GamerGate and You: A Discussion of Gaming Journalism

[Arenegeth]

Originally Posted by Nemmerle

snip

OK just so we can drive this puppy home.

First of all forget all these extreme examples you keep using about murder-rape farms sociopaths and murder becoming legal.

The worst thing a company really does in the real world, besides killing people (supposedly by accident) because they are too corrupt or a cheap-ass is something which I view as bad business. And also destroy the environment (also bad business). I personally think all these are problems of the modern corporate structure which I loathe, but lets not open this can of worms.

All of those things and many like it, illegal - legal, moral - immoral or not, at the end of the day I find them to be bad business.

My business mantra is providing the best product/services possible at the most competitive prices. And that is the way it should be for every company, but it is not (the reasons why is another chapter).

That is the best way to make money, if you’re good at something PR or no PR marketing or advertising, you will ideally have your business thrive. Is not that simple in the real world, but honestly every two-bit businessman in this day and age is too busy trying to scheme and sneak their way to profit they don’t even try for that. Or are simply incapable.

I say this in order to make a point that the reason I find lobbying inappropriate and those other (legal, like sweatshop factories) things appropriate (we already established that I think business should be an amoral empirical entity) is because the one is part of making business and the other is a business having power to do something it never should be able to do. The market should be regulated by the government not the other way around. I don’t believe in a real free market, because that means that (theoretically) a company can grow big and powerful enough to stop being a company and takeover governments or even the world. That should never be allowed to happen.

Now you get why I have problem with the one and not the other, it essentially boils down to power, the power of any company should remain in the economy, and should not be allowed to regulate laws and social structures, as we know of course in modern corporate business that is not the case. I do not view many of the very big corporations as a business but as neo-power structures similar to what the Templars were back in the day. Lets drop this here, because ultimately my views on business are not important to the matter at hand, this whole thing started by making the point that companies work as intended (in regards to gaming and even that is sketchy these days).

And this is the important part, whatever your perspective is on who or what is to blame, society at large, customers, businesses, practically right now, the consumer can alleviate a lot of the problems within the gaming industry, just by voting with their wallets (that may not be true with the corporate world at large). And that is just a fact.

I find the point you are making in regards to human emotions a bit dishonest, you should know to differentiate between individuals and social structures we have created for regulations. Rules, laws, bureaucracy, protocol, those tools are in place so we don’t act like the man-apes we are, they are the reason why our civilization has grown so far.

Obviously an individual left unchecked can’t be expected to check his feelings, look how Kings invaded countries based on a whim in years past, that is why we have built governments with so many gears to go through that what comes out in the end is as objective and considered as possible, it does not always work, but that is the intention, and is better than any alternative.

I hope you get my perspective now. What I have to ask is, how would you like companies to work? Not empirically, with empathy with an agenda? What would you like to see companies change so they can be more to your liking?

At the end of the day, regardless of our different perspectives on business (which are not really relevant to this topic) we seem to agree on how the situation actually is right now.

Difference is that I blame solely the customer while you blame everyone. And that’s OK. I think the are social issues at large that are the real problem under all of this, but I’m not set out to fix the world or human nature, I’d be content to see gaming recover closer to what it was in the earlier years, or grow bigger than before in a more substantial way, than the bubble waiting to burst that it is today.

Regardless of taking the long way there I think we agree on how inappropriate the behavior from some people from the industry has become, but you prefer the honesty (I do too for personal relationships) while I’d prefer a more professional conduct, though as you said we way past that point.

I hope your next reply is not too confrontational, I already spend a lot of time writing these posts (was fun though) and the ones I had to scrap for context and I’d like to hope we’ve come to an understanding?

[mdqp]

Originally Posted by Pint.dmg

Their tactics always boil down to the same method. It's essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy for them. Their entire argument always hinges on any attempt to prove them wrong being actually totally proof for their point. No matter how ridiculous the mental gymnastics need to get for that.

I call you a misogynist. If you dare disagree with that assessment, you prove my point, therefore you are a misogynist.

You want to claim collusion in the media? Well, sorry, but the media colluded to say you're wrong, so you're wrong.

I bully you into submission or leaving. Then I say I won. If you still fight, I'll just bully harder until you apologize to me.

Yeah, but what I am arguing is even more basic, in a sense. They are arguing that either what has been uncovered so far doesn't constitutes an ethical breech, or that it isn't enough to warrant outrage and further investigations, while at the same time demanding more proof or denying that it isn't about ethics if you can't provide them.

Or the way they argue about how if part of a movement is harassing, then the whole movement is disqualified from having a discussion, willfully ignoring that if such a standard was applied across the board, no discussions could ever be had (and that if you wanted to shut down a discussion, you would simply need to pose as a member of an argument and stir shit up, to kill any argument).

I guess what I am trying to figure out is how can they argue points that are intellectual dead ends, and aren't sustainable, and if I should always assume bad faith from anyone bringing those points up. I barely interact with anti-GG, but I see numerous people trying to do so, and more often than not on KIA you can find some threads (I don't know if this is the right name for a discussion on Reddit) either started by anti-GG, or where some anti-GG come and post, in which people repeatedly try to get the discussion moving (even if most of the times it ends up being snark, as some people clearly come just to troll, to no one's surprise).

I am probably just a bit tired by the marathon, and I am starting to get kind of angry at the misinterpretations I so often get to see, while still failing to see how anti-GG can be so smug about such self-defeating strategies.

[Jayngfet]

Gentlemen

Hold onto your butts

We're going to space.

First one to make an ayy lmao joke gets a gold star.

[Nemmerle]

Originally Posted by lmlloyd

I understand what you are saying, it just doesn't fit very well with my view of history. It was, to my understanding, the norm that there would be at least two competing publications in most markets, even in early American history. This of course is ignoring massive anomalies like Hurst, which would come later.

However, I see what you are trying to say, that barriers to entry create their own form of censorship. That is of course true, I just think we probably have different opinions as to how high those barriers to entry were.

Two competing publications describes today as well. You have Fox and CNN, what more do you want? We both know that meaningful political opinions do not reduce to binary viewpoints; left and right, Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative; and so, the question to my mind is whether the common man was free to speak his mind and have that heard by any great number. A mere handful of viewpoints cannot represent the complexities of any significant society, no matter how reasonable those viewpoints may be.

It may well be the case however that people regularly gathered to have meaningful debates, sent a great number of letters to those in their local community – in short had a meaningful political life as part of their culture – and that the conversations so constituted simply occurred on a far more local level. Though I do not see how it would have been practical to censor these things, and so I do not see why the media would have been in favour of doing so regardless of what it might desire.

Originally Posted by lmlloyd

As far as this goes, don't forget the speaking tour and debate. Before radio and TV, authors going on speaking tours, and politicians or intellectuals having public debates were an extremely popular American pastime. I don't think it paints the whole picture to just take the printed work in isolation, there was 'supplemental material' that added additional context and relevance.

Assuming that it was a meaningful pastime, taking our earlier definition of being part of a culture as being constructively involved with it – even if just in the constructive interpretation of the memes prevalent within the group – it raises the rather unfortunate question of at quite what point Americans transitioned from being members of the political culture to members of an audience of that culture.

If we take the view that vastly faster communication allowed information to be distributed absent its original context, and absent any meaningful action that someone could take based upon it, then the question arises why people who were members of a culture that had no use for that information in its constructive endeavours would choose to consume it. The information seems as if it would only be of use to an audience, rather than a culture.

Originally Posted by lmlloyd

I will just offer up the recent, not particularly positive, but nonetheless notable, phenomenon of the Tea Party Republicans, as proof that it is not inconceivable or unrealistic for a group of people to exert control over a party. However, as I said, people are mostly just lazy.

Were they successful? They seem from over here to have had relatively little effect and then gone on to rant about immigration.

Originally Posted by lmlloyd

I can totally see why you would say it seems contradictory. You have to understand, my previous comment was in the context of current 'Startup Culture' which is basically another 'innovative financial product' of the financial sector. It was not meant as an indictment of the theoretical capability of a small and motivated team, but rather the reality of how the current Venture Capitalist, IPO, Exit Strategy functions.

Ah, fair enough.

Originally Posted by lmlloyd

Really a whole different discussion, but multiple large-scale studies by very reputable employers, have shown that there are indeed massive advantages to distributed workforces, and people react better to face to face (even virtually) communication than they do to text communication. The impediment is basically the late nineteenth - early twentieth century management structures we use, which were really developed for industrial work, not information work. The expectations of management culture are really quite out of sync with what is actually most productive, but at this point they are so ingrained in our culture, that it is very difficult to change it.

As just one example of what I mean, a VP at this large telepresence company who used to be one of my clients, once said, fully aware of the irony "the majority of my job, is flying around the world, to sit in meetings and conferences, explaining the value of telepresence to potential clients."

Hmm. So people just aren't updating efficiently. Bugger. I expected better, I really did >_<

Originally Posted by lmlloyd

Ok, I understand what you mean better. If I am understanding you correctly, you are saying that the scale of the economy determines the amount of inequity. As a general statement, I'm fine with that. I just find it odd that you focus on the product of the economy as being the problem, rather than the economy itself. I mean, with 7 billion people on the planet, even if a society were a strict theocracy, the ruler of that theocracy, would have resources at his disposal that no pope (or whatever his title) had ever had before.

It seems to me you are talking about the absolute scale of the civilization, while I'm talking about the relative conditions of it's citizens.

Don't know I'd say focus on it – IIRC it was like two lines where I went, 'worth keeping in mind if we're going to look at history.'

That said, I do think that it fairly strongly influences the form that society takes. Any economy, however constituted, that produces a given output seems as if it's going to trend within a certain distance of any other economy producing that output – including the social conditions that surround it. If you want to have a culture that's going to invent and make set of things X then.... you need to be reasonably analogous to the culture that did so.

For instance, you don't get to 7 billion people – with all the associated support techs and practices needed for that – with a theocracy. It's like saying if the Roman Emperors and their system of governance had 7 billion people they'd be more powerful. Sure, they would, but not for very long. The infrastructure that supported that ideology couldn't handle 7 billion people. They couldn't handle a single modern city all by itself for that matter – there just wasn't the provision in their culture to deal with that complexity. When you start adding the tools that let you do so, the form the tools take doesn't lend itself well to the transmission of imperial or religious ideology.

It is, in its way, why China is trying to censor the Internet. They wouldn't have much success if they were all 'No internet for anyone.' And, why despite all these efforts they have such relatively little success in getting people to really believe their ideology – because the Internet’s not particularly suited to that sort of transmission.

It's like will there ever be a preacher on the net who gains much success for religion? No. I feel confident in saying that there won't. The form forced on the communication by the system – largely textual representation – isn't suitable for transmitting a spiritual experience based on strong social ties. And even if the spiritual experience could somehow be transmitted, you wouldn't be able to transmit the underlying rules that people typically took advantage of without putting them in a form where they're far more open to criticism. That's why the Church was so dead set against translating the Bible, it's why they were so dead set against the printing press, it's why they're so dead set against many of the forms of modern society. Because as the society changes they either have to change the definition of religion or fall by the wayside.

The reason that the Pope doesn't matter very much in the world is because he can't. It's the reason why no developed nation of any significant power in the world is a theocracy and anyone who attempts to go down that route will in relatively short order matter about as much in the world as North Korea does today.

Originally Posted by lmlloyd

Well, I don't think it really proves or disproves either of our arguments, but China is the obvious example of a completely different economic model, that produces massive consumer goods.

The last hundred and change years of Chinese politics have essentially been a response to The Great Disgrace and present the question of whether you can have a technologically progressive society without adopting the systems of liberal values that have hitherto described the Western powers. (And to a certain extent whether you can retain those values in a global security environment in which you're careless with your military and diplomatic power.) The Party secures its power with the ideal of a strong China to oppose the West – it's why it's so difficult to get agreement from them on stuff. It's not hugely different to the Soviet Union's old: “We will bury you [with a superior economy].” And we all know how that went once they'd ceased expanding basic education and the like.

This ties back to my earlier position that Popes simply wouldn't be able to meaningfully manage the complexity we have at the moment. They might be a nominal head of government, but in practice they're going to have most stuff run through a hierarchy that's largely autonomous, and that's going to have certain common qualities with capitalist models. It's like the UK, yeah - technically we still have a monarch... but as far as I know no-one pays her too much mind.

It seems to be only as China has become increasingly 'Western', so to speak, in its practices, including its financial system, that it has started producing large volumes of consumer goods. Only when they absorbed Western teaching practices, scientific methodology, went to Western schools, (or reasonable imitations thereof,) and started recording and publishing information in the media forms that had generally favoured Western ideologies that their manufacturing expanded in any significant sense.

I grant you that Chinese government does fund a lot of its industries more than the West, and has laxer laws relating to the treatment of workers and how industry can expand etc - but they're not that far into industrialising, and we are fundamentally talking about a debt-driven capitalist market. They happen to choose to sink that into Ghost Cities, because the Party demands certain growth figures from local government, but the pattern is the same. It's not a command economy in the same sense that the Soviet Union was.

Now, is China less equal in the West? Yes. But China does not produce the same things as the West, it does not invent the same things, and the more closely it's economic output resembles that of the West the more Western values it seems to acquire.

Though... all that said... I'm not averse to taking the economy as the thing to talk about instead.

Originally Posted by lmlloyd

I think that with the technical capabilities of near instant creation of information infrastructure and the just as nearly instantaneous ability to dismantle infrastructure, pose some interesting emergent organizational models that make anarchy more viable than at any point in human history. I even could point to various places in the world that I would argue have been functionally anarchies (due to governmental neglect or purposeful blindness) for years, with varying levels of success. I would also point out that from a political point of view anarchy means the lack of government, not necessarily the lack of order. That said, yes, there always has to be some at least base level of order to keep things running.

I just think that what we are seeing start to emerge, is the capability of citizenry, and especially industry, to surpass the government in organizational efficacy, which quickly reaches a point where society has to decide, does the government give up, and remain hands off, or does the government crack down, and limit the abilities of its citizens, to maintain organizational dominance?

Government seems to be there, as its core function, to provide and enforce a single source of compromise. It is what happens when you can't be diplomatic with each other and don't want to go to war – because whether you win or lose the fight in court it's still preferable to murdering your neighbour and then his mates murdering you.

While I can imagine forms of government that do not take the structure of a small number of people elected by a large majority attempting to run every aspect of life, and I can certainly imagine governments that are allowed to take less upon themselves. I cannot imagine a system in which there is no government – regardless of the relative efficiency with which it executes its functions. Even if that government is very local and consists of the locals voting directly on the issues, that would still be a government.

In the broader sense of the question: How powerful will government remain as people and companies are able to organise more things for themselves?... I couldn't venture a guess. I certainly don't want a world run by Facebook et al though. That's one of the dangers; that relatively easy organisation will inherently favour people with clearly expressed interests. The flipside of that seems to be that they already have fairly good communication channels, and that an increase in efficiency for them is going to have less relative utility than it does to people who are organising on a more ad-hoc basis. But how, or if, that is going to balance out in anyone's favour…

Originally Posted by lmlloyd

I could point you to any number of past projects on 4chan, any number of open source projects, any number of real life communal efforts, even the citizen response to the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, before the government could act. However, what all these things have in common is a cultural element. I do not believe that there has to be an authority figure setting the rules, when you have a common culture of agreed upon cultural norms. Of course the question is then how do you deal with interlopers or instigators acting against the cultural norms, and that question will vary from community to community. Authority figures are one popular answer, but I do not think they are the only viable answer.

There are authority figures, official or otherwise, in all of those settings (or at least that's what it looks like largely from the outside.) If we're going to drill down into authority, then the question is, more or less, who does it make sense to have deciding particular things where the group cannot agree? Or, to put it another way, how do you resolve dispute to the benefit of the group?

For an awful lot of projects, that doesn't really matter. If you don't like how the current project is doing something, then you just go and start another one. And if we could just go and start an entire new society, then things would be golden on the real government front as well.

Do we need authority figures? Only in so far as the qualities that they bring to the table aren't shared among all the members of society. If you can take those things out into argumentative norms, then you don't need someone to moderate the discussion – and you can deal with interlopers by parcelling out the authority such that no one person has very much, but collectively they have sufficient power to restrain the defectors. You would, in effect, be crowdsourcing government.

Given that we do not currently have those norms, I do not think this would go well without a source of significant selection bias.

Originally Posted by lmlloyd

The Escapist is, in my opinion, an almost perfect example of how excessive formalism is as bad, if not worse, than complete anarchy. The problem over there (even before factoring in any bias) was that they had a clear tradition of formalistic rules enforcement. Illustrating quite simply what I mean by that, it was an environment where you would be penalized for saying:

But if you instead said:

You would not be penalized, because by their formalistic application of the rules, you did not directly insult someone. The problem, of course, being that in the context of a disagreement with someone, those two sentences have identical meanings. You are, in fact, insulting the person disagreeing with you, just as directly, just as unambiguously, and just as unpleasantly in either sentence.

Thus, they are in no way actually punishing people for insulting each other, they are merely punishing those who for whatever reason have not employed the proper dialect for their insult. The end result being actually making a wonderful environment for trolls, because they can troll all day, and get the ultimate satisfaction when their targets get punished for calling them trolls, because that counts, under their formalistic rules, as an insult.

It is a perfect example of how moderation can actually be worse than no moderation at all.

Well, I can't pretend to understand how their rules work. However, there you'd seem, I might be wrong, to have an environment where the advantage is on the side of those who can keep their temper the best – or that has a, 'Meh, I'm not getting anything out of this conversation → blocklist,' response.

I'd have to ask if the people you're familiar with lose their tempers from that sort of thing, and don't have that norm of indifference, how you'd expect them to deal with trolls? By simply calling them trolls? That hasn't worked here in the past when people have been fairly blatantly trolling and, for whatever reason applied at the time, we haven't addressed them promptly. They seem to get off on it. Even if most people don't engage with them, a few do and then the thread goes to heck in a hand-basket.

I suspect there's a certain amount of concern from arguing before an audience: [If you don't engage with the trolls, then it may look like you can't engage with them. If you do, then you pay a feeling cost.] That stops people ignoring them properly.

Originally Posted by lmlloyd

Personally though, I think it is a sign of a massive failing of our entire model of education, that anyone could end up with a college degree, viewing the world this way. I think that postmodernism and comparative studies are valuable and important tools, but only when put in perspective as part of a system of rational thought, not a ideologies of their own.

Well, they're a place to get guesses about how things work from, I suppose. And as long as you actually check against reality once in a while, that's no terrible thing.

Originally Posted by lmlloyd

Actual journalism is quite expensive. Months, or even years, of developing leads, following stories that might end up going nowhere, traveling where the story takes you, lawyers to make sure you are not going to get sued, or to defend you when you do, all of this while trying to make enough money to feed yourself, and perhaps your family. We've seen the quality of reporting you get when you just let anyone post to a website, or setup a camera and start talking, and it is all unsubstantiated rumor and personal opinion, about topics that don't really depend on facts, and which will upset no one of any import. That is blogging, not reporting.

Journalism, yeah – in the sense you seem to mean; investigative journalism; that is expensive. Just spending a couple of weeks getting familiar with a topic is going to be dear. Pretty rare beastie these days though with all the re-packaged press releases.

Originally Posted by lmlloyd

Some would argue we are already there in America, with the bulk of the reporting coming from Huffington Post and Politico, and the TV just parroting back the stories that got the most clicks, as fits that station's agenda.

Hmm, something like Bluesnews updated in real time would be closer to what I'm talking about. I mean you wouldn't do it exactly like that, because it's terrible use of screen real estate – and you'd have a way of sorting according to certain criteria – setting watch flags on certain bits of news. But if we're just going for news without commentary or significant context that seems the extreme.

Originally Posted by lmlloyd

Well, my point was that they still might contain meaningful content, just not the meaning that was intended. I am immediately reminded of that management fad in the '90s, where every douchebag in an Armani suit had to bang on endlessly about how important The Art of War was to understanding their idiotic power lunches.

Presumably with the assumption that people had learned nothing more about war and business in thousands of years... ¬_¬

Originally Posted by lmlloyd

It isn't a matter of relativism. It is, if it is taught properly, an issue of the progressive construction of better models. Plato should not be taken as sacred text, to be venerated and quoted as truth, it is just one of many steps in understanding the context of Kant, who you need to understand to really know what Nietzsche really meant, who in turn is necessary to understanding what McLuhan meant when he said the medium was the message, and so on. It is one long, evolving, story, where each builds on the next, while in some ways tearing down that which came before. Seeing how it progressed, is in some ways more important that what was said by any one philosopher, and they all contribute to our current understanding.

Where modern education falls down, is in teaching dates and facts and quotes, instead of teaching the progression and evolution of the concepts, and how they influence each other.

I think that to a large extent depends upon the philosophical tradition you're talking about. My background in this regard is primarily in analytical philosophy, and as such I would tend to view philosophy as mostly making direct statements about supposedly apriori knowledge, or about the world as it actually is – and much of that sort of philosophy has gone off and become harder form of science as the depth of knowledge in those areas has increased. When I talk about students picking out mistakes I'm talking of logical mistakes in how the arguments are structured, and mistakes of equivocation where they've used a word that means different things in different places as if it means the same thing. Words that don't seem to have drifted much in their meaning over the years.

Most of what you are talking about seems to be what we could broadly describe as continental philosophy. If we're talking about things like Nietzsche's view of biophilosophy and McLuhan's more hopeful response to that, then, while there are definitely elements of analytical thought in them, a lot of it a confession of the philosopher's way of looking at the world and their view of the culture of the time.

Originally Posted by lmlloyd

I haven't had an employer in over a decade. I own my own company, so I'll probably never end up a salaryman.

Ah ^_^

[fierytrainwreck]

Originally Posted by mdqp

snip

This is why I support GG - I refuse to acknowledge the validity of arguments based almost entirely on formal and informal fallacies. I don't care if your ends are just when your means are irrational, anti-intellectual, and destructive. The end result of most antiGG reasoning is the annihilation of all communication between human beings who happen to disagree, and THAT is what leads to true violence.

[Lunar Archivist]

Originally Posted by Arenegeth

I don’t believe in a real free market, because that means that (theoretically) a company can grow big and powerful enough to stop being a company and takeover governments or even the world. That should never be allowed to happen.

Isn't it already a bit too late for that considering what's already happened with the HSBC?

5 Outrageous Revelations from Matt Taibbi's Takedown on HSBC's Drug Money Laundering | Alternet

The problem with getting any business to behave ethically is that they're devoted to the bottom line and nothing else. People always laugh when I point this out and respond with "Businesses are supposed to make money! What else do you expect them to do?" so I've given up trying to convince them otherwise. I personally believe that it's better to forsake some profit if it means your customers genuinely trust and are devoted to you, but that apparently makes me a lousy businessman. *shrugs*

Originally Posted by mdqp

Or the way they argue about how if part of a movement is harassing, then the whole movement is disqualified from having a discussion, willfully ignoring that if such a standard was applied across the board, no discussions could ever be had (and that if you wanted to shut down a discussion, you would simply need to pose as a member of an argument and stir shit up, to kill any argument).

I've spoken with someone who has a stake in all this and has a Ph.D. in social psychology and his reasoning for this is that, since GamerGate doesn't have a defined leadership, power structure, or membership requirements, we lack plausible deniability for the actions of trolls and professional agitators who use the hashtag. The gaming media theoretically have all three, which is why our accusations never seem to stick.

I think the reasoning behind this is bullshit because we don't exactly see Leigh Alexander and other journalists calling out the anti-GamerGate people's bad behavior, but there's no reasoning or arguing with them.

Originally Posted by Pint.dmg

Their tactics always boil down to the same method. It's essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy for them. Their entire argument always hinges on any attempt to prove them wrong being actually totally proof for their point. No matter how ridiculous the mental gymnastics need to get for that.

I call you a misogynist. If you dare disagree with that assessment, you prove my point, therefore you are a misogynist.

You want to claim collusion in the media? Well, sorry, but the media colluded to say you're wrong, so you're wrong.

I bully you into submission or leaving. Then I say I won. If you still fight, I'll just bully harder until you apologize to me.

It's actually a newly-defined logical fallacy known as kafkatrapping:

The Daily Bell - Beware of Kafkatrapping
Kafkatrapping

[Jayngfet]

Originally Posted by Lunar Archivist

Isn't it already a bit too late for that considering what's already happened with the HSBC?

5 Outrageous Revelations from Matt Taibbi's Takedown on HSBC's Drug Money Laundering | Alternet

The problem with getting any business to behave ethically is that they're devoted to the bottom line and nothing else. People always laugh when I point this out and respond with "Businesses are supposed to make money! What else do you expect them to do?" so I've given up trying to convince them otherwise. I personally believe that it's better to forsake some profit if it means your customers genuinely trust and are devoted to you, but that apparently makes me a lousy businessman. *shrugs*

Actually it makes you a decent buisnessman if you can build a plan around it. Having a loyal base to work with is absolutley a good thing and often worth an occasional bit of sacrifice. That's why as of late Disney can do no wrong despite being in the gutter several times during their history.

It makes you a shit shareholder however. A shareholder's only concern is the bottom line since their only concern is essentially gambling with corporations. They don't need things to work longer than a few years because worst comes to worst they can just sell off and wash their hands of this. That's why EA's shareholder meeting was so legendary around TOR's launch, since they could lie to the audience but the boys at Goldman and Sachs take no bullshit and feel no affection to them.

Shareholders, much like Advertisers, are something that get between the creator and audience. They make ridiculous demands and have no knowledge or concern for the industry itself. If it's a choice between buying something once for a hundred and never replacing it, and buying it for twenty and needing replacement regularly years down the line, they'll take twenty every time.

[TehDoh]

Meanwhile on twitter, i'm stuck between a tachikoma and a lemon because of reasons

Spoiler:

[TehDoh]

Meanwhile on twitter, i'm stuck between a tachikoma and a lemon because of reasons

Spoiler:

[lmlloyd]

Originally Posted by TehDoh

Meanwhile on twitter, i'm stuck between a tachikoma and a lemon because of reasons

Spoiler:

And just out of curiosity, which I've been asking all along, how does this change anything? This is my entire problem with this whole love letter strategy, what can it possibly change? I mean except of course for Ivy's reputation as a game PR agent.

The problem with the entire concept behind sending love letters to devs, is it's great and all for them to say "thanks, we know you love us" but how does that in any way change the current situation?