Scenario 4 - Irony; you take EA’s money to buy some games from rival publishers. Probably the funniest of the available choices; taking money from a mega-publisher that is choking the creativity out of the industry in their pursuit of profit and using that cash to buy three or four new games from smaller publishers (thus boosting their sales figures a little) is a pretty good turn-about play. Of course, it has flaws too.

Positive Effect 1: If you’re into the indie gaming scene and like smaller publishers, you just got a fair batch of new stuff of theirs to play. Or you can even take it a step further and buy a lot of Indie Games over Xbox Live, and $200 will buy almost the entire catalog of those.

Negative Effect 1: Same as Scenario 3; you just took a bribe for personal enrichment, and you’re probably going to get fired unless your readers and boss find this as hilarious as you do.

Negative Effect 2: Even if you don’t get fired, EA probably blacklists you for blatantly exploiting them, assuming they even find out what the money was spent on. Actually, I’d consider getting blacklisted by EA to be a positive effect, but that’s just me. And in this scenario it’s accompanied by being fired, which I don’t want.


Scenario 5 - Cash it, but issue a negative review, or don’t review Dante’s Inferno at all, and possibly don’t disclose that you cashed it. Immediately fails on so many levels. You may keep some of your integrity by issuing a negative review, but you still lose some of it by accepting the bribe. And since it was cashed, it’s once again a matter of bank record; EA can easily prove you took the money.

Positive Effects: None unless you get really lucky with none of your readers finding out, and EA doesn’t rat you out for what you did. That’s a huge gamble to take for a $200 pay-off.

Negative Effects: EA likely tells everyone you took the money. The second you cash that check, it’s on record and they can find out about it easily. Perhaps they will publish your name in a list of reviewers who did "succumb to the sin of greed." Then you get fired.


Those cover most of the main themes. There are certainly variations on them, but they’re generally different takes on the same overall idea. But of course at this point, you’re probably wondering, "Alright, smart guy, what did you do with the check, huh?" I’ll tell you, because I think I made the best possible play in this situation.

My Solution: Wargames Victory, "Strange game. The only winning move is not to play." I didn’t receive one of these checks (or at least I haven’t as of press time). I imagine this is because I regularly refer to EA as the ’evil empire’, decry their ’planned obsolescence’ way of making games so they can sell you next year’s edition by discontinuing online play for the last year’s version, and otherwise make it clear I don’t like them as a company. They still send me review copies, but not high profile items. So I likely will never see one of these checks in person, nevermind one made out to me. This means I won’t be faced with the above choices (all of which have significant downsides, making it something of a "no win scenario"), and I get to sit back and smirk as the drama unfolds.

Positive Effect: I’m never put in the situation others are, and not forced to choose from one of several decisions that all have major drawbacks. I have in effect ’won’ by not getting involved. I also get to be a smug little punk about the whole matter.

Negative Effect: I don’t get to see just how far I can string this out by trying to pull the Nigerian Scam upon EA; "the 13.5 out of 10 review is coming along, but has been held up by a snag in proofreading. Please send another check for $50 to cover the paperwork, or give me your bank account details", etc. Probably not a very smart idea, but it would be fun to try right up until I got arrested.

So, what do you think? Was there another right choice that does good in the world without compromising your integrity? Are there other good solutions to this situation? Feel free to leave a comment or otherwise discuss it.