Short Form:
Pokemon Team Has Poop Fight in Hotel…?
So, what I’m about to say may blow your mind, but try to keep it inside your skull:
Sometimes journalists, like any other human beings, make mistakes.
I know, right? Who would have thought? But whether this is news to you or not, after reading this article you’ll probably forget all about it and continue going about your day.
But here’s why you shouldn’t. I present to you Exhibit A, an unpublished article written by yours truly about an incident that supposedly happened during the Pokemon Video Game Championships (links from this original article have been unlinked, but have been labeled in brackets and relinked below):
I don’t even need to come up with a clever or entertaining way to write this article. It practically writes itself.
Apparently, during the Pokemon Video Game Championships in Birmingham, UK, over the weekend, the championship team from Spain got drunk, went back to their hotel, and decided to fling their own poo at each other in the hallway.
No, really. That really, actually, seriously (apparently) happened. The story has been corroborated [Destructoid] by multiple sources [Nintendo Life] and eyewitness reports [PokemonWorld forum] of the incident.
Needless to say, the group was thrown out of the hotel.
Obvious Primate Pokemon-related jokes aside, I can’t imagine what these competitors were thinking – or on. I mean, even if they were drunk, that’s not a normal thing to do. I’ve never gotten drunk with my friends and suggested that we should throw poop at each other. No one else that I know has ever suggested that, either. I’ve never even heard of that happening at my university, and there were a lot of really awful, gross things that happened at my university.
…So I guess you could say that the shit really hit the fan at this Pokemon tournament.
[Budum-pish!]
I admit that I mostly wanted to write this article because the story is absolutely ridiculous — and because I wanted to shop the Pikachu image, which I’m still using, dammit!
But that’s exactly the point. The story is so ridiculous and shocking that no one, including myself, bothered to actually corroborate the story. We all just took each other’s word that the story was true. With a bit of poking around the links in the article, you’ll see that the only evidence presented for this story is the “eyewitness account” forum post on the PokemonWorld forums.
And Nukezilla, Destructoid, and Nintendo Life were not alone. Other sites posted the same story with the same quote from the same anonymous person.
Absolutely no one, as far as Nukezilla or I can tell, knows anything else about the incident. There are mentions of “several other sources at the hotel,” but there are no links presented to prove it.
I don’t want to say that because there is no, or very little, evidence to support it the story isn’t true — that’s a can of worms I’d rather not open — but it’s quite suspicious to say the least. It could be true, but that’s not enough of a reason for it to have blown up like it did. And if it turns out to be true, I’ll be sure to post about it again.
The moral of this story, kids, is to always question what you hear. If Nukezilla hadn’t caught ourselves before posting the same story everyone else was posting, would you have thought twice about it?
Critical thinking is always important, no matter if you’re at your job or just reading some news story about some guys at a Pokemon tournament who supposedly threw poop at each other.
…So I guess you could say this became a real shitstorm of a story!
[Budum-pish!]
Editorial, Short Form Tags: Are you serious?, critical thinking, Destructoid, drunk, feces, Gameranx, gross, hotel, MCVUK, N4G, Nintendo Life, Pikachu, Pokemon, Pokemon Video Game Championships, poo, poop, scandal, Screw Attack, shit, Spain, tournament, truth, UK
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I can’t remember the last time I saw a games blog (other than Nukezilla) wait to do any fact-checking before publishing a news piece. It’s kind of like the Wikipedia citation thing, so long as there’s one other website out there saying the same thing then whatever you write will be accepted.
Someone (we don’t know who) said something (we don’t know exactly what)? Post it, stat! Gotta get in there quick, got to get the page views ASAP. Research? Pfft, this is why we have edit post functions.
This is the main reason why I found myself disenchanted with blogging and am now only looking at a career in print. I can’t stand the sloppiness, the rushing to get fantastical and dramatic headlines posted immediately.
I really like that you posted this.
@Peter Silk: Admittedly I wasn’t going to. I was pretty upset with myself for getting caught up in the “OMG everyone’s going to want to hear about this!” hype and not doing more leg work on the story. But John made the suggestion of posting a “this story blew way out of proportion, we almost posted about it ourselves” article, and after some consideration I decided to write this.
I also partly wanted an excuse to use the Pikachu image I made ;)
People shouldn’t give their opinion if they don’t know what actually happened.
Press has overreacted and exagerated the whole thing. I know the people involved, so I’m gonna give the real version of it:
One of the guys decided to take a crap at his own room as a prank (obviously no the best of the ideas). The rest of his friends bashed him and told him that was disgusting and that he should get rid of it immediately. He wraped it on toilet paper and moved it to the hotel corridor (again, there were better options). Some time later somebody saw it and reported the staff. So no, people were not drunk, they didn’t poop in the hallway nor did they start a poop throwing fight, godammit don’t be stupid who the fuck would do that?
What pokechamp21 posted is not acurrate. The noise he heard were the players going loud inside their own room, and absolutely no one witnessed a poop fight, so it’s his fault for using that expresion when he only saw a crap wraped in toilet paper.
@asdfr: Wow, if that’s true… still pretty weird! But still, yeah, bad reporting all round, it would seem.
@asdfr: That still sounds ridiculous, but makes a bit more sense, I suppose. Do you have proof that that’s actually what happened? I’d love to be able to post about what actually happened, but I’ll need evidence to back it up.
@Ace Flibble: I once took on a news piece for the site I’m writing for at the moment regarding game piracy and BitTorrent which at the time seemed like fairly big news, with major news sites covering it.
The original source – before the feeder sites used the biggest site as their source – was a lengthy report published by an official tracking company which compiled in-depth data and analysis on piracy, with videogames being just one section of a much larger study.
I found that the news posts already out there were referring to one detail in particular related to videogames, with the rest of the report being essentially filler in their eyes. I felt it prudent to read the report in its entirety – can’t remember how many pages now but it was a good chunk of my afternoon gone. After reading through, it was clear that the news post wasn’t worthy of being posted so I told my editor and walked away from it.
This was partly on the grounds that in the grand scheme of things, the particular tidbit of information that sites were fascinated by was part of a bigger picture that was of greater interest to more people. It was obvious that either the reporters were taking the information and checking the nearest pages to make sure it wasn’t out of context, or skimming the report (or in the case of quickly-reposting feeder sites the report was entirely inconsequential).
Another reason was also that while reading it I was hearing a few little things about the company that compiled the report and about the complete authenticity of the report itself. I didn’t have any major doubts while reading it – I found it illuminating (but also a bit boring) – but that suspicion lingered and factored into my decision to drop the post and be done with it.
I consider it vital to do the proper research first, even if that means you strip away the urgency. Getting the job done properly takes precedence over getting the job done quickly for me, and I’m to make sure my superior knows that if I’m asked to rush out a piece. I’m late with a review for the Jak Trilogy at the moment but I want to be thorough.
My last post for NZ was an important wake-up call regarding thoroughness: I only played RIFT to lvl 15 before reviewing it (should have at least been double that, in retrospect). I’m late with a Jak & Daxter trilogy review but I want to play them through individually because this would be the first time I will have done that with these games – always preferred Ratchet & Clank – and if I’m to review these games on their quality without foreknowledge of how their stories progress I haven’t done my research.
Research first, post second.
If my EiC reads this: the Jak review will be ‘on your desk’ sometime next week, there’s still plenty left to play.