Every few minutes, someone with zero creativity and no access to Google says “Entertainment is serious business!” A cliché becomes a cliché for a reason, though, and in this case I suspect the reason is due to a collective yearning for development to be a process of magic. An organic magical process, where money goes in one end and comes out the other much increased. Furthermore, in this fantasy, no one is picky about how long the organic process takes, and someone shovels money in the front end for however long it takes the process to crap out gold ingots.

The people with the shovels are understandably cranky about this ridiculous yearning, and therefore when you pull their strings, they say “Entertainment is serious business!” I suspect the hope is that if the sentiment is repeated enough, the recipients will deliver a salable product instead of platitudes about the process.
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Judging from the comments, more than a few of you are aware that I used to have another website. I already suspected as much, because internet denizens never let ANYTHING vanish from a signature file. Thus it was that when I started this site, I vowed that I would not repeat my old content. I also made a rule that I wouldn’t post on weekends.

That was a week ago. I’m breaking both rules right now. What the hell, I’m a rebel.

The essay I’m reprinting was written in May, 2001. 9/11 had not yet happened. My writing skills, and more importantly my editing skills, were… let us be kind and say “less practiced,” okay? And in five of the six years I worked for Mythic, a week didn’t go by where I didn’t get a letter from one of my players, leaving home.

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Time on the internet is a strange beast. Time in terms of the gaming industry is even more bizarre. So when we’re talking about the effects of time on people who use the internet as a gaming platform, things get horribly twisted.

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Disclaimer: This is, believe it or not, pure fiction: an amalgam of anecdotes taken from more than a dozen community managers. I heard them over the course of five years at a series of loud and usually somewhat intoxicated industry events. However, the essential timeline is not at all falsified.

Other community weenies are invited to pipe up and let us all know if they have had a different experience, and in fact, I hope they do.

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…for a professional. And furthermore, an MMO professional doesn’t go off his feed just because someone says something rude to him. Come on, you knew there was a catch.

Community work is customer service, PR, marketing, and communication. A community manager’s customers are both the developers and the actual paying customers, not one or the other. Anyone who says the job is mere PR or marketing is missing the damn point. Without the secret ingredient of, you know, personally caring about your customers, you belong in sales or marketing. And speaking as a player of these little games, if you don’t care about your customers, you’re wasting your time and mine in community.

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