Just before I took my summer break, you may be aware that IGN was forced to fire its Nintendo editor Filip Miucin when it was alleged that he had copied the script for his video review of Dead Cells from a review by YouTuber Boomstick Gaming.
I won't recount it all, when plenty have already done so. I mean, I could just copy-and-paste what others have written, and change a few words here and there, which would be totes funny. But anyway.
Miucin posted an apology video in which he made excuses, and later added the mistake of daring people to find any further examples of his plagiarism. Presumably, intending to imply that they wouldn't.
They did.
Since then, many more examples of Miucin apparently slightly rewriting the work of others have come to light, with much hilarity ensuing when parts of his Linkedin profile seemed to have been cut-and-pasted from a sample template. IGN is now reviewing all of Miucin's work for the site, having taken it down at least temporarily.
Many have been amazed at how little Miucin changed the pieces he allegedly cribbed from, but in my experience the plagiarist is blatant.
I've certainly had people rip off things I've done, and the worst time it happened was when I was a struggling screenwriter, and someone more successful, influential and powerful than me borrowed fairly liberally from a script Digitiser's Mr Hairs and I had written, and put elements of it into a broadcast pilot.
Years later I found out that said individual had a bit of a TV industry reputation for doing this, but - at a time when we were trying to get a career off the ground - we were fairly powerless to do anything about it. Similar things happened to me a further two times (that I know of) in the early days of my TV writing career, and always by people you would expect to know better. Each time I felt the same sort of impotent anger and frustration that Boomstick Gaming must've done.
In sort, it happens more often than you think it might, even though plagiarism is one of the worst creative and journalistic crimes a person can commit. And - hold onto your scandal-pants - it's a crime of which I too have been guilty...
I won't recount it all, when plenty have already done so. I mean, I could just copy-and-paste what others have written, and change a few words here and there, which would be totes funny. But anyway.
Miucin posted an apology video in which he made excuses, and later added the mistake of daring people to find any further examples of his plagiarism. Presumably, intending to imply that they wouldn't.
They did.
Since then, many more examples of Miucin apparently slightly rewriting the work of others have come to light, with much hilarity ensuing when parts of his Linkedin profile seemed to have been cut-and-pasted from a sample template. IGN is now reviewing all of Miucin's work for the site, having taken it down at least temporarily.
Many have been amazed at how little Miucin changed the pieces he allegedly cribbed from, but in my experience the plagiarist is blatant.
I've certainly had people rip off things I've done, and the worst time it happened was when I was a struggling screenwriter, and someone more successful, influential and powerful than me borrowed fairly liberally from a script Digitiser's Mr Hairs and I had written, and put elements of it into a broadcast pilot.
Years later I found out that said individual had a bit of a TV industry reputation for doing this, but - at a time when we were trying to get a career off the ground - we were fairly powerless to do anything about it. Similar things happened to me a further two times (that I know of) in the early days of my TV writing career, and always by people you would expect to know better. Each time I felt the same sort of impotent anger and frustration that Boomstick Gaming must've done.
In sort, it happens more often than you think it might, even though plagiarism is one of the worst creative and journalistic crimes a person can commit. And - hold onto your scandal-pants - it's a crime of which I too have been guilty...
EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
Many years back - and we're talking late-90s here - I did a fair bit of work for Empire magazine's video game pages.
I'd read Empire more or less since it began, and was quite excited when I got approached about working with them. I even hoped that I'd - perhaps - be able to move from writing about video games to, maybe if I was lucky, writing some film stuff.
Curiously, the Empire gig came about because of Leslie Bunder's then-girlfriend (now wife, I believe) Caroline Westbrook.
You may remember Leslie as a short-lived Digitiser columnist, whom we discovered had been given a column by our bosses, because they planned to remove Mr Hairs and I from Digitiser and replace us with him. We even found a memo to Leslie from Teletext's editor asking him to "familiarise" himself with Digitiser's output.
Caroline was an Empire staffer, and it was her who approached me with a view to writing for Empire. Which was nice of her.
To cut a long story short, I got a call one day from Caroline after they'd been contacted by a reader, claiming that one of my Empire pieces had been plagiarised by a local newspaper column - almost word-for-word in fact. I had to explain - with a chuckle - that no such thing had happened. It wasn't a problem at all, as I was the one who'd written the syndicated local newspaper column, having inherited it from Violet Berlin, who no longer had the time to do it.
I could tell two things from the silence on the other end of the phone. 1) This was a problem, and 2) I was never going to work for Empire again.
Many years back - and we're talking late-90s here - I did a fair bit of work for Empire magazine's video game pages.
I'd read Empire more or less since it began, and was quite excited when I got approached about working with them. I even hoped that I'd - perhaps - be able to move from writing about video games to, maybe if I was lucky, writing some film stuff.
Curiously, the Empire gig came about because of Leslie Bunder's then-girlfriend (now wife, I believe) Caroline Westbrook.
You may remember Leslie as a short-lived Digitiser columnist, whom we discovered had been given a column by our bosses, because they planned to remove Mr Hairs and I from Digitiser and replace us with him. We even found a memo to Leslie from Teletext's editor asking him to "familiarise" himself with Digitiser's output.
Caroline was an Empire staffer, and it was her who approached me with a view to writing for Empire. Which was nice of her.
To cut a long story short, I got a call one day from Caroline after they'd been contacted by a reader, claiming that one of my Empire pieces had been plagiarised by a local newspaper column - almost word-for-word in fact. I had to explain - with a chuckle - that no such thing had happened. It wasn't a problem at all, as I was the one who'd written the syndicated local newspaper column, having inherited it from Violet Berlin, who no longer had the time to do it.
I could tell two things from the silence on the other end of the phone. 1) This was a problem, and 2) I was never going to work for Empire again.
PLAGARISE OF THE ROBOTS
Suffice to say, it was a mistake borne out of naivety. I was relatively young and inexperienced. I didn't stop to think that it might've mattered that I'd plagiarised myself. I didn't even think you could plagiarise yourself. I mean, I figured that I only have one set of opinions. If I was writing about the same thing for two different publications, what was the point of completely changing what I wrote for both? Right?!?
Ugh...
Obviously, now I realise how stupid of me that was. Even at the time I was deeply embarrassed and ashamed of what happened. I realised almost immediately that it made me look sloppy, unprofessional and lazy. Indeed, the knock-on effect was that, as predicted, I never worked for Empire again. We hopefully learn from our mistakes however, and from that point onwards I was a lot more diligent.
I'm well aware that my crime of plagiarism isn't in the same ballpark as Filip Miucin's, but I guess that because of my experience, I've got a little more empathy towards him than the majority seem to have.
For somebody to plagiarise to the degree that Miucin is accused of doing - with such an apparent pattern of it - there has to be something fairly significantly broken in his head. I'm not going to try to psychoanalyse him, but whatever he saw as the potential rewards for doing what he did, it clearly outweighed the very real risks. And he's paying for that, just as I did.
BAD GUYS
There can be all sorts of reasons for why a person plagiarises, and it's never as simple as them being a "bad" person.
Whatever his reasons, Filip Miucin is unlikely ever to work in games journalism again. In fact, should any employer, regardless of the industry, choose to look him up online prior to a potential hire - as they all do these days - the online firestorm is going to severely impact his chances of being employed by anybody.
A lot of people are taking great delight in Miucin's fate, but I can't join them. I can't revel in how his life has potentially been ruined - yes, by his own actions, admittedly - and the knock-on effect for his young family. It's shocking, it's embarrassing for IGN, and damaging to the already beleaguered reputation of games journalism, but further laying into Filip Miucin - kicking somebody who is, believe me, paying for his errors and already beating himself up pretty robustly without needing yet another voice telling him how awful he is - isn't going to improve the situation any.
All you're going to do is feel momentarily better about yourself, because you're not the one in the middle of that firestorm. But at what cost?
Overall, it's just really sad.
Suffice to say, it was a mistake borne out of naivety. I was relatively young and inexperienced. I didn't stop to think that it might've mattered that I'd plagiarised myself. I didn't even think you could plagiarise yourself. I mean, I figured that I only have one set of opinions. If I was writing about the same thing for two different publications, what was the point of completely changing what I wrote for both? Right?!?
Ugh...
Obviously, now I realise how stupid of me that was. Even at the time I was deeply embarrassed and ashamed of what happened. I realised almost immediately that it made me look sloppy, unprofessional and lazy. Indeed, the knock-on effect was that, as predicted, I never worked for Empire again. We hopefully learn from our mistakes however, and from that point onwards I was a lot more diligent.
I'm well aware that my crime of plagiarism isn't in the same ballpark as Filip Miucin's, but I guess that because of my experience, I've got a little more empathy towards him than the majority seem to have.
For somebody to plagiarise to the degree that Miucin is accused of doing - with such an apparent pattern of it - there has to be something fairly significantly broken in his head. I'm not going to try to psychoanalyse him, but whatever he saw as the potential rewards for doing what he did, it clearly outweighed the very real risks. And he's paying for that, just as I did.
BAD GUYS
There can be all sorts of reasons for why a person plagiarises, and it's never as simple as them being a "bad" person.
Whatever his reasons, Filip Miucin is unlikely ever to work in games journalism again. In fact, should any employer, regardless of the industry, choose to look him up online prior to a potential hire - as they all do these days - the online firestorm is going to severely impact his chances of being employed by anybody.
A lot of people are taking great delight in Miucin's fate, but I can't join them. I can't revel in how his life has potentially been ruined - yes, by his own actions, admittedly - and the knock-on effect for his young family. It's shocking, it's embarrassing for IGN, and damaging to the already beleaguered reputation of games journalism, but further laying into Filip Miucin - kicking somebody who is, believe me, paying for his errors and already beating himself up pretty robustly without needing yet another voice telling him how awful he is - isn't going to improve the situation any.
All you're going to do is feel momentarily better about yourself, because you're not the one in the middle of that firestorm. But at what cost?
Overall, it's just really sad.
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