The job of video game critic or journalist is a bully pulpit – a great venue for expressing opinion and sharing ideas. But that perch also makes writers an ideal target. One misspoken word, fudged fact or misunderstood phrase and out come the pitchforks and torches. Recently three writers caught the ire of the community for their work. I've caught up with each of them with the hopes of getting their side of the story.

Peter C. Beller's Forbes profile of Activision boss Bobby Kotick stirred controversy for calling Rock Band a "shameless knockoff" of Guitar Hero. The loaded phrase struck a nerve with readers and bloggers alike.

Peter C. Beller of Forbes responds:

My terming Rock Band a "shameless knockoff" of Guitar Hero was based on the fact that it came out after Guitar Hero and sported very obvious similarities with Guitar Hero, including color-coded prompts moving onscreen along a fret board. It even accepted the same Guitar Hero guitar controller, I believe.

If you define knockoff as "a copy or imitation of someone or something popular" the way Merriam-Webster does, then I think Rock Band fits the bill nicely.

I was aware that Harmonix designed both but Redoctane, then Activision, actually owned the game. When Harmonix sold to MTV and produced Rock Band it appears likely they took their know-how from Guitar Hero to create Rock Band along a similar vein. Which is a better game? Not for me to decide.

The point I was trying to make was that just because Bobby Kotick spent $100M for Guitar Hero, or has a long-running skateboarding franchise, doesn't mean he can churn out sequels without the threat of competition. More broadly, creative talent, on which the industry depends, is quick to migrate to where it feels most appreciated and remunerated.

Astute Ripten readers noticed that Demi Adejuyigbe's review of Shaun White Snowboarding for the Wii mentioned online features that game didn't have. The article was later edited to reflect the error. But not after readers and commenters accused the critic of never having played the game. Adejuyigbe insists, "I did indeed review this game after playing it in its entirety," but declined to comment for this column. Dan Landis, reviews editor for Ripten, had this to say:

We don't work in an office. We don't have security cameras in our reviewers' houses. We have no way of knowing what our reviewers are doing or whether they ever play the games they are reviewing, but we trust that they aren't being deceitful. What would be the point of that? Why take on the workload but not get the experience of playing the game? We don't assign reviews to our writers; we instead have them request to review games they are interested in. Why request the game if he wasn't going to play it?

Demi is a good writer and a good reviewer, and in my experience working with him, he doesn't strike me as the kind of person that would fabricate an article. I believe that it was an honest mistake -- he just mixed something up. Hopefully this experience will at the very least make him much more cautious about what he attaches his name to for all of the Internet to see. To be honest, I'm more concerned about him feeling like total sh** than I am about the reputation of our site.

And, finally, Scott Jones (one of my co-workers at Crispy Gamer) fessed up in a column called "Critic In Exile" that he didn't like Fallout 3 all that much. In the piece he admitted to making a game of the year vote for the game, despite the fact that he wasn't that crazy about it. Several bloggers took offense. Writer Adam Rosenberg called the admission "grossly unethical" and Cole Stryker from Nerve called Jones a "spineless hack."

Scott Jones responds:

What I was trying to do was be brutally honest from a personal perspective. I knew I'd piss off some people but once their emotions faded a bit, and they were alone, in the middle of the night, maybe they'd think, "Hey, wait a second. You know, Fallout 3 did have its problems. And I didn't really like it all that much either." I felt like there was a very quiet groundswell of people who didn't have a voice [and] I was among those people.

There was a thought among some readers that Jones had actually reviewed the game and lied that he liked it. This assumption was straight-up false. "They are mistaken," he says, "I knew I had to look at it. But I didn't want to review it for anyone, because my feelings were very mixed." For Jones, his granting the game a best-of nod came down to awareness of his audience. "We wear different hats as writers and my Crispy Gamer hat is, obviously, more gamer and enthusiast-centric so voting for Fallout 3 felt like more of the Crispy Gamer thing to do." What it came down to for Jones is that there wasn't a single stand-out game in 2008. "I think part of the blame has to go on BioShock. Here was a game that I fell for, so hard. And that just never happened this year."