Rampant Games - About Trolls and Fish

Myrthos

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This time Jay Barnson's blog is not about a game but on the internet trolls that drove away the indie developer Phil Fish, who created the game Fez. He was someone who loved attention and said some rather controversial things in his time thus stepping on quite some toes, which apparantly makes people think they have the right to take this cause of action.

And it goes both ways! Seriously. Just ‘cuz you are the creator of a game, or just because you’ve got a lot more followers on Twitter, or are the admin on some forum, does not give you some sort of divine right to be a jackass. Treat everybody with respect. Sure, you can ban / block / ignore those within your field of influence if they are perpetual trolls. But the respect needs to go both ways. If nothing else, because you are dealing with human beings (at least we assume so, though there are a minority that refuse to act like one). For another – these people may be ignorant of some of the aspect of game development or game fandom or whatnot, but that does not automatically make their opinion inferior to your own. Treat everybody like they might be your personal hero going incognito until they’ve proven themselves unworthy of such. And at such point, the best way to fight a troll is not to engage them, but to deprive them of oxygen (attention).

I don’t take any joy in seeing Fish’s retreat from online pressure. I really don’t. If anything, I worry that this will embolden the trolls, the bullies. We really don’t need this. We don’t need game developers hiding behind PR walls and ignoring all feedback from their audience because each hateful comment hurts enough to nullify twenty notes of praise. We don’t need toxic communities where those attempting rational discussion get threatened and banned because they are resisting the mob mentality. We don’t need virtual lynchings of developers that result in them losing their jobs over something stupid they said on Twitter. I say stupid things on Twitter all the time, so I’m really sensitive to this!
More information.
 
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Well I can relate to Phil Fish the internet is toxic and full of trolls. Sometimes it makes you wonder why you even bother.
 
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Internet can be really nasty place and no one should be treated like that.But on the other hand Fish is less amusing version of Cleve Blakemore and Fez is one of most overrated games imo so I can't say I am really sorry for him.
 
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Oh, this will be good.

And then there are people whose world doesn’t seem to extend much further than five feet from their nose. The kind of people who not only voted for, but campaigned for EA to be voted the worst company in America. Twice. Seriously, guys?

Seems pretty fair to me to go after any company that forces me to play games like the sims online and has almost literally killed everything I love in life, every game company and series worth a damn. Pretty pathetic apologizing, to defend EA. That's exactly the kind of company that list is made for.

I’m not the kind of loudmouth Phil Fish.
And yet we get 3 of these tedious blog posts a week on the front page of every rpg news site….

But the negative aspects – the death threats, the constant hate, the verbal attacks – got to be too much. So he quit. Maybe forever, maybe just long enough for the hate to die down so he can settle back into just making games.

Ok so looks like what he said was japanese games suck. Publicly and loudly. Sounds like he was pandering to the indie crowd and it backfired. Not sure what else he expected.

From the sound of it I thought it was tards attacking him for political beliefs much like with cleve. That I can sympathize with, this seems pretty much like justice.

You should be able to think japanese games suck, and probably most people who like rpgs do think that. But saying it at a vidya games conference is just…..

And it goes both ways! Seriously. Just ‘cuz you are the creator of a game, or just because you’ve got a lot more followers on Twitter, or are the admin on some forum, does not give you some sort of divine right to be a jackass. Treat everybody with respect. Sure, you can ban / block / ignore those within your field of influence if they are perpetual trolls.

I don't think trolls are a real problem, the real problem is games suck. Big budget games suck because they pander to least common denominator and the people funding them are MBA rejects who couldn't make it in a real job, and small games suck because they have no budgets to make anything decent.

If you have a game like mass effect full of sex scenes and blithering retardation it's only natural to ridicule it. As far as I'm concerned the system is working when developers can't just reach into the stream of the internet and get free asskissing and publicity.

They generally are not upset about alleged death threats but that people point out what's wrong with their games.
 
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I can't really empathize with people quitting their job over internet threats/ slurs, but I can understand them quitting over the realization that a lot of their customers are insufferable retards.
 
Yes, ironically enough, sometimes the worst trolls are the best customers… I think it is only natural that you feel strongly about something if you have invested a lot in it, and might become a troll out of disappointment when it doesn't turn out as promised.
 
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