1UP, Plagiarizing, and Other Bits of Joy

Nathan writes "1up recently posted their Dead or Alive 4 strategy guide on their website. It didn't take long for users at the Dead or Alive Central forums to recognize their hard work analyzing the fighting game engine had been blatantly pasted into the strategy guide without any credit given whatsoever. While movelists are largely factual and can be argued to be public knowledge, the most incriminating evidence is the section on the evasion system, which had been pasted into the 1up guide with a few reworded sentences. Discussions are ongoing at Gaming Age Forums (with 1up members defending the writer of the guide) and DoA Central. Perhaps the most interesting bit about this is that just a month or two ago, Dan Hsu from EGM and 1up had famously written an editorial criticizing shady ongoings at other publications." I've reread the different pieces, and while I think the DoA Forums are a large basis of work, people need to read Kate Turabian's on how to cite research because I don't see this as plagiarism in the whole - just poorly cited. Update: 01/23 22:20 GMT by Z : 1up has announced that they've pulled the guide to review the situation.

Game "Journalists"

[macadamia_harold]

I interviewed at 1up recently, and when I brought up the subject of game "journalism" the guys just laughed it off. They said, basically, that they're in the business to make money, and that the editorial wall of old-guard journalism doesn't apply.

If everything can just be "poorly cited"...

[AdityaG]

"Oh, oops, I forgot to cite my usage of these third party pieces of code. It's just poor citation. It's not stealing or anything right?"

Yeah, people need to stop making up euphemisms for things.

Not plagiarism?

[GizmoToy]

I've reread the different pieces, and while I think the DoA Forums are a large basis of work, people need to read Kate Turabian's on how to cite research because I don't see this as plagiarism in the whole - just poorly cited.

Which is exactly the opposite of everything they teach you in school. If you don't cite your sources, you are plagiarizing. Claiming incompetance by poorly citing your work is no excuse...

Re:Plagiarism == copyright violation

[kailoran]

Information wants to be free, but it also wants its original author(s) properly credited (as in at least mentioned *somewhere*).

Re:Culture of Copy and Paste

[gEvil (beta)]

Go look at Google News and find all the related stories under one header and you'll find 1000 stories, all the same. Same words and sometimes attributed to a wireservice report.

The difference here is that this is the entire purpose of the wireservice reports. By signing up and licensing the wireservice feed, the smaller papers are given the right to print those reports, so long as they are properly attributed. You really don't think the Boise Daily Spud is going to have a reporter sitting in the UN, do you?

Sigh ..Big Suprise

[Mycroft9x]

Actually these guys have been ripping off video game FAQ authors for years. Even as far back as 1993. A well known faq author for some of the Mortal Kombat games would actually poison his FAQ with false moves just to see if they appeared in other peoples FAQs or magazines. Any MK fans from that era will prolly recall seeing the "Tiger Run" move from MK2 posted in an EGM "strategy guide" in one of their issues. Sure enough, EGM was there to rip of his every word, even the fake ones. A few years later they ripped of a FAQ author of a Tekken 3 Moves list. So to most of the people in the fighting game community this isn't really nothing new. Really sad, but it has been happening for over 10 years now.

Re:Lesson Learned

[pikine]

When you work, that's a different story. All your work and ideas belong to the company, so if he receives the credit on that external revenue---some third party organization and with SANS---for the company as a whole, then it is okay. But if he didn't acknowledge your work inside the company, say didn't mention your name in the company newsletter, then there is a problem.

What I'd do is whenever people talk about the script, you ask (assuming his name is John), "Oh, is that the script that John and I worked together on?" If you talk to other people, tell them the story, "hey, you know the security flaw that John and I discovered together? He's getting an interview with SANS. I'm happy this flaw is receiving some coverage." You don't want to ask for exclusive credit on that one particular thing, but to hint that you and John (and possibly others) have always worked together as a team; and as a team, you're proud of his work.

If you want to be more subtle, give him an opportunity to lie, saying he did everything himself. If you do this right, someone will recognize that he doesn't value teamwork, and this is a negative quality that can quickly send his work life downhill.

Don't go around telling people that John doesn't value teamwork, but make it self-evident. If your company doesn't care about teamwork, then that's another thing. :-/

Re:Internut

[Anonymous Coward]

two words: broken links. couldn't we then make up anything and just attibute it to some website that isn't there. I suppose this could be the case with any website, but at least there is some information about the source if it has the title, date, etc, granted not all that much though. I suppose such transient sites aren't very trustworthy anyway.

Re:How do you cite combo strings?

[KDR_11k]

Wouldn't "source: DoA Central Forums" be sufficient?