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Age of the Geek Column: It wasn't a stellar week for IGN last week.
IGN is, by a wide margin, the largest and most prolific video game news website out there. When they review a video game, tens of thousands of people see it.
Thus was the case for the recently released "Dead Cells," reviewed by editor Filip Miucin, who proudly proclaimed over Twitter that it was the first video review he had edited himself. And, as expected, thousands of people watched the review. Among those viewers was relatively small YouTuber that goes by the handle of Boomstick Gaming.
Boomstick Gaming also does video game reviews and in fact had released his own review on "Dead Cells" days earlier. Imagine their surprise when they watched the IGN review and got a unique sense of deja vu.
The next day, Boomstick Gaming released a video alleging that IGN had copied their review, complete with a side-by-side comparison of the strikingly similar text.
Now a little bit of overlap is unavoidable when it comes to reviews. There's nothing unusual about two people playing the same game, making the same observations, and drawing the same conclusions. Critical response to "Dead Cells" has been basically unanimously positive across the board and there are only so many ways you can describe a game without going out of your way to intentionally avoid commonly used terminology for the sake of difference.
In this case though, the similarities were far too similar and numerous to discount as a coincidence. More than just similar talking points and terminology, Miucin's review has entire sentences that appear to be lifted directly from Boomstick Gaming's script, with only the most minor of changes made to the wording. Seeing them run side-by-side, it's not hard to come to the conclusion that Miucin watched Boomsick Gaming's review and used it as the basis for his own script.
IGN reached the same conclusion, pulling the review and terminating Miucin's employment. Since then, the internet spotlight has dove into Miucin's other reviews and uncovered further cases that suggest that the "Dead Cells" review was merely the latest in a regular habit of using other people's content for "inspiration."
Making matters worse, Miucin's singular response to the incident has been a comically inappropriate video where he chalks his actions up to a "mistake" and noticeably apologizes to everybody involved except Boomstick Gaming.
Miucin's actions have left him few friends in the gaming world.
As expected, the gaming community has taken Miucin to task on every front. Some of it is probably deserved. Some of it is probably over the line. In either case, it will be a long while before Miucin will be able to enjoy any public social media practice without waves of gamers deciding they need to get their shot in.
More surprising though, Miucin has equally become persona non grata in the games journalism community. His wrongdoing has been so blatant that even sites like Polygon and Kotaku, hardly champions of ethical journalism themselves, have blasted Miucin. Where in the past games journalists would rally around one of their own and reframe the narrative as yet another person being harassed out of the industry, nobody is coming to Miucin's defense here.
It's relatively safe to say that Filip Miucin's career in video games journalism, and probably journalism all together, has come to a swift and abrupt end. It's hard to imagine anybody hiring him when it's not even clear he understands why what he did was wrong, much less is willing to take responsibility for it. And that's the way it should be.
But now what?
Miucin seems to have done unethical things. Repeatedly and unremorsefully. What do the career prospects look like for a person that has been very publicly ejected from an entire industry? Especially in a time where the internet never forgets. Outside of concerns about his own behavior, who would risk attracting the ire of the anonymous masses by giving him quarter?
There is no place for Miucin left in the journalism world, but he's going to have to make one somewhere.
This idea goes far beyond Miucin. If recent years have taught us anything, anybody can trigger the ire of the collective masses and suddenly find their careers upended. Sometimes it's fair, like in this case. Other times it's not. But whether warranted or not, people still have to eat. Even bad people.
I'm as much a fan of karmic justice as the next guy. A couple months ago a white Ohio man got so consumed by road rage that he followed the black driver to his home and shouted racial slurs at him. The exchange was caught on video, along with the name of the man's heating and cooling business. As one can imagine, his Yelp reviews have taken a sharp downturn and now he's complaining about how his business and life have been ruined.
He's far from the first person in the last couple years to make the painful discovery that open racism isn't as acceptable today as it might seem.
Cue the world's smallest violin.
I shed no tears for this guy nor anybody else that has met a similar fate, but the underlying question remains. What happens next?
Actions have to have consequences, but we can't just make people vanish from society either. The common answer is generally "McDonalds is always hiring," but it's been made abundantly clear that you can't make a living on minimum wage jobs and people have to make a living one way or the other. Ironically, the only people that seem capable of bouncing back from such disgraces are people already in a position that they'll never have to worry about money anyway.
Whether it's a plagiarizing video game reviewer, an open racist, or even an ex-convict, we don't do a great job as a society at finding new places for people that have fallen from grace. The general philosophy seems to be "I hope you do well, just not here," which is obviously not a sustainable model. Karmic justice can be really satisfying, but it's also important to think beyond the instant gratification and consider the long term.
I don't know what to do about it either. I have no suggestions. Bad people deserve to be punished, but do they deserve to be punished forever? Maybe they do. Maybe not. It's worth thinking about.
Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and may be over thinking things.