In fairness, "Arena" never depicted its participants as playing for prizes or cash. But the show was always presented as two teams of human players competing against one another, and that wasn't always the case. Producers often used bots, or computerized players run by artificial intelligence, as contestants. "Arena's" small but active audience started raising questions about the show's veracity on G4's message boards as well as on computer game news sites such as Slashdot.

Both Wheaton and Oates were active on the G4 message boards, interacting directly with viewers. After noticing several postings asking whether bots were passed off as human players on "Arena," they asked their producer Jim Downs what to tell their fans.

"He told me to lie to them," Wheaton says, recalling the incident. "I said, 'I'm not doing that, but somebody's going to have to handle this and it's not going to be me.'"

Downs is the producer of "Arena" and is also a correspondent on G4's news show "Pulse." He formerly hosted a show entitled "The All-Games Network," which was streamed on the Internet by the now-defunct media dot-com Pseudo. He declined to comment on any aspect of his working relationship with Wheaton and Oates.

Wheaton says that Downs' disrespect for the G4 audience extended to the network's coverage of video-game news. "Mike Tyson got into trouble again -- surprise! -- and some Tyson video game had just come out," Wheaton recalls. "We were having a production meeting talking about whether we were going to cover it in the news. A lot of people said, 'I don't want to cover that. Mike Tyson is offensive to me.' Several of us tried to make the point that just because you are offended by something doesn't mean that you don't cover it. Jim Downs said, 'This isn't real news. This is video games.'

"I began to see a relationship emerge [between] video game companies and the 'news' on G4," Wheaton adds. "Jim even said it wasn't journalism and we didn't need to be objective, which was really disturbing to me."

Wheaton's differences with G4 went higher than his immediate producer. A Comcast executive pulled the hugely popular game "Dead or Alive 3" from "Arena" because she was offended by the game's imagery of big-breasted, scantily clad young women fighting to the finish. "This was a hugely popular and relevant game," Wheaton says. "What if this person was offended by 'Unreal Tournament' or the new 'Star Wars' game? We were letting one person decide for our entire audience what they're going to see."

"We couldn't say the word 'suck' on the network," Oates adds.

Participants on G4's message boards soon noticed the absence of "Dead or Alive 3" and its battling bikini babes. At that time, Wheaton began to feel that the cable channel's disregard for its audience might actually damage his career by compromising his extraordinarily open relationship with his fans, which he maintains through his blogs and Web site. Things got worse, he says, when he saw the disrespectful treatment of "Arena" contestants by the show's producer and staff.

"Jim [Downs] treated the players with complete contempt like they didn't matter to him," Wheaton says. "He spoke about them really disdainfully. He had this really laissez-faire attitude towards the players, that they were lucky to be there and they should do what we told them to do."

Vinnie Longobardo, G4's senior vice president of programming, disputed this in a Slashdot response that bordered on unintentional comedy: "Regarding competitions, to the best of my knowledge, no participants were treated badly or with disrespect and never treated as though they were lucky to be competing on the show or to be getting free pizza."

But Travis Oates also says he witnessed poor treatment of "Arena" players: "He [Downs] treated the contestants badly. I mean, they got no prizes or anything. It was a mentality of, 'Well, they're on TV, so they should be happy that they're getting on TV.'"

When Microsoft paired with "Arena" to air the national championship of "Halo" (a popular game for Microsoft's Xbox platform), Wheaton decided to advocate for better treatment of the competitors. "It might just be a video game," he says, "but these kids were finalists in a national championship and I think that's a significant thing. There was one woman who got that and cared about the players, but that was about it. Everybody else treated them the way that you would treat extras in a movie."

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