Player One Podcast

As a reader, I’m a James Mielke fan. When the guy is covering a game or a developer that he’s interested in, he generally does a fantastic job at it. He’s truly passionate about certain games, and it comes through wonderfully in his writing. I’ll even admit that he’s far better at covering the games he likes than I probably ever was, or ever will be. I also thought that the final issues of EGM – the ones under his direction – were fabulous. He managed to inject that kind of passion and enthusiasm throughout the entire magazine, even though he liked to pat himself on the back a bit too much in his editorials.

Even on a personal level, I like the guy. Whenever I would take trips out to our San Francisco office he was always friendly and helpful, fun to be around, and just an all-around good guy.

That’s probably why, when he chose to fellate himself for about 11,000 words on his weblog, it didn’t really bother me for the most part. I rolled my eyes at a lot of it, because despite some real accomplishments during his career, it’s hard not to see the whole thing as one massive ego stroke where his apparent greatness is more than a little exaggerated.

And that leads me to my third relationship with James Mielke – as a co-worker. As a co-worker, I had a real problem with the Milkman. And normally, I’d keep that kind of feeling to myself. But two paragraphs in his recent blog post misrepresented the then-crew of EGM so badly – a group of people I love and respect – that I feel like I need to defend them (and myself) publicly.

I’m going to quote the two paragraphs here in their entirety; just to be sure I’m not accused of taking anything out of context. I apologize for the length.

During my early years at EGM, it was interesting. I was, being the only EGM representative on the West Coast, always in meetings with PR people, who found it a relief that they didn’t have to fly out to Oakbrook to show EGM a game. I’d do the meeting, get the assets, write the preview. Of course, many people still did fly out to see the guys, but it wasn’t as mandatory any more. The magazine that really suffered at the time was Game Informer, since they were usually only visited if a PR person was already in the area to see EGM. It wasn’t easy to get to where they are based. This was, of course, back when their circ was only in the 115k range, before they got bought and became what they are now. But, I remember a couple of the guys I’d worked with thinking I was always freeloading, since I was usually AFK in a demo meeting, and not responding to AIM all day long. It actually became harder for me when Dan Hsu came back (he, who I voted for when we were asked to pick between him and Simon Cox to be the new EIC of EGM when John Davison left to be EIC for OPM) because the gripers suddenly had a sympathetic ear. “Milky’s just having free lunches,” and “Milky’s never around when you need him” were the common misconceptions of those who shall remain nameless, but John Davison put an end to that. He saw just how hard I was working, whether it was meeting with publishers for demos all day, or fulfilling various off-site TV appearances on CNN for the marketing department, or working overtime on Gamers.com V2 (which Ziff acquired for a bit after Gamespot was sold to CNET) with Sam Kennedy, or staying late to help freelancers and former Gamers.com alumni Christian Nutt and Shane Bettenhausen into the office. I usually had to show those guys where to store previews and screenshots that we’d taken onto the servers, which were abysmally slow, since the downloads we put on the server in San Francisco actually were routed to the East Coast, before being bounced back to Chicago. It literally often took something like a 2 meg zip file almost 3 or 4 hours to upload to EGM’s server.

But it was John Davison who –in the two weeks he spent in San Francisco a month– saw how much work I was doing — and getting no credit for. He set the record straight about my contribution, and shortly after the entire Ziff Davis Game Group were moved out to San Francisco. It didn’t get easier for me once they moved out, though. Sam and I were used to being the only console guys in the office, along with the CGW crew, who enjoyed our loud music and good natured ways. The EGM guys were used to much quieter working conditions, which I totally didn’t get, since we were in the entertainment business. People would holler at me to turn down my music, and they would play games with headphones on. I distinctly remember John Davison asking me to turn my music up. The EGM staff needed to loosen up, was his (and my) opinion. Games are using surround sound, or 5.1, live a little, guys. We’re lucky enough to work in the entertainment industry. I thought “How can we make a fun product if we’re not having fun?” Anyway, I didn’t mesh well with the suddenly-relocated formerly Chicago-based staff of EGM, and I often clashed with Shoe over random things. He’s a very detail-oriented, anal kind of guy, which is great, because EGM under his watch was an immaculately finessed publication. I, on the other hand, didn’t like some of his cover choices, the politics of which I won’t go into, but I probably could have handled things better myself too and been a little more discreet in my reactions to certain things. I chalk it up to being younger. But veterans like Jeff Green used to pull me aside and tell me “You’re the best thing they’ve got going for them, why is he giving you such a hard time?” With Jeff and John Davison in my corner, I always managed to get through the day, but the guy who would prove truly pivotal in my career at Ziff was perhaps my least-expected ally. Enter: Simon Cox.

Throughout the entire, 11,000 word history lesson, James tends to represent himself as some sort of misunderstood or undiscovered genius. And if that’s how people saw him (or how he saw himself), that’s fine by me. But this “early years at EGM” story paints the crew as some sort of lynch mob who would rather pick on him and tear him down than thank whatever god they prayed to that they were lucky enough to be in his presence. It’s a bit oversimplified, definitely one-sided, and absolutely unfair.

As early as the second sentence, it seems like James’ massive ego has altered his memory. James wasn’t the “only EGM representative on the west coast” at all. Within three months, Ryan Lockhart was out there as well, and after him Che Chou. The service of both, apparently, have been lost to the ravages of time, as James states that he and Sam Kennedy were still the only two console guys on the West Coast when us Midwesterners eventually showed up and ruined the party.

In fact, I’m going to go ahead and say that Sam Kennedy was originally hired as an EGM rep, as well, before John Davison moved to OPM and recruited him as that magazine’s newshound. At least, that’s how the hirings were explained to us at the time.

As for the “couple of guys who shall remain nameless” thinking James was freeloading, and who got a “sympathetic ear” in Dan Hsu…well, that just ain’t the case. What is true is that James wasn’t communicative at all. We would never know where he was, due to his apparently busy schedule and bad tendency to roll into the office sometime between noon and 2pm most days (something he was still doing during his GMR tenure, when I left), which translated to us not being able to reach him until around 4pm in Chicago.

I’m sure he was working hard, but his increasingly bad reputation was based on other problems – missed deadlines; simply disappearing during important times of the day and month; tantrums; “issues” with personal game requests from publishers; problems with west coast coworkers; reviewing games without telling us his name could also be found in the credits; the list goes on…
Yes, James definitely liked to do things his way, and sometimes that’s to his credit. But in an environment where everyone relies on everyone else to deliver, and deliver on time, or else everyone’s workload increases, he was a liability a lot of the time. And this was despite the great things he brought to the table, such as generally representing the magazine really well and assisting in some cover and exclusive preview deals.

But he did get credit for all of that good stuff, even if his fragile ego didn’t allow him to see it. Maybe it was the fact that everyone else on the magazine got the same amount of credit for putting together a kick-ass publication every month? I don’t really know.

The part of this blog that’s really upsetting, though, is the insinuation that the relocated EGM crew wouldn’t put up with his loud, obnoxious ways because they were somehow out of touch with the entertainment business – apparently too uptight to have fun while working in a fun industry.

Now, let’s have a little perspective here, before we swallow what James is shoveling during this part of his story. At the Chicago offices of EGM, we had pretty much daily game nights; we had the cone of violence; we flushed GBAs down the toilet in the name of research; we had pantsless NFL Blitz tournaments; we set up Big Mouth Billy Bass on top of urinals just to scare the shit out of whichever poor, unfortunate soul simply wanted to go pee; we chucked Frisbees at each other down dark corridors in the hope hitting our prey in the neck; we set Crispin belly down on a motorized skateboard and used him as a battering ram on a pile of whatever we could find around the office that night; we did untold amounts of property damage with our antics; we had regular scooter races around the cubicles until “the man” confiscated our wheels; I came in one day to find a plushy beaver wearing a maple leaf hat hanging from a VGA-cord noose above my cubicle; we blasted some of the most obscene songs we could find at 1 in the morning just to keep the mood light during deadlines; we watched Crispin paint a wall with soy sauce after succumbing one too many times to Jon Dudlak’s ridiculous skill with a sniper rifle in Halo; we all laughed when an overly-affectionate Jeanne Kim fan sent nude photos of himself to her attention. And so on.

Clearly, we’d lost our ability to have fun doing this work.

But we also respected each other. If we were under a particularly strained time crunch, and we knew some (or all) of us were working our asses off to make that deadline, or needed a bit of peace in order to get their job done properly, we understood that and acted accordingly.
James never seemed to get that. And things weren’t nearly as bad as he’s saying in his story. I only remember one time that he was “hollered at” to turn down his music, and it was during a particularly bad deadline (the Vice City issue, I believe – the first issue after the big move), and following a lengthy amount of time where all of us had put up with his loud music and game play without any complaint.

It bothers me that his complete disrespect for his coworkers at the time is somehow translated publicly to his coworkers being total squares who just didn’t recognize that he was trying to save us all from ourselves. I don’t know if he really feels that way, or if he’s simply representing the situation that way to make himself look better in the eyes of his readers while relaying his personal history. All I know is that, in my eyes, it required a bit of perspective from those of us who worked with him at the time.

Greg Sewart Electronic Gaming Monthly EGM, Electronic Gaming Monthly, james mielke