One of the most powerful things you can do when you’re crafting a message is to frame your own position as the norm, and all others as substandard. It does not work to frame your position as above average, because the human animal is at heart totally okay with average. Average means you did enough to get by, and you are now allowed to turn your attention to things you like more. Why bust your ass/spend more money/devote hundreds of hours when half the effort gets nearly the same result?

No, for a communications specialist, it’s far better to establish yourself as the market norm, as opposed to something meant for the elite. You can only get away with “elite” positioning if you’re going to charge your smaller audience enough to make up for it being… well, smaller.

In conjunction with this, I’ve always been frustrated with game marketing, because it almost always goes for the audience WE ALREADY HAVE, and not the much larger pool of people who think our products aren’t for them… even though behaviorally, our products would fit like a glove.

So of course I was thrilled when I read about the presentation at DICE that basically said, y’all, by making games for “gamers,” we’re limiting ourselves. People who watch TV aren’t “TV watchers.” Instead of an assumption of homogeny, in television the starting assumption is that the audience consists of multiple groups.

It’s so simple that I feel decidedly below average for not harping on this point years ago. I can’t pick out one quote, so just read the second half of the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/arts/television/25video.html

So, every game seems to think that powerleveling is somehow bad and sad and god kills a kitten whenever a twink dings without suffering. Therefore, there’s always some code to prevent a low level guy from getting all the experience if a high level guy does any damage to the mob at all. (Side note: Why was City of Heroes’ sidekick mechanism not widely stolen emulated? Anyone? Bueller?)

In practice, of course, this means that if I’m soloing a monster in LOTRO, and about to win because, dude, I’m level 34 in full crafted gear and the mob is level 28 yard trash, and some punk ass comes up and plinks it with an arrow for seven points, I get a fraction of the experience I would have gotten without any “help.”

I just told someone that in my day we’d have trained frogloks on him for that stunt.

In. My. Day.

Excuse me, I’m going to go drink some Metamucil and fetch a donut shaped pillow for my scooter.

There’s a lot I can’t say about Mythic right now. But there are three points I can make, in direct defiance of silly children on message boards:

One, the people who lost their jobs today were not just a few extra QA folks, or a couple world devs hired on for the big push to completion. The pile included some very senior people, people who expected to stay at Mythic until they retired.

Two, many of them were good people who deserved the loyalty they’d been told so much about. If anyone reading this happens to be hiring (people still do that, right?), please give me a buzz.

Three, um, and I say this with love, but the mouth breathing troglodytes who post on boards in between bouts of masturbation and nosepicking should probably shut the hell up about how this was EA’s evildoing at work. I don’t know firsthand what EA was like before they bought out Mythic, but if “acting like adults” and “allowing the studio to set their own expectations” and “paying a decent wage by the standards of the game industry” are bad things, I don’t want to work for a good company again.