Cue Rant Mode

Several Opinions from Rich Redman

It's returned to my attention recently that people say a lot of things that are clearly and demonstrably stupid and wrong. Gamers are no different. In fact, all the things I'm going to call out below are from posts on gamer message boards. Please try to keep in mind that, no matter how worked up I get on a topic, my goal here is to help you express your ideas and opinions more clearly and in way more likely to have the impact you want.

"Everyone…"

Stop right there. You don't know everyone in the entire world. You didn't check the opinion of everyone in the entire world. You don't even know or check with every gamer in the entire world (a much smaller subset). Anything you say after this is automatically suspect because whichever gaming company you talk to has at least spent some money on market research and has a much more in-depth picture of the marketplace than you do.

When I worked for Wizards of the Coast Customer Service, I would sometimes get taken to conventions as a "gunslinger," meaning it was my job to sit at the booth and play games (usually Magic: the Gathering®) with anyone who wanted to play (this was back in the days before World Champions and Pro Tours and people who could whup me in the first round). It always astounded me how little the "big" local players actually knew about the game. They always played with the same small group of people, they all made the same assumptions about how the game was played, and they all built decks to beat each other, not to win (the difference is that a winning deck should win against any opponent in the same tournament environment, whereas a "beating" deck only wins against certain specific decks). Because I traveled the country playing the game, I brought new ideas to groups that thought "everyone" played the way they did.

Do yourself a favor and stop using "everyone" to justify your opinion. If you're going to express an opinion, have the guts to express it as your own. Your opinion is just as valid without "everyone" supporting it.

"Everyone I know…"

This has a lot of variations, including "Everyone I play with…" Look, it's a matter of scale, okay? Let's be generous and say you know or talk to 1,000 people. That's probably too many, but it's not terribly unrealistic. If you have maybe a dozen gamer friends plus people you talk to at your FLGS plus some online acquaintances, you're getting pretty close. The trouble is millions of people all around the world play Dungeons & Dragons®. That group of people you know is less than .1% of the audience. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking The Game Mechanics are much smaller than Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro, and you're right. At their scale, we're not even a flyspeck. However we see the marketplace at that scale. Heck, we can't help it. We worked for them! The opinion of you and everyone you know is more likely to influence The Game Mechanics because a thousand sales has more impact on our bottom line, but we're still going to put your opinion into the larger picture of the overall marketplace.

Let me digress for a second, because many people don't think about this scale. In fact, let me digress further. Several times per week I deal with people who want special permission to use some part of an intellectual property for either no money or some amount that seems huge but reasonable to them. Look, I get it. Gaming is, and always has been, a grassroots, hobbyist, activity. What you need to realize is that even the most successful game companies (which isn't us yet but we get closer ever day) are tiny compared to a corporate juggernaut like Hasbro, Mattel, or Lucasfilm. They have international corporations' budgets. This means that a license has to offer something significant on that scale in order to be considered. Sure, there are older agreements that are smaller than that. Many of them compose the daily workload of licensing managers, and that's the point. They're certainly not going to increase their workload unless the return to their company is significant on the company's scale. "Everyone one you know" is just not a significant number on that scale.

None of those things means that you're insignificant or that you should stop voicing your opinion. What they do mean is that you should stop using this argument. It's meaningless, and you'll sound much more reasonable and influential if you just own your opinion and state it calmly.

"…all the books…"

This is about the dumbest thing ever. It's usually in the context of "XXXXX revision [or XXXXX new campaign setting] sucks because everybody already owns all the books…" This is incredibly and obviously dumb to anyone who thinks for a moment or two, and I'll prove it. No! I'll prove it twice!

First, if everybody owns all the books, then all books would sell equally well. That's clearly not true. Some books sit on shelves forever, while others can't be kept in stock. Other lines get cancelled. I've seen our numbers, and I know that Stan!'s Modern Player's Companions are huge sellers for us, where others are less so, and some don't even come close. When we worked for Wizards of the Coast, we saw that company's sales numbers. We know our books don't even come close to selling as many copies as theirs. What's a lot less obvious is that there is a huge sales difference between books aimed at players and books aimed at GMs. You know very well there's got to be at least four to six times as many players as there are GMs, so this discrepancy should be expected. However, it argues against everybody owning all the books.

Second, if everybody owns all the books, your opinion is irrelevant to the gods atop some corporate Olympus because they already have your money. The idea that everybody buys all the books shoots any opinion or argument that follows right in the brainpan. Don't tell a company that it needs to change something and then say you'll buy it anyway. Come on, people! Act as smart as I believe you are!

It's not true that everybody owns all the books. Market research says that the audience is larger than the sales numbers of many products. If it was true, then the audience would be so undiscriminating that companies could type random letters, slap some cardboard on it for covers, and (with the right logo) sell as many copies as it could of something that R&D spent years on, the best editors in the world proofed, the greatest artists ever illustrated, and printed on gold leaf with a $5 cover price! So your opinion will actually sound more reasonable without this.

"…Just wants our money."

Every time I read this I think "Duh!" Okay, we've been there. We've been young people with extremely limited incomes. We've been through that period where our families bought everything we really needed and gaming was the first thing on which we spent our own money. We remember the passionate devotion to the hobby that goes along with being passionate adolescents, and how much it can hurt to choose between what we want and what we can afford.

I wish I could tell you that it gets easier, but it doesn't. You just get used to it. The simple fact is that businesses exist to make money. That's as true for The Game Mechanics as it is for General Motors or Prudential Insurance. We don't apologize for it. In our case, we're both the designers and the guys who run the company. In the case of larger companies, that's not true. The designers are most often gamers and writers and are interested in producing the best and most desirable products possible. They don't want to produce desirable product because it will sell (though they're not completely ignorant of that), they want to produce it because the fans want it. Those designers are the ones reading your posts, not the corporate bean counters.

So when you accuse a business of just wanting your money, you're stating the obvious. You're also risking alienating the people who are trying to produce what you want as fast as they can. Get over it, accept the commercial reality of our world, and get to the meat of your message instead of padding it with this accusation.

"This doesn't work in my game."

What were they thinking when they didn't take your campaign's needs into account when designing their product? Shouldn't that have been their number one design guideline?

This is simply not useful feedback. No publisher designs products for your campaign world. In fact, if one publisher seems to be designing with your campaign in mind, you should probably just play in that publisher's campaign world.

It's another invalid criticism that distracts from the message you're trying to get across and may cause the very people you want to read the message to skip over it.

Idontneedgrammarorpunctuation

When I read a post on a message board, I try to value it as much as the person who wrote it. When you don't bother to use decent grammar (note that I'm not asking you to be perfect), don't bother to use words that you know how to spell, and don't bother to use little things like punctuation, you clearly don't care very much about the clarity of your message. You may think you do, but the evidence strongly suggests otherwise.

If you are posting in a language not your own, please let the readers know. We're much more inclined to cut you slack. Personally, I'm much more inclined to value a message posted in English by those who make the effort to post in a language other than their native one! If you want to get your message across, strive to make it as easy to read as possible.

"I haven't read this but…"

I've said this before, and I'll say it again. If you haven't explored a property, you can't have detailed knowledge of it. You can still have an opinion, but you need to learn to differentiate between a purchasing decision and a decision about a product.

I can read the marketing copy about a book or movie or TV show and decide that's not my cup of tea. My opinion, in such a case, is really that the marketing message didn't grab me and make me want to know more. That's a purchasing decision. I'll give you an example. I've never watched an episode of 7th Heaven. That's because all the marketing that I see for it fails to grab me. I have no opinion about the show per se because I've only seen the marketing. It could be a great show. It's certainly popular enough to still be on the air. I won't "purchase" it (i.e., watch it), though.

Believe it or not, there's another variation of this that's equally common and takes the opposite position. I've seen people post that they haven't read a book but love it anyway. This is called neophilia, meaning a love of novelty or new things. While it's a lot easier for authors to accept, it's equally invalid. In fact, it poses a real danger to you. If you build something up in your mind to be the best thing ever, chances are the reality will not live up to your expectations and you may wind up disliking it. I love the Hellboy comic books (heck, I've got a BPRD ball cap and a Hellboy satchel), so I'm in real danger of being disappointed by the upcoming movie – not because it'll be bad, but because my expectations are unreasonable.

So when you're giving your opinion on a product, differentiate between stating your purchasing decision and stating your opinion. Let people know the limits of your experience, and then stay inside them. For example, if we announce a book title, like Cromagh's Guide to Fluffy Bunnies, you can have an opinion about the title—-especially if you've read the wonderful Cromagh's Guide to Goblinoids. You can't have an opinion about the book's contents. Once we put up some sell text, you can have an opinion about that sell text, and you can make a purchasing decision. You still can't have an opinion about the book's contents, but you can help us by saying that, based on the sell text you will, or will not, buy the book. What you should not say is "it sounds like crap, so it is crap." I know it's scary to stand out there unsupported and take a position that you don't like something, but you're a lot more likely to get a sympathetic response (even from the writers and publishers) if you don't try to hide behind the idea that you can judge a book by its metaphorical cover. Otherwise they're more than likely to think, "Oh, look, a troll," and blip over the rest of your post.

No, this doesn't force you to buy something in order to have an opinion about it. You're welcome to have an opinion about everything that you got for free--the advertising, the sell text, the sample, the web enhancement, and so on--and to make a decision based on that. What you must do is recognize that your purchasing decision is not a valid opinion about the contents of a product. It's a perfectly valid opinion of the advertising and sell text, and a perfectly valid decision for you to make. You can flip through the book when it's on shelves, look at free preview material, and read reviews and then make a truly informed purchasing decision, and at that point I think you should have an opinion about the contents. Don't take it out on the product and the company if they aren't exactly what you dreamed up in your head.

"I'm not a lawyer…"

There are two contexts in which I see this most often. The first says this, or "IANAL," then gives a legal opinion. That's a good disclaimer. You should let people know that they should compare your opinion with that of a lawyer before making a final decision.

The second says this, and then professes not to understand some legal text and asks for help. Look, you've got two clues here. The first is that you have no legal degree, and the second is that you don't understand some legal text. The solution to which those clues should lead you is that you need a lawyer. I see this all the time on the d20 General boards at Wizards of the Coast. People, just because the OGL and the d20 License are free does not make them any less a legally binding agreement. Some folks, and some businesses, seem to get the idea that, because they're free, they're also trivial. As 1/4 of a third-party d20 publishing company, let me assure you that's not true! They are serious, weighty, and legally binding (and Hasbro has deeper pockets for legal fights than you do, or than we do, for that matter). I see other people who think that because they're free, they're meant for easy use by individuals. As a business person, let me assure you that's not true either!

What you need is a lawyer familiar with licensing and trademark law. Once you get a legal opinion in terms you can understand, then you can make a business decision. Game company message boards are not the right place to solicit a legal opinion. Crack open your phone directory and look under "lawyer."

"You suck. ;-)"

I'm not sure if it's clear in my work and my posts on various boards, but I like emoticons. I especially like board posts that make good use of the range of icons available. Text has no inherent emotional content, the way speech or images do. The feeling that I get from a message is more often some emotion from inside me (and not always an appropriate one), unless the writer states his emotional intent and/or uses emoticons. I know that I'm guilty of not stating my intent. A number of people who've come to our chats think that the four of us fight like an old married couple. We know each other so well that we can tell from our word choices and punctuation what the feeling of a post or chat text is supposed to be, but our audience doesn't and sometimes we're confusing. In our March chat, I typed, "Wiker, I'm coming over there!" and then logged off. I'm sure some of our guests thought I was furious, and I'm equally sure that JD knew I was kidding. Fortunately we're also funny in a chaotic sort of way, so stop by our chats and see for yourself!

In Closing

Let me just say that some of you post reasonable, intelligent, well-educated, carefully thought-out messages on boards. You people (and I'm thinking of good folks like Ranger REG and Rob "the Other Nice Man" Kenny) are like a cool drink of water to someone dying of thirst. I can't thank you enough for your presence, even when you're critical of me or my work. You keep me coming back to the boards even when I'm fed up with flamers and trolls. From the bottom of my heart: Thank you.

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