AT Computers

Swag is very much a part of the video games industry. From cheap plastic toys to pricey collectors’ editions of games, a games journalist is mired in the stuff — most of it is sent by companies we’ve never heard of advertising stuff we don’t plan on buying. It seems wrong to keep it, wrong to give it away, and even wronger to sell it. No matter how you slice it, swag feels wrong — but it’s also necessary. And by now, traditional.

I think the weirdest piece of swag I’ve ever received was a Rayman Raving Rabbids thong three sizes too large for me (thanks, Ubisoft) or possibly that container of meat and fake bullets from Epic Games we got a month ago (cheers, Cliffy B.). The most expensive piece of swag to find its way to my desk was a $200 bottle of Cristal, courtesy of EA for a Godfather II event. The most amusing swag story I’ve ever heard was the time EA sent brass knuckles to several journalists and then had to ask for them back because it’s illegal to send weapons in the mail. The most common form of swag in this industry by far is the t-shirt in sizes L and above.

Let me be perfectly clear: as a journalist, I dislike like swag. It’s unethical and it erodes any claims I could make toward objectivity. As a gamer, though, I love it. Where else can you even get a plush bear hoodie with dangling paw sleeves? What, am I made of money and endless amounts of time to troll eBay? These two parts of me have been at war ever since I started working in the video games industry in 2002.

I’m not here to brag about swag or to call out the people who send it — nor would I presume to tell other people what to do with it. All I can do is talk about my experience and hopefully that’ll illustrate the culture of swag.

Spot the thong.

I’ve always felt guilty about swag — even when I was an unpaid intern whose only form of compensation came from the occasional t-shirt (and once a scotch glass from Midway). This is because my parents, both of whom are doctors, used to joke about the smarmy pharmaceutical companies who burdened them with swag in an effort to pedal their products. “It’s bad enough they push drugs, but they gotta push cheap pens, too?” my mom would laugh.

From them I got the impression then that swag was a bad thing, a shallow attempt at bribery, but my parents still took the stuff and even sent us kids to school with it (my brother once got detention in high school for sporting a Viagra-branded laptop case). So later, when I started work in this industry and found free stuff pushed my way, I learned to take it for the sake of appearances and sneer about it later. As if some flimsy wooden puzzle would make this one game suck less — or sway me to say otherwise, ha!

Your average swag bag.

Then good stuff started finding its way to me. Before the economy tanked, I couldn’t walk away from a press event without a nice (often leather) laptop bag loaded with goodies — at the bottom of which I might find a disc full of screenshots I desperately needed to write my preview of the game. The bags were useful, so I could justify keeping them — the same went for the hoodies because our office was rather cold even in summer. The stuff I didn’t keep was shuffled onto a coworker’s desk where other unpaid interns would pick at it. I’d use the bag or wear the hoodie until I’d ruined it, then toss it or donate it to a local clothing recycling facility and think no more about said swag.

I would’ve gone on like that for the rest of my career, probably, if I hadn’t gone to graduate school for journalism. While Stanford University graduate-level journalism courses never explicitly discussed swag, they did cover journalist-source conduct and the idea that a journalist would ever accept something from a source that wasn’t grand jury testimony or a hidden camera video of an anarchist riot where a cop busted a protester’s face was clearly inconceivable if not somehow illegal.

That bottle of Cristal, which I admit to drinking pre-Stanford.