toblix

Fez 2

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Damn, Henroid, don't think I could agree with you any more than I do!

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I had to deal with anger management issues throughout my whole life, and I still do (but it's way easier going than it used to be), so I guess that's why I feel the need to defend Phil Fish. I used to be aligned against the guy but as soon as I saw that brief moment a month or two ago when he opened up, I came around.

 

There's this attitude people easily have over the internet that an asshole should be treated like an asshole. I don't necessarily disagree (see: Mitt Romney), but if you know that there's more to the picture you are actually harming someone. I've seen some people justify it as "tough love" and they clearly have zero experience in dealing with reactionary people. It's not about giving them a pass on why they have outbursts, it's about sitting down with them and figuring out why. You can do that without telling them they're OK to do what they do.

 

Anyway armchair psychologist time is over I guess.

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I went ham on Twitter over this. The "journalist" in question is the biggest fucking hack in the world. This shit makes me mad.

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I went ham on Twitter over this. The "journalist" in question is the biggest fucking hack in the world. This shit makes me mad.

 

I understand ragequitting, but someone being an asshole towards you just makes me think of success. That's the first person I ever had with me trying to write fiction. I figured if someone whom I've never met in person went out of their way to be an asshole specifically to me then I must be getting somewhere. I should really get back to that.

 

Sad to see Fez 2 go down though, regardless.

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Yeah I don't want to completely excuse phil here, because he's not blameless. But if you know the kind of personal issues a person has, and the kind of ways they will react to certain things, and you deliberately provoke said reaction, then you are equally responsible for the outcome.

If phil were a healthier person he would react better than he does. But he's not, and he doesn't. And to pretend ignorance of this after everything that has gone down in the past and to bait him and hound him and to act shocked when he predictably lashes out ... it's sickening. It's really gross. It's the worst kind of passive-aggressive bullying.

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This is super disappointing, but I totally understand. The amount of nerd rage and nerd judgment thrown at that guy is crazy. Just because a lot of people in the industry are able to ignore/deal with that sort of thing doesn't mean any one of them is obligated to.

 

Oh well, here's to his future of peaceful anonymity and/or his triumphant return once he cools down.

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Well shit. I was really excited about Fez 2, based on absolutely nothing other than the teaser, the first game, and the statement that the new game would be completely different.

 

It's hard for me to have an opinion on Phil and this situation, or more accurately, it's hard for me to know how much of my opinion is based on my love of the game Fez and my desire for the sequel.

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I will say this: I'm going to avoid discussions of this on the internet anywhere other than here. I really don't want to read a bunch of internet people's gloating.

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I'm still not entirely sure what Phil's reputation for being an asshole is based on. He's short with idiots? He said something unkind about Japanese developers? Inafune said much the same thing and no-one hounds him on Twitter for it. I can't think of anything he's said that is uniquely assholeish. Is this something in Indie Game: The Movie or something?

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He's kind of a jerk, I won't lie. It's not so much WHAT he says as it is how he says it. When he talked shit about Japanese games, it was after a super humble Japanese guy came up (at the GDC screening of Indie Game: The Movie) and was like, "I'm really proud of Japan because I can see the influence of our classic games in the games you've created. But what do you think about modern Japanese games?" (Paraphrased, obvs.) Phil responded: "They suck!" He went on to explain why, and also almost immediately apologized for how he said it, but the damage had been done. There are other examples. A lot of shit just flies off his tongue. I don't think he fully understands what he's saying until it's out, half the time. I dunno.

 

But the real problem lies in how people react: he fucks up, and is aware of it, but it doesn't matter because everyone just jumps down his throat, dual-wielding cacti. He understandably snaps under the pressure, and that snap bounces back and forth between him and the people yelling at him until he finally just... walks away from everything, like he did here.

 

Indie Game: The Movie makes him look like a pretty sympathetic, overly frustrated kind of dude who gets a lot of flak for stuff that's kind of out of his control. Which is absolutely true. But also not the whole story.

 

I like Phil Fish. I just think... well, Henroid said it all for me.

 

(Granted, everything I've said above is just my assumptions based on what I've seen from him both during his calm, calculated moments and his flame-broiled trolling.)

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I'm still not entirely sure what Phil's reputation for being an asshole is based on. He's short with idiots? He said something unkind about Japanese developers? Inafune said much the same thing and no-one hounds him on Twitter for it. I can't think of anything he's said that is uniquely assholeish. Is this something in Indie Game: The Movie or something?

Really? When Inafune said things I saw plenty of people react.

 

The thing with Phil Fish is he kinda made his internet-fame (or infamy) debut (as a personality) by saying some really tactless things. Like it's one thing to observe something about Japanese video game developers or development, and then another to just be insulting about it. He fell into the latter. And I held it against him (and if he still feels the same way, I'm still going to hold it against him).

 

But not everything he says warrants that kind of reaction. And not every outburst is uncalled for, sometimes it's understandable. People don't like to think of others dynamically though so we partition them into "good" or "bad" and Fish got put into the "bad" category.

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I think this also precipitated from a small incident that happened earlier this week when Polygon quoted Kevin Dent regarding the Xbox One's indie policies. Fish took issue with Polygon quoting Dent because Dent is well known for being a misogynistic asshole with very little indie credibility. He called out Polygon for seemingly forever over Twitter, both toward the main account, the writer in question, and various people in management positions there. At some point, Justin McElroy told Fish to email him because he though Twitter wasn't a good venue, only to basically tell Fish that they didn't know Dent was a human piece of shit.

 

Fish got pretty worked up about it, mostly because "we didn't know" isn't an adequate reason (I believe) to pull quotes from someone who isn't very qualified to begin with. So that started him on the path of really biting into "games journalism" and then this situation landed on top of that to deliver a finishing blow to his perception of how the press in the games industry works.

 

Speaking to the situation at hand right now, I feel comfortable pushing much of the blame to Marcus Beer, because he essentially positions himself as the self-proclaimed antagonistic troll of the gaming press. I don't think there's any value to having people who exist simply to piss people off or act pissed about things, mostly because I don't think we need to strive to produce negativity when plenty comes up naturally. Sure it doesn't help that Phil seems somewhat overly emotional and very reactionary, but when that's the status quo with this guy and you still call him out for dubious reasons (no press is entitled to the opinions of indie developers, and indie developers should by no means feel blessed to be asked) Beer deserves all the backlash and likely more than he'll get.

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100% on Team Fish on this one. A serious chunk of the gaming community is goddamn despicable, and driving good people away from the industry. And not to drag other topics into this, but this kind of harassment is the same reason that we're driving away women as well.

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Sounds like this dude could use a break from the internet for sure.

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Fish put up this post on Polytron's site:

FEZ II is cancelled.
i am done.
i take the money and i run.
this is as much as i can stomach.
this is isn’t the result of any one thing, but the end of a long, bloody campaign.

you win.

 

Looking through the comments that follow, the VAST majority of them appear to be a lot of hate against Fish.  My personal favorite:

You’re game was shit anyway, where was the shooting and gore?

 

I don't know if they're all genuine gamer rage but I like to think that guy is serious.

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Social media creates artists by bringing them notice and destroys them by delivering the bile of several hundred people to those artists.  I'm with Fish on this one but not with his hasty reactions (which I would have been guilty of doing if I were in his place).

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He's kind of a jerk, I won't lie. It's not so much WHAT he says as it is how he says it. When he talked shit about Japanese games, it was after a super humble Japanese guy came up (at the GDC screening of Indie Game: The Movie) and was like, "I'm really proud of Japan because I can see the influence of our classic games in the games you've created. But what do you think about modern Japanese games?" (Paraphrased, obvs.) Phil responded: "They suck!" He went on to explain why, and also almost immediately apologized for how he said it, but the damage had been done.

 

I still see people calling the man a racist because of this exchange, it's really pretty absurd.

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I feel kind of mostly bad for him, but all that "i take the money and i run" makes me think of is fucking Kangaroo Jack.

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Fish put up this post on Polytron's site:

 

Looking through the comments that follow, the VAST majority of them appear to be a lot of hate against Fish.  My personal favorite:

 

I don't know if they're all genuine gamer rage but I like to think that guy is serious.

Actually it was Cliffy B.

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I feel kind of mostly bad for him, but all that "i take the money and i run" makes me think of is fucking Kangaroo Jack.

Like I wrote in my first post here, people say shit they don't mean in the heat of the moment. Some do it more than others but that doesn't invalidate it happening.

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I still see people calling the man a racist because of this exchange, it's really pretty absurd.

Yeah, that's definitely disgusting. It kind of makes ME want to ragequit the internet.

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I still see people calling the man a racist because of this exchange, it's really pretty absurd.

 

My biggest fear about the gradual enlightening of the Internet and gamer culture is the co-opting of words like "racist" and "sexist" by trolls to put down good people doing nothing of the sort.

 

As for Fish, I feel as though he's not his own worst enemy, but definitely among them. The number of times he's quit Twitter in a rage, only to come back a few weeks or months later, shows an unhappy and unhealthy relationship with his own fame. Like Henroid said, I hope he gets some therapy or better therapy, so that the only demons he has to fight are the ones he meets on internet article comment threads. Those are bad enough.

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This kind of reminds me of an email that was sent into GWJ in the vein of "can you dislike an artists work on the grounds that the artist him/herself is, for example, a known racist/generally being a cock". Which, again, reminds me of Tegan's posts (amongst others) in the H.P Lovecraft discussion that prompted me to look up the name of his cat, and boy did that piss me off. People can't help but talk about how tortured the development of Fez was, and how much of a stir Fish caused in the industry. 

 

Anyway, I never really disliked Phil Fish, I never even knew there was so much vitriol aimed at him until I watch Indie Game: The Movie. I find him truly fascinating, it seems like he's not totally equipped to handle all the fame his art has brought him, and that's really interesting to me because it's clear that failure would kill him, but in reality like with most pieces of art, a few critics on the internet would talk shit about him and then he'd be free to do whatever he wanted after that. Although I can't blame him because if I was ever thrusted to a status of equal fame I'd probably be so nervous of failing I'd never release anything and flip out too. I doubt he'll totally leave the gaming industry, or even fully drop Fez II. 

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Chris just tweeted this out and it's pretty astute.

 

I just can't imagine how a developer would let the silly comments of random people on the internet get to him or her http://gamerfury.tumblr.com/

 

I can. Phil's been at the focal point of a parabolic mirror of internet rage for a long period. There is no way to dismiss that as insignificant over time. Even if no individual instance feels like it's getting to you and you feel fine, over time the effect builds up. It's not the unpleasantness in the moment, it's the erosive force of it over time. A boss of mine used to bully me. I thought he was a shallow twat who regularly exercised bad judgement, so laughed it off every time, but after three years of it realised it had actually been actually wearing me down by imperceptible degrees. Now imagine that, but instead of coming from one neatly isolated source, it continually comes from random strangers, often basing their attacks on partial or misquoted words you said. That'd be enough to shake anyone's faith in humanity and their professional environment.

 

When celebrities from any field let their personalities show and they're a bit weird, nowadays I automatically understand it as an inevitable byproduct of the amount of attention they receive and that's demanded from them. We are not designed for and are not very good at adapting to that kind of pressure. That combined with Phil's rage are an especially bad combination, but I don't think any of us would handle it well or be unscathed.

 

Going by most people talking about him, this is the paragraph where I have to put a mealy mouthed qualifier about the things Phil's said being unjustified, too harsh, not classy, etc. Fuck it though: I have nothing but sympathy for the man. Any bit of hatred people have had to deal with from him is orders of magnitude smaller than the collective heap of shit they've served up to him. He once said "Gamers are the worst fucking people", and a load of them seem hell bent on proving it.

 

 

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