"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

[Mangela Lansbury]

Mangela - to clarify, the point being made was that the likelihood of swatting someone is low enough that the swatter could say in court that they didn't expect or intend any death to occur.

Yeah -- apparently I was more tired than I thought on the bus this morning. I'm dumb and can't read sometimes, sorry y'all!

[marblize]

I didn't back the Kickstarter so I don't have an angry dog in this fight and don't really care but i just don't see the point of sticking a finger in someone's face and shouting "LIAR! THE WORD THAT BEST DESCRIBES YOU IS LIAR! LIAR. ADMIT IT. JUST SAY THE WORDS. WHY WONT YOU ADMIT IT?"

Presumably people who would back a game are familiar with the history of outrageous delays in game development history and should assume a little bit of that risk.

[Dewar]

I have respect for Peter continuing through that interview. A lot of people would have just hung up.

[Gaizokubanou]

Yeah -- apparently I was more tired than I thought on the bus this morning. I'm dumb and can't read sometimes, sorry y'all!

 

I also apologies for bit of snarky response without explaining why.  I thought you were trying to flamebait.

 

On that "interview", wow that's some cringeworthy way of asking questions.

[Brodie]

Is it unfair to suggest that, at the point when Godus was Kickstarted, and knowing full well Mr.Molyneux's track record on expectation vs. delivery, if you bought in anyway then you should have done so with the acknowledgement that you may never see the game as presented? 

 

I've always thought of Peter Molyneux as an eccentric with some fun ideas and a very bad habit of making promises he can't keep. Which he is. He's not a monster and to treat him like he's some sort of sociopath is unwarranted, particularly in light of how many kickstarter projects fall apart in pretty much the same way. 

 

Also: fuck John Walker right now. There is a difference between asking hard questions and just being an asshole.

[itsamoose]

This is the fist I've heard of Godus' development woes, but to be honest I think this is a problem unique to Peter Molyneux and not just kickstarter.  He doesn't mind stating specifics, versus PR people who keep it to generalities, which for some reason people tend to take as fact rather than him just taking a conversational tone regarding his game's development.  In some ways he's a victim of his own success, in that he is completely fearless when talking about his work and convinces people of his ideas so well that when those ideas inevitably don't pan out the way everyone would have hoped, this constitutes a broken promise.  The same way that the Myth of Ken Levine or Cliff Blezinski informs people's opinions of their work in some ways to a greater extent than the work itself.  If something works out, that person lives up to the expectation of their myth but if it doesn't they personally are the reason.  Also, man is that interviewer passive aggressive as all hell.

[Brodie]

Also, man is that interviewer passive aggressive as all hell.

 

fixed that for you.

[itsamoose]

fixed that for you.

 

Well put.  Throughout the reading I couldn't get exactly what he was going for.  I mean what did he expect Molyneux to say that would have satisfied him?

[Vainamoinen]

Wasn't about "satisfaction".

[Professor Video Games]

If an interviewer opened with a question like that I'd most definitely end it right away. It shows a complete lack of respect for the interview subject and is totally unnecessary. Molyneux's explanations did all the work in showing how poorly handled that project was/is.

[Twig]

Is it unfair to suggest that, at the point when Godus was Kickstarted, and knowing full well Mr.Molyneux's track record on expectation vs. delivery, if you bought in anyway then you should have done so with the acknowledgement that you may never see the game as presented? 

 

I've always thought of Peter Molyneux as an eccentric with some fun ideas and a very bad habit of making promises he can't keep. Which he is. He's not a monster and to treat him like he's some sort of sociopath is unwarranted, particularly in light of how many kickstarter projects fall apart in pretty much the same way. 

 

Also: fuck John Walker right now. There is a difference between asking hard questions and just being an asshole.

Pretty much exactly how I feel.

[Bjorn]

The SVU episode might not have been all bad:

[Ninety-Three]

And 50000 raids were executed in the year 2005 alone

 

What the fuck? That's an insane number

 

So I did some rearranging of numbers because I was having trouble with perspective. 50,000 raids per 300,000,000 US citizens per year, times an 80 year lifespan and an assumed one person affected per raid. It works out to one person affected per 75 US citizens.

 

At 2005's rate of raids per capita, more than 1% of US citizens will be the subject of a raid at some point during their life. Jesus, that is an insane number.

 

I also did the same rearranging with the US arrest rate out of curiosity, and holy crap. But that's probably a matter for another thread.

[Patrick R]

And I bet it's going to disproportionately affect certain groups of US citizens!

[Ninety-Three]

Yeah, although I didn't examine those statistics in depth. If arrests were distributed evenly, at the 2012 rate, everyone would be arrested three times in their life.

[BusbyBerkeley]

Honestly I loved that RPS interview. Molyneux really shouldn't have been allowed to do a kickstarter and it's nice to see someone just fucking call him on his shit. I don't think I've ever read a games interview that was just so deliciously hostile.

 

Plus I love me some schadenfreude.

[Apple Cider]

If an interviewer opened with a question like that I'd most definitely end it right away. It shows a complete lack of respect for the interview subject and is totally unnecessary. Molyneux's explanations did all the work in showing how poorly handled that project was/is.

 

It was unprofessional. There's no way to refute a question like that  - the interviewer is already implying that they think you are XYZ and if you buy into  it, you get painted as such, if you refute it, you are painted as being so self-deluded that you can't see yourself like that. Calling someone a pathological liar when they perhaps are egotistical, have hubris AT BEST is immature and frankly, terrible. I barely know who Molyneux is, but even scanning his crumbly history shows me not a man who is a liar, but just a man who can't keep his promises and gets too excited by his work to be a person in a production role. That's not being a liar, much less a pathological one, which is a clinical term? Like what the fuck is going on there. 

[Problem Machine]

I have extremely limited sympathy, given the amount of other people's money he's wasted and apparent lack of remorse or personal responsibility in doing so. It may be a shitty question or a shitty interview, but I think the anger behind it is more than justified at this point.

[pkirkner]

Opening with a loaded question like that should ruin that guy's reputation as an interviewer. It served no journalistic purpose whatsoever. The only thing his readers could possibly learn about from an answer to that question is the interview subject's skill at rhetoric and tolerance for hostility.

[Problem Machine]

Well he obviously didn't want to be informative then, he wanted to be the avatar of righteous anger. Is that wrong or bad? I dunno maybe. Probably not the best way to get more interviews.

[Bjorn]

It was unprofessional. There's no way to refute a question like that  - the interviewer is already implying that they think you are XYZ and if you buy into  it, you get painted as such, if you refute it, you are painted as being so self-deluded that you can't see yourself like that. Calling someone a pathological liar when they perhaps are egotistical, have hubris AT BEST is immature and frankly, terrible. I barely know who Molyneux is, but even scanning his crumbly history shows me not a man who is a liar, but just a man who can't keep his promises and gets too excited by his work to be a person in a production role. That's not being a liar, much less a pathological one, which is a clinical term? Like what the fuck is going on there. 

 

I'm not sure it is a clinical term.  It's not in the DSM, which sounds like its at least part because people can't quite agree on what exactly it encompasses ( like does the liar know, or not know, that he is lying?).  But it sure as hell is a loaded term/question. 

 

Ultimately I think the interview, while somewhat interesting, is mostly a waste.  Like, what did we learn, that Molyneaux lives in a "truth bubble" of his own making in which he can't always recognize facts versus his memory of them?  Okay, we all do that to some extent, and it's hardly surprising that he does it to a greater extent.  That his grasp on the nuts and bolts of development is far exceeded by his vision.  Knew that already.  For an hour long interview, there is surprisingly little meat there. 

 

The more interesting story there is what is actually going on inside 22 Cans, and Walker's interview probably makes it much harder to ever learn that. 

[marblize]

I'm just going to repost what I posted on Gamerghazi just now:

 

"I attended my first games conference thing today. It was a wonderful event full of all different kinds of people. I was really surprised by how diverse the crowd was. I played some neat New 3ds XL games, like Gunman Clive 2, which was beautiful and challenging. I played for half an hour, and got like 8 stages deep as others came and went, frustrated (there were 4 set up, at least one was always unused - I wasn't hogging! D: ). Framed, on the iPad, was fucking awesome. Mobile games are so exciting right now. I mellowed out with a wonderful exploration game called Shape of the World for a bit. I saw some great talks by merritt kopas, Cara Ellison, Liz Ryerson, Matt Albrecht, Gonzalo Frasca, etc.

 

This is the current state of the fest's hashtag: https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=%23IndieCadeEast&src=tyah

 

People use this hashtag to post highlights from game design talks, share their opinions, share photos, etc. I can 100% guarantee spamming a bunch of techraptor articles all over it is not going to convert any 'neutral' Indiecade East attendees over to gamergate's side. That was the plan, yes? The only thing that seeing 16 blue gamergate illustrated portrait or purple and green logo tweets in a row does is annoy us a little, little bit. It's also easy to ignore. It just takes a flick of a thumb to get past the cascade of easily identifiable horse shit. If anything, this will 'convert' 'neutrals' to 'anti-gg'. So congrats on slightly tainting a good thing, and slightly annoying a bunch of people who really love games.

 

Also worth mentioning that virtually no (maybe definitely no?) gamergate authored #IndieCadeEast tweets are in the 'top' section of the hashtag. Thank god.

 

So gg, GG."

[Vainamoinen]

"Related searches: gamergate".

 

Nope, they're trying to ruin this full force. What a bunch of crapheads. Attack the indies, they're not dealing out the 'real' stuff anyway.

[Deadpan]

I've been thinking about something Cameron Kunzelman said about the interview and how that incredibly aggressive style previously led to some great discussions (notably RPS interviews with Yohalem and Rohrer). I think the big difference is that in those cases the conversation was rooted in Walker's understanding of the games themselves - questions of interpretation and specific examples - while this time it's rooted in his understanding of how the development of a game works, which quickly turns out to be flimsy at best, and then it starts circling around itself and gets into increasingly petulant territory like why can't he give a perfect estimate for how long something will take even after doing this for thirty years, and how dare he be in a fancy hotel a couple of days ago when there was work to be done.

 

Large parts of this read entirely too much like GG "grilling" journalists with questions about publisher bribes, trust funds and hidden cabals. Yes, those questions are tough and mean-spirited, but they're also pointless and show you don't really understand these issues and aren't interested in addressing them in any meaningful way. It's downright bizarre how much of this seems to be a proxy war over Molyneux's previous broken promises, an exercise in vindication that allows people to pin their anger on Godus or Kickstarter specifically instead of having to consider their own responsibility in continuing to fund and cover a man who so notoriously overpromises on things. Like, if RPS thinks Molyneux lies consistently about everything, maybe stop interviewing him every time he announces some new project regardless?

[JonCole]

Today I learned that when you search a hashtag, Twitter shows you posts from people you've blocked. How dumb is that shit?