Half-life 2 Debacle Shows Pitfalls of Pack Journalism

Note: This article was originally published on Joystick101.org



The Puget Sound Business Journal broke the big "story" on June 8 with a gem of a quote hidden at the end of a seemingly innocuous article about Microsoft's rising and falling Xbox fortunes. Xbox Product Manager David Hufford told the Business Journal that Microsoft was getting "mixed messages" from Valve about a port of the highly anticipated Half-life 2 for the Xbox. "As of now, Half-life 2 is not going to be on the Xbox," Hufford was quoted as saying.



It wasn't long before the video game web sites had picked up the scent and were linking to the story with abandon. Evil Avatar was one of the first to post it, positing mid-Sunday that Valve might be trying to get more money from Microsoft by waffling on their implied commitment. By Sunday night, Slashdot had picked it up with links back to Evil Avatar and the PSBJ story. By Monday morning the feeding frenzy was on, with sites from Gamerfeed to GameIndustry.biz to GameSpot and Blue's News all reporting that Half-life 2 would not be coming to Microsoft's console. The full force of the video game journalism conglomerate was now on the trail of this highly important story. There was only one problem...



The story wasn't true.



By Monday afternoon, sources from Valve and Vivendi Universal, the game's publisher, were coming out of the woodwork to re-confirm that Half-life 2 would be coming to the Xbox. GameSpyDaily was one of the first to quote Valve's Doug Lombardi as saying that "Half-life 2 is planned for the PC and Xbox." GameSpot posted confirmation of an Xbox version from Universal's Amy Farris just 8 hours after their original story on had run. The aforementioned websites, along with many others, were quick to post follow-up stories acknowledging that Hufford's comments seemed to have no weight.



There are quite a few disturbing things about this story. The first is that the PSBJ reporter did not realize the importance of Hufford's statement (if, in fact, he made the statement; more on that later). The reporter, Jeff Meisner, obviously didn't realize the impact Hufford's statement would have on the business futures of both Valve and Microsoft, not to mention the futures of countless Xbox owners. Instead, Meisner buried the quote at the very end of the article and didn't bother to check Hufford's assertion with any other sources. While this is sloppy journalism, Meisner can perhaps be forgiven because he writes for a local business publication and not a national video game web site.



The herd mentality of the practically the entire video game web journalism industry, however, is less defensible. True, the situation was cleared up so quickly that many readers probably missed the whole thing, but this debacle is indicative of the larger trend of lazy link-and-quote reporting that passes for "news" on most video game sites. Rather than calling up sources and finding the news on their own, most web site editors seem content to have the news spoon-fed to them from public relations managers and conventional, mainstream news sources. Had anyone bothered to pick up the phone and check Hufford's comments with someone at Universal or Valve, as GameSpy and GameSpot eventually did, they'd have realized that there actually was no story and that the growing media circus was misguided.



The link-and-quote process succeeds in that it quickly gets many important stories to gamers who might not otherwise see them. But the process fails in that it results in a lack of originality in video game news as a whole. When every site posts the same big press releases and links to the same big articles as everyone else, it becomes impossible to find the smaller, more in-depth stories that bring new information or new angles to light. It also becomes easier for a small bit of misinformation, like that in the PSBJ article, to become a full-fledged juggernaut that can be hard to stop. Even the follow-up articles posted by many web sites simply linked to the GameSpy or GameSpot refutations using a simple, "This site quoted this person as saying this thing," template. This kind of journalism is lazy, sloppy and unfair to gamers who should demand more accurate, original reporting from their news outlets.



In a June 10 story, GameSpyDaily talked with David Hufford, who asserted that he "never said Half Life 2 wouldn't be available for Xbox." Hufford said that he had deferred the question to Valve in the interview. Interestingly, the original PSBJ article has been edited to say that Half Life 2 will be coming to the Xbox (the original can currently be found through Google's cache feature).



Evil Avatar has posted a nice summary of the drama with the apt observation that "the world may never know" whether Hufford or the PSBJ were in the wrong. But what is clear is that online video game journalists as a whole need to follow up on leads for important stories and not settle for echoing the reporting of others. When the actions of many big-name, national media outlets wouldn't even pass muster in a college journalism course, you know something is very wrong.