fanlist: snip ... it's of exactly the same kind and entails exactly the same kind of emotional investment by the purchaser.
The relevant difference in kind here, as dragonbeast and babark point out, is between buying and being bought ... That's a bright-line distinction: If a writer has received any special consideration from a subject, they're in dangerous territory, and if they don't reveal it then they've committed a major ethical breach. ... snip
Brasas: I'm having a hard time here mate... You sound so disingenuous... your bright line does not preclude other bright lines... open your mind will ya?
You kicked this off (me and you blabla) by saying you considered recurring payments to Blizzard for sumth like WOW as equivalent to Patreon recurring payments to some game dev.
Note how all those specifics came from you... Despite you later on saying you're after the general principles involved!
I told you already the big difference in kind for your example, which is whether the product exists or not. Similar to how a prepayment and a payment on delivery are different kinds of payment. Do you really see no difference in kind between buying a service and subsidizing an author? Can you give some closure here? Don't bring other examples, just go deeper rather than wider on why the distinction I'm offering is in your opinion invalid.
I really find it hard to believe you don't get that distinction. And by the way, I further notice you chose to elide my elaboration on journalistc objectivity, on journalists turning into entertainers, and on how the level of personal engagement of a reviewer in the product is in itself always a source of potential conflict of interest. Exemplified in your particulars by the time preference of paying for something that does not even exist - for whatever reasons: ideology, payola, ethics, affection, etc... Again, you elided this despite now saying you're interested in the general ethical rules!
And even if you don't get the distinctions, because I do see how you maybe are considering this from a higher level, treating all capital exchanges as almost equivalent, distinguishing only between buyer and bought: payments, prepayments, subsidies, bribes... they're all the same right? Well, the general points are still there if you would actually read with just a bit of openness...
Journalism's goal is to inform the public.
Journalists should strive to be fair, impartial, etc... I just say objective in short.
Journalists should strive to avoid conflict of interests or the appearance of same.
Are those general enough for you? I suspect none of the pro GG folks in here will disagree with any of those three.
How about you? Curious what you'll reply :)
For someone interested in the general ethics you kind of homed in only on the specific disagreement with me... see where my perception of your being disingenuous comes from? Go back to my very first reply to you and see if the general principles are or not implicitly present. I didn't reply to you with a one liner about the product not existing...
I'll give you points for one thing, which you mentioned yourself. You have indeed not derailed the ethics conversation with the typical character attacks I see from most aGG. Kudos for that.
You're...not really clear on how ethical argument works, are you? The point of homing in on a specific disagreement is to work out the reason for that disagreement, determine which opinion(s) (if any) is/are correct, and make sure it doesn't introduce inconsistency into the larger ethical system.
There was mention of journalists' support for Patreons as a prima facie conflict of interest. I thought that led to an absurdity, namely, that the relevant qualities of Patreon were shared by other, apparently unproblematic, forms of commerce (MMOs, season passes, pre-ordering, etc.). So I tried to elicit a distinguishing factor of Patreon, and thus ensued a lot of circularity, accusations of bad faith, and changing the subject.
You're operating on two levels here: The hyper-specific ("This person wrote this about this game then, and that was unacceptable.") and the maximally general ("Inform the public."). Those both
inform an ethical system, but they don't, by themselves, provide any useful rules. What does it mean to "inform the public," in the particular context of video games? Certainly something different from what it means in the context of, e.g., electoral politics ("Here's a cool new candidate you should try!" "How to get the most out of your Rand Paul").
So we have to work it out by considering what the purpose of games journalism is, what (
specifically) we consider a successful result and why. Hence my pointing out that the actual result of journalists writing about their friends is often a good product; we have to know what we're striving for (beyond "ethics" and "objectivity," because those are meaninglessly general by themselves).
Likewise, knowing the specific features of a given situation that are ethically problematic is necessary to making rules that forbid destructive activities and allow or encourage beneficial ones. Hence the persnickety comparisons of unethical activities with acceptable ones, to make sure that, say, forbidding Patreon support also includes other activities that are unacceptable for the same reason but doesn't include superficially similar but ethical activities.
If you want to keep sneering at that kind of work as some sot of malicious distraction, you're welcome to, but then you don't get to pretend that you're the serious ones.