My Very Own “I Told You So” Moment
There’s been discussion on R*IF lately on how Paul Panks didn’t get his “I Told You So” moment, where he would’ve proved all his detractors wrong. It is a shame and not many people who take on the establishment get to have theirs. Something just clicked this evening and I realized that I was one of the fortunate few.
I got mine.
Here’s the backstory.
One of the reasons why the Ifwiki blows chunks is that it’s run by a clique of little Stalinists who try to prescribe their opinion about things as fact. I was one of the early contributors to the IfWiki, long before it really took off. I contributed to various articles and even wrote one (as memory serves). One of the articles I gussied up was about the history, present, and future of commercial IF. I wrote in admittedly-glowing tones that the age of commercial IF was not dead, as 1893 and Future Boy! had shown. Apparently two commercial entities weren’t enough. For daring to go against what the little Stalinists had decreed was truth immutable, my edits were flayed, I was personally attacked, and eventually, they took out what I wrote on the basis of majority vote.
Textfyre has released a commercial game. That makes three commercial games, put out by three separate commercial companies!
I TOLD YOU SO..
You can’t bury it any longer, guys. Commercial IF is resurgent, and long live all those who will make it glorious. Finally, on a personal note, there’s an awful lot of peace in being vindicated.
IFDB: That Don’t Impress Me Much
I’ll make no secret about it. The IFDB doesn’t impress me much. Now the idea is a great one, for both game designers and game players. But it’s the people involved who screw it up, a la usual. Sometimes I think that the IF community is comprised of the smallest, most vindictive, petty, vengeful, and disrespectful people on the face of the earth, because there is a spirit of “never let the other guy get the last word” that runs rampant on the IFDB and elsewhere.
Seriously, now. Where else have you seen where people feel it’s necessary to not write a review about a game, but a review dogging on another review? That’s pretty common. Then you have the silly little “I’m going to vote down MOST/ALL your reviews because I don’t like what you said in one” voting. What the heck is this, people? Third grade? Lastly, you have the “anything goes” policy of the moderators, which just amp up the noise ratio so that you have to wade through all of these personal vendettas disguised as reviews.
I wrote one “review of a review” just to prove a point — that if you want to broadcast your smelly little orthodoxies, that there will always be someone who can disembowel you verbally if he or she so chooses. Then, having said my piece, I immediately lost all of my interest in the ifdb as a watering hole. I don’t even bother to read reviews on my game.
That’s a big thing that generally sucks about the IF community: lack of spine. The bartenders are so afraid of offending this Old One or people in general, that no-one is willing to call them on their immaturity. As a result, every saloon gets shot up on a regular basis and everyone lives one step away from blowing away someone else. I really don’t get why we can’t treat each other like human beings instead of trying to argue our points endlessly. IF suffers from an endemic lack of humility and a corresponding overabundance of vanity.
