might be disappointed, they will understand that it would be unethical for me to pursue any form of coverage of this title now. To answer your second point, I haven't run into any situations in the past where I've had to deal with my personal feelings about a developer. Incidents like those surrounding Wild Game Studios and FUNCreators came after my coverage, rather than before. My issues with SEGA resulted in a channel-wide boycott so any bias that I might have against SEGA due to their questionable copyright strikes against my channel a couple of years back would not make it into a critique of any of their products to begin with. Q: I'm also curious: in a situation where you knew a developer liked you or was a fan of your work, would you take similar precautions as you did here? To be clear, I'm not equating "liking you" with "friendship." Yes I've had to do that before. I've taken steps to try and keep developers at arms length, up to and including closing my PO Box because developers were sending me gifts as a result of coverage I'd given them, such as wine or chocolates. While that's very nice, I don't want to be put in a situation where my opinion on their next title would be clouded by "fond memories" of such pleasant gestures. I avoided hanging around with developers at conventions and trade-shows as much as possible. There will always be inevitable run-ins but I don't go out of my way to socialise with developers, in order to try and best maintain some degree of objectivity. There are a small number of developers that I've had numerous conversations with that I'd consider to be friendly enough with to justify disclosure of that fact in any coverage of their title I do in the future, though I try and keep that number as small as possible to avoid possible conflicts of interest. Q: What do you make of the negative reviews Titan Souls is getting on Steam? At least a couple that I saw reference your tensions with one of the developers. I am extremely bothered by this behavior. Dodgy reviews on Steam in general are a huge problem and Valve has been slow to react to the issue, only recently adding in a "funny" category to try and combat the huge numbers of joke reviews that are posted about a product. I would strongly discourage anyone from posting negative reviews referencing this social media spat. It's always been my policy to critique a game on its own merits and not concern myself with things such as say, the political leaning of a developer. A great example is the controversial title Hatred. I intend to critique that just as I do any other game, regardless of the allegations that some of the developers have ties to far-right groups. It's my job to inform the consumer first, not to pa** judgment on the developers ideology. I would encourage others to follow suit and not engage in petty revenge in my name, I don't approve or endorse such actions.