POLITICS IS STILL POLITICS, BULLSHIT IS STILL BULLSHIT, LETS ALL WANK OFF TO UNDERWEAR CATALOGS [Author: myschyf]

As you may be able to tell (since everyone who reads this site has such stunning powers of reading comprehension, especially when it comes to bylines), I’m pissed off and getting more pissed on by the minute. Every time I see some assholian game company engaging in petty politics and grandstanding to impress the raging masses of fanboys that gather slaveringly at every flash-impregnated web page, rather than buckling down to the job of making a kick-ass game and loving it (since, you know, that would require work, and children generally don’t work unless watched by adults), I get pissed. Every time I see a narrowly targeted demographic for a game (hint to marketers: women. They usually control the family finances. Another hint to marketers: teenage boys usually do not) that could be so much more I get pissed. What the fuck did you people do in college? And can you share? Do you have any professionalism left to you at all? Can you even spell “professionalism?” Hint: It’s in the previous sentence for easy reference.

This isn’t an industry. This isn’t a profession. These aren’t professionals. Let’s call a child a child. This is a high school playground. Where the inhabitants all play petty little Lord of the Flies games with each other and wank off to Victoria’s Secret catalogs. I feel like the straight-A student that studiously did all her lessons and looked askance at the other kids smoking pot — at the rest of the entire industry smoking pot.

I am tired of the amateur act. I am tired of the lies. I am tired of the audience. I have been reassessing whether or not I want to stay around this industry for the last couple of weeks and every evening I see or hear something else that makes me want to just leave, because you can only take so many showers.

I think this could be such a great industry. The potential involved in making virtual worlds that transcend the petty bullshit I’ve detailed over the previous four paragraphs defies description. But you know what? The folks doing it now can’t fulfill that potential. We’re expecting too much of the children. Like any other child trying to do something they really are too young to think about, they’re fumbling around in the dark hoping against hope that THIS time they’ll be able to undo her bra without causing screams of pain, actually meeting a deadline without burning through 3/4s of their employees and, you know, getting it right. But of course, this implies they would have a clue about how to schedule a project. And you know what? I’ll bet you that the hallowed halls of Verant, OSI and Turbine have never even seen MS Project. Because, you know, it’s hard to find on the warez sites. I’ll bet you there’s not one person there that’s ever taken a project management class or even has an idea what the words “project management” is. They have no clue how to schedule resources. All they do know is how to pay local strippers to pose for badly lighted fantasies of Mike Wilson’s Catholic school upbringing. They don’t even comprehend that there is a whole wide world of strange mystical beings out there – we at LumCorp like to call them “adults” – who don’t make their buying decisions based on which wench has the sauciest nipples.

But of course, that assumes that said marketing weasels actually strive to better the industry that they work in to begin with. Judging from the evidence, they don’t. They lie, they cheat, they play petty politics, developer A leaks shit about company B to website C so they can get a scoop on website D and impress the hot chick in IRC E so that they might actually score some cyber in channel F – and we all know what channel F stands for, don’t we? Don’t kid yourself – this is how the stories you miss so badly from “the good old days” happen all the time… everyone has a big fucking mouth that they can’t keep shut and I’m fucking sick of it. Which is nice, because after this article, I’m pretty certain developer A will never talk to me again. Which is just peachy, as I’m really sick of channel F because dude E really has no clue of how to cyber. Don’t even get me started dude E, otherwise called “the players”. I really don’t see any of the major developers as being major developers in 10 years — that’s another problem — FUCKING AMATEURS!!! This is a goddam playground for these kids — not a profession. Fucking Mike Wilson is the darling of the goddam industry right now. Stevie fucking Case is a goddam gaming god – Playboy said so, and if nothing else, she can be a body double for Lara Croft’s tits in the sequel, which I suppose does imply a certain amount of gaming godhood. Todd fucking Coleman is making the holy fucking grail of gaming by directly targeting cheaters and assholes. Given the rest of the industry, this is probably a stunning assesment of the market to date.

Which is why I’m fucking sick of it. Go home.