In other news, Brandon Orselli of Niche Gamer has apparently been caught plagiarising work. Thoughts
@Jaimas ?
“Hey @brandonorselli, take your half ass apology and shove it. How many more people have you still not paid? You can't claim to have "moral standards" when it just came out you've been plagiarizing for years, & this is on top of everything else. Leave Niche. Stop profiting from it...
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There's a few ways plagarism happens when it comes to works like reviews.
The less egregious ones happen a lot, especially in technical writing, and an incidental here or there I don't consider especially egregious because a lot of new writers fuck up and do that. Fuck,
most first-time writers wind up doing that to some degree or another, and fucking up is part of not fucking up anymore. You can consider plagarism text equivalent of tracing in art. Do you remember when Dobbybear traced an image of Big Ben for an artwork and caused a shit-show by not giving credit?
Everyone knew he could draw Big Ben freehand; they were angry because it was lazy and zero-effort and Dobson could do better.
Very rarely is
this kind of plagarism done out of malice, usually just expedience. I've even seen it done over self-doubt issues or to try do accomplish something else by doing so, which is why generally I consider this sort to be a lesser offense. If they own up to their failure, someone can move beyond it. Thing is: that's not what we're talking about when it comes to reviewers like Brandon Orselli.
These guys are
career plagarists. He's not the most high-profile example to emerge this year; that award goes to Filip Miucin. Career plagarists are
not one-offs. They aren't struggling neophyte writers on some backwater blogging site trying to delight readers for the hell of it, still in the formative phases of their careers. They're entrenched people at big journo outlets, occupying slots that by all accounts should rightfully belong to someone more qualified, and the first thing they do if they're caught is blame someone else and deny all culpability.
He doesn't care about the craft or the underlying purpose of the site the work is established on; he cares only for his own ego and Sophia's right to call his shit out. Which is fucking ironic when you remember that the only reason
his site fucking even exists is due to opposing the likes of Zoe Quinn, a moral standpoint he then fucked right in the ass by doing this shit and basically plagarising her living off people more talented.
Career plagarists often have an extensive back-catalogue, and now that Orselli's been exposed, I can virtually guarantee you're going to find many more examples of his doing this. They usually haven't gotten caught so they don't see any issue in staying the course, and they'll probably have bullied whoever they stole from into silence, but with the advent of archiving it's harder than ever to get away with this crap and these assholes always tip their hand eventually.
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