MAG Fest (Music And Gaming Festival) is an annual event held in the United States to celebrate and praise excellent game music, various games, and player group culture. The 24-hour event site of MAG Fest has prepared various console games, arcade games, and board games for the audience, as well as live performances of game music. Simply put, MAG Fest provides a good opportunity for music and game lovers to get together and have fun.
And this year, because of a “little joke” made by MAG Fest itself, the discussion of this event has doubled.
According to an article published by the author of the VGC website on January 5, a spectator at the MAG Fest event took a photo of the sign and posted it on Twitter. The signboard lists the guiding directions for different activities of MAG Fest, and at the bottom, there is such a line:
“Kotaku Game News Integrity: 404 Not Found”
Kotaku is a world-renowned game information website/media with a large number of game journalists and readers. The contents of MAG Fest’s signage undoubtedly slandered the Kotaku website staff and fans.
The image of the MAG Fest sign was widely retweeted on Twitter, with people accusing MAG Fest of maliciously attacking Kotaku, including some well-known gaming journalists such as Patrick Klepek.
The quarrel of public opinion quickly attracted the attention of the MAG Fest official—the MAG Fest official replied to Patrick Klepek’s tweet:
“Hey MAG Fest fans, we’ve heard your feedback clearly and unequivocally that this year’s little joke we made didn’t work out well. To clarify, we did this because last year a media outlet suggested that MAG Fest caused The spread of the new crown infection, we thought it was just a joke to talk back this year . The signs have been taken down.”
The media that suggested last year that MAG Fest led to an increase in the number of viewers infected with the new crown was Kotaku . That is to say, MAG Fest held a grudge after Kotaku secretly stabbed himself last year, until this year when MAG Fest was held, he made a small retaliatory joke on the sign.
However, this joke is not funny. After all, no company wants others to make jokes about its core business level, right?
Later, MAG Fest official tweeted another message to reply to Patrick Klepek:
“We understand that you didn’t get the joke and that it made you feel uncomfortable. It was an oversight on our part and a big mistake on our part. We apologize to the MAG Fest fans and to Kotaku, indeed we It’s not right. We’ll think about it carefully when we joke in the future.”
When the matter first fermented, the public relations director of MAG Fest did not realize the seriousness of the problem. He replied to Patrick Klepek in a message on his private Twitter account, saying the sign was just a “friendly joke”.
However, the controversy intensified. Not only did Patrick Klepek ironically “do you think it’s funny?”, but also industry celebrities, such as Frank Cifaldi, founder of the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF), tweeted and accused MAG Fest of intentionally eccentric Kotaku on GamerGate (Game Gate) Scandal in :
“I never expected that MAG Fest would be smug against GamerGate during the event. I am very disappointed that the organizer of this event has done such a bad thing. I have two lectures to attend at MAG Fest. Excited, now I’m really not interested.”
Bringing GamerGate into the conversation made the debate a little more heated. Looking back at the bloody battle on GamerGate in 2014, fierce conflicts of public opinion broke out between the player community and game information websites/media. One of the points of contention includes whether game journalists working on game information websites/media deliberately write praises for the works of individual female game developers through sex trafficking.
At that time, Kotaku’s game reporter Nathan Grayson was the object of serious suspicion by the player community, and the Kotaku website was not surprisingly involved in the center of the GamerGate whirlpool, becoming a game website where players concentrated on speech attacks.
This MAG Fest made a joke like “Kotaku Game News Integrity: 404 Not Found”, which was considered by some people as seeking the approval of GamerGate supporters and the scandal of Kotaku in GamerGate.
Alyssa Mercante, a game journalist currently working for Kokatu, also tweeted:
“I have been in Kotaku for less than 3 months, and I have never seen such a large number of malicious remarks attacking Kotaku like this time, as if the shadow of GamerGate is still lingering.”
Seeing that the debate is becoming more and more uncontrollable, the PR director of MAG Fest changed his previous stance, seriously and sincerely replied to Patrick Klepek’s tweet again:
“We’re going to remove the signs. We thought it was a joke that wasn’t talked about seriously. All of our signs have little mocking jokes at the bottom. We never meant to imply anything, especially’ GamerGate’ . Kotaku, I’m really sorry!”
MAG Fest’s attitude of apology has not been recognized by the public—neither the official account of MAG Fest nor its PR director sent an official tweet to apologize, but only expressed apology in the message reply, and the target of the message reply is not Kotaku. This kind of apology made many onlookers think that MAG Fest did not apologize sincerely.
On the other hand, there are many netizens who believe that MAG Fest does not need to apologize, it is telling the truth , Kotaku has already betrayed the majority of player groups, and its game news/information is always full of title scams, or in the content Deliberately cause controversy, and even deliberately create some controversial news under the condition of distorting the facts.
Netizens ridiculed on Twitter that the people whose defenses were breached in this incident were making too much of a fuss, and they also complained about Kotaku’s anger, which proved that MAG Fest was telling the truth:
“The truth is, when you’re forced to take down a sign mocking Kotaku, it means the sign is telling the truth. It’s on point.”
“I don’t think…you don’t have to overreact so much, do you?
I don’t quite understand why you are so anxious and broke down in anger for an event that is thousands of miles away that you just played a joke on your company, and desperately demanded that the sign be taken down.
Maybe, you should just accept the fact that ‘people really don’t like Kotaku’ and go about your daily life? ”
Some people complained about Kotaku and subjectively pinned the blame on GamerGate , making it seem that every time there is a negative incident against Kotaku, it must be organized by GamerGate supporters:
“Kotaku game reporter is reportedly rolling in a corner, chanting ‘GamerGate'”
In addition, some netizens began to list the “crimes” committed by Kotaku in the past, and said that ” bullying Kotaku has always been the right thing to do .”
These “crimes” include, but are not limited to:
On November 4, 2022, Kotaku game reporter Sisi Jiang posted an article complaining that the characters of “Final Fantasy 16” are “too white”. Producer Naoki Yoshida’s explanation of the all-white characters in the game is disappointing. This is blatant racial discrimination. After being angered by the player group, the game reporter posted an article on Kotaku on November 9th, thinking that what he said was okay, and the industry should not “get used to them” because most of the production team of “Final Fantasy 16” are Asians , the issue of racial discrimination should be taken seriously, it is time to demand JRPG games with higher industry norms and moral standards .
On September 29, 2021, a Kotaku game reporter published an article titled “Halo: Infinite Skull ‘Quidditch’ Glitch Allows Players to Realize the Wizarding Dream of Discriminating against Transgender People”. The content of the article is actually complaining about a bug in the Oddball multiplayer mode of “Halo: Infinite”, which caused the skulls that players need to grab to fly around on the map. But for some reason, the author insisted on labeling the player as “discriminating against transgender people” in the title, which has nothing to do with the content of the article .
On April 10, 2020, a Kotaku game reporter issued an article stating that the simple difficulty of “Final Fantasy 7 RE” is too simple. This article has been complained by players, it’s nothing to look for— if the easy difficulty is not easy, what is the easy difficulty ? Many players also mocked Kotaku with sentences on the forum: “Shocked, the sun is hot”, “The water is wet”, “There is sand on the beach”…
On April 18, 2019, Kotaku game reporter Laura Kate Dale issued an article saying that the update of “Nintendo Star Super Smash Bros” added a new character – the Joker in “Persona 5”, and the update also added “Persona” 5″ music pack, including a song titled “Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There”. The lyrics of this song at 1 minute and 57 seconds used the insulting word “retarded (mentally retarded)”, which is suspected of discriminating against people with intellectual disabilities .
Kotaku did not confirm with Nintendo or Persona 5 maker Atlus whether the song contained “retarded” in its lyrics at the time of publishing this article, simply because the game journalist sounded like “retarded,” Just wrote and published an article denouncing Super Smash Bros.
Many players said that this was a malicious misinterpretation based on personal speculation without digging out clear information. The singer of this song is Japanese, his native language is not English, and the pronunciation is not standard. The original lyrics are likely to be “record it (record it)” or “retort it (refute it)”.
Later, Nintendo and Atlus officially responded that “retarded” was not included in the song’s lyrics .
Although Kotaku officially deleted this article and apologized publicly, its preconceived reporting has left a very bad impression on the player community.
In January 2013, Kotaku published an article titled ” Bababais ” just because the producer of “Bababas” Hideki Kamiya said on Twitter, “I don’t know much about Valve and PC games, because I have no interest.” The Witch Producer Doesn’t Understand V Agency and PC Games ” article.
This time, there is no need for the players to end the game, because Hideki Kamiya is notoriously bad-tempered. When a netizen asked Kamiya Hideki on Twitter if he had read Kotaku’s disparagement article, Kamiya Hideki replied:
” Do you eat shit ?”
All in all, the “little joke” made by MAG Fest this time, objectively speaking, its content does slander Kotaku’s core business, which is not funny to Kotaku who was joked, and MAG Fest’s apology is indeed not that sincere. From these perspectives, MAG Fest is not properly handled.
However, after this controversy, many netizens watched with cold eyes, even with a cynical attitude. Does it mean that Kotaku itself has some problems?
At this moment, I just want to sigh:
“Kotaku-chan, Ban Zun!”
This article is transferred from: https://www.yystv.cn/p/10338
This site is only for collection, and the copyright belongs to the original author.