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Wrote an article of praise for Diablo 3's contested DRM while his site was running a massive Diablo 3 ad campaign. He did backtrack two years later, after Diablo 3's developers had dropped the DRM themselves.
Covered the videogame Volume, which was a customer of Agency for Games—a company owned and founded by fellow journalist Leigh Alexander. Agency’s involvement in the Volume’s design has been confirmed by Bithell to have started prior to when Hamilton covered the game. Alexander and Hamilton have a very friendly relationship—exchanging tweets since 2009, meeting extremely frequently, working together. Hamilton’s article on Volume contains no disclosure of this relationship. Hamilton also covered Alexander directly several times—articles about Alexander contain very partial disclosures, while namedrops don’t disclose anything.
Wrote an article promoting a visual novel by Christine Love, without disclosing an apparently fairly developed friendly relationship—including frequent social media interactions, at least a meetup, and possibly more soon after the article.
Gave positive coverage to Joust without disclosing his friendly relationship with creator Douglas Wilson and game's voice actress Sarah Elmaleh.
Gave postive coverage to Redshirt without disclosing his very friendly relationship with the game's author Mitu Khandaker Kokoris.
Gave positive coverage to Gone Home without disclosing his admitted personal relationship with the game's voice actress Sarah Elmaleh.
Wrote about the doxing of actress Felicia Day following her blog post criticizing GamerGate. Took GamerGate's guilt as granted, despite it being impossible to prove and GamerGate hubs having mild reactions to Day's blog, universally condemning people calling for a reaction to it as shills and immediately condemning the dox. Hamilton also claimed the lack of harassment towards certain GamerGate critics as a point against the consumer revolt, and that the harassment targeting GamerGate activists was irrelevant in comparison. While the claim that Day was not actually doxed, with the leak containing data referring to her talent agency, is disputed and likely false, there is circumstantial evidence that makes the dox appear likely to have been undertaken by GamerGate's opposition or by third parties.
This journalist’s career means they might be subject to slight asymmetric scrutiny.
Dishonesty emblems may be based on subjective criteria.
Readers are encouraged to take entries critically, and form their opinion independently.
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