You know what really helps with piracy? Not being a complete cock toward honest consumers.

I rarely talk about my kid on this site because he is none of the general internet’s business. But his existence is germane to this anecdote: I have a lot of Pixar movies. LOTS. The kid’s a big fan. I have seen Cars and Toy Story 2 so often at this point that I can recite them, and as such, I am grateful to Pixar for making great movies. (We’re pretending Cars 2 never happened.) I’ve bought them all.

The movie we watch MOST often is… a pirate copy. Now, I didn’t steal it. I bought a laptop off Craigslist and told the guy I needed the software to be legit. He brought the CDs for Office, but to let me test the DVD drive, he brought along a movie. DVD drive thus proven functional, I started looking for the button to pop it out of the tray and he said “Nah, keep it for your kid.” I thought it was sweet of him, and it was, really.

Only I got home and found out the movie was on an unlabeled disc and wasn’t out on DVD yet anyway. Whoops. As an artist, I don’t steal from other artists, and as soon as possible I bought a “real” copy. But as I said, we watch the pirate copy… because my kid isn’t really old enough to understand why he has to sit for up to ten minutes before we can just watch the damned movie. The pirate copy plays immediately.

I don’t blame the kid. I don’t understand, either.

Want to make more money, movie people? Let me skip all of the bullshit. Fuck the warnings, fuck the threatening notices, and definitely fuck the unskippable artsy shit with the fading and the animating and the whatever the hell. I am already committed to paying artists for their work. Stop punishing me, stop acting like I’m the problem, and stop lobbying. Less legislating, more art making.

And while you’re at it, make it EASY to get the movies. Take music. I will always pay a dollar for a song rather than search the pirate networks for some virus-laden file that may or may not eat my brain… at least, now that I actually own the songs and listen how I want when I want where I want. Now that digital music is as much mine as the music I bought on cassette tapes was mine, I buy more of it.

Books? I like paper books a lot. I like writers. I also want my books on my gadgets and I don’t want to buy shit twice. If I buy a paper book, gimme a code to DL a copy for my gadgets, and with me it’s a small gain… and a big gain from people who were happy to buy the book but willing to pirate because the publisher made it hard or impossible to be legit.

Anyway, that’s where I’m coming from. Scott (owner of all things Broken Toysish) is joining the strike tomorrow*. I asked him to take my domains dark as well. There are only eight of you, but the nice thing about a free internet is that all of us matter, even if we aren’t enormous corporations with huge budgets.

*When he wakes up.

I’ve apologized for things I did, things I was about to do, things I didn’t do, and even things I tried desperately to avert by methods including begging, pleading, and screaming. I’ve apologized for wrongdoing, attempted rightdoing that went horribly awry, and things I would do again without a second thought. I’ve apologized for how I came across, how the listener thought I came across, for how I didn’t come across but the listener thought I secretly meant to come across, and for being across the hall from someone who did not wash his hands after he peed.

None of this has injured me in the slightest. It hasn’t cost me anything, either.  It is part of the job, like correcting release copy and putting on pants when I go to meetings.

It’s not just the Ocean Marketing hilarity that’s got me thinking. I’ve been seeing more and more protests at stores that happen because of the following:

1. Some ignorant employee violates their own company policy and orders a customer to stop doing something the employee doesn’t like. Breastfeeding, being black, whatever.

2. Customer turns out to be educated, aware of policy and/or the law. Complains to management. Gets runaround.

3. Complains to HQ. Gets runaround.

4. Rallies internet friends and stages protest… to demand support for something the company already supports.

5. Company gains reputation for being against something they support.

The accompanying article (here’s the one I read today) usually makes two things clear – one, the originally offended person never heard “I’m sorry” from anyone, and two, the flack in charge of providing quotes didn’t say “I’m sorry,” either.

Maybe these people just don’t understand the central component of the public spokesperson’s job. I hereby will do my holiday service and provide a helpful how-to guide for public facing employees:

HOW TO APOLOGIZE TO AN ANGRY CUSTOMER

Step one: Listen to angry customer until customer has run out of words.

Pro-tip: You need to actually listen, because you will need to remember what he said for step two.

Step two: Say to the customer, “Please correct me if I have misunderstood you. You are angry because X, Y, and Z.”

Pro-tip: Repeat steps one and two if necessary.

Step three: Pause for one moment and think about how you would feel if you were the customer.

Step four: Apologize, using the active voice. “I am sorry [this] happened.”

Pro-tip: You have to actually mean it. You have to be sorry this human being in front of you is upset. Do you have to be sorry for what happened? Well, if you/your employer was at fault, yes. But the minimum you should be able to muster up is genuine regret that this person is angry, and a desire to make them happy again. (Edit to add: I use my regret over the customer’s distress as a shortcut to the right frame of mind if the cause of their upset doesn’t get me there. Thanks to Sidereal for helping me clarify my thinking.) If you cannot muster up that much, you are in the wrong damned job.

Step five: If someone from the media calls for comments, say “I apologized to the customer and we will work hard to avoid XYZ in the future.”

That’s…kind of all there is to it. I’ve been apologizing professionally for more than ten years now. I admit the part about being sincere is what keeps this from being “the easiest job in the history of mankind,” but even for the empathy-challenged, you can usually figure it out within a couple months. There are about a billion PR/Marketing niches that don’t require even that much, so it’s not like a failure to care is going to limit your career in any way.

But if you’re going to sit on the front line, you should probably figure out how to give a green-assed damn about your own customers. Probably. What do I know.

My second favorite part of community management is a little less mentally masturbatory. I call it the batting cage.

Picture the first night of a beta, or a stress test, or launch, or even a trade show. You’re in a small space and you cannot leave. Problems or people who absolutely must have your attention pop up every couple of seconds. The pace is relentless. There are no do-overs – a miss is a miss, but you can’t stop to cry over it or you’ll miss the next three. On the best of these occasions, I slide into a groove and everything thrown at my face gets a clean, solid hit. (Well, not the people. It does not help to punch people, no matter what you might have heard.) The adrenaline helps, but endurance matters more. At the end of the night, there’s this sense of accomplishment, of having been a vital part of the process of making a game.

It is seriously fun. It’s like PVP with software.

The thing that made me snicker uncontrollably was “Stress to your children that they should never physically meet anyone they’ve only become friends with online.”

Really? In 2011, we’re giving this advice with a straight face?

“Don’t meet your online friends in person, son.”

“How’d you and Mommy meet?”

“Match.com and then we hung out in World of Warcraft. Now shut up and eat your peas.”

I admit I’m a little vague on some of the details, because kids don’t come with a user manual. Oh, who am I kidding, that doesn’t matter. I’ve never read user manuals in my life except for when someone is paying me to spellcheck them.

Anyway, manual or not, I’m fairly sure that the point of parenting isn’t just to keep the little demons alive until they can pass on their own genetic material. Wait. Okay, that is the point, but there is a higher moral point to human parenting, which is to equip the little demons with the skills to keep themselves alive, because you can’t always be standing there.

When it comes to meeting online friends in the physical world*, a more reasonable (and ultimately more useful/protective) rule is “Kid, talk to me about meeting online friends and we’ll make a plan together.”

Parents can help their children to understand that people are not always what they say they are (and that sometimes people are what they say they are, but other things as well). Parents can and should teach their children basic safety rules like “Always meet in a public place, and always bring another person with you.” Meetings between elementary aged children should be negotiated between the respective parents. Junior high students should be supervised through the process. If you haven’t equipped a kid to function safely by high school, you don’t even want to know what they’re getting up to.

We must teach our children to safely negotiate a modern world where many people meet and interact online before meeting in person. Sticking your head in the sand and saying “just don’t do it” is a breathtaking abdication of responsibility. How’s that abstinence-only education working out for you?

* Did you see what I did there? Maybe if we taught our kids that the online world IS a real one, and the stuff you say matters, maybe there’d be less bullying.

Yes, there is also quite a bit of “I’d hit it,” Nazi accusations, a fundamental misunderstanding of what the right of free speech actually means, and cat videos, but I’ll bet even a shining city on a hill has a sewer. Can’t know daylight without the dark, etc. The darkness is at least our choice. The internet is the great leveler where all of us are judged by what we choose to share, not the things we can’t help. Most of all, it allows us to not be alone.

Anyway, I was watching some YouTube, because, you know, Maru, and I followed a chain of links until I got to some stuff that choked me up. I’m not ashamed. I defy you to watch many of the It Gets Better Project videos without choking up. Personally, I couldn’t watch more than three without wanting to freaking DO something, as long as that something was not “yet another straight girl making a blurry video.”

There’s something I’ve been doing already. Gaming forums, being somewhat dominated by young straight males, tend to be one of the last places in our culture where you can toss around homophobic (and misogynist) slurs with abandon. I don’t mean there’s always evil intent. When you ask one of these kids why he said “gay” when what he meant was “stupid” or “contemptible,” most of the time he’ll just blink at you. A few of them mumble an explanation that basically goes “I didn’t mean gay, like, GAY. It’s just a word on a gaming forum, it doesn’t mean anything.”

Well, it’s not just a word, it does mean something, and I don’t allow it to be used in a derogatory way on any channel where I have mod powers. If you do allow it, you’re basically saying to every kid who is LGBT or questioning that his or her kind isn’t really welcome in your community, and that the only way they can stay is if they pretend they don’t care. Just like you don’t care if some mouthbreather uses “gay” as the very worst possible insult.

Wanna know something interesting? It will cost you nothing to change this paradigm. It doesn’t take very long, or many repetitions of “do not use that word” before people find other, better insults. You don’t even have to ban, or get agitated. You just have to say no. I’ve proven it on multiple forums ranging in size from hundreds to tens of thousands of people. So much for “it’s just a word gamers use.” Gaming forums do not have to be ruled by the worst our genre has to offer.

So, speaking of help: Help me, fellow mods and CMs. (And help me, players, by reporting and not responding when you see it.) We’ve got to stop tolerating homophobia in our communities. I’m not saying we have to go and get gay married. You don’t even have to support an agenda of any kind. All you have to do is say that you will not permit one of your customers to call another one of your customers a faggot.

Here is my pledge:

If you’re young and LGBT, I want you to know that gaming is getting better. In any community that I run, you will not be called names if you choose to be open about your identity and orientation. I will not allow the use of homophobic slurs, either at you or near you. I will not work for an employer who does not have my back on this. My forums are a safe place where you are not “other.” You are not alone. You are, always and forever, one of us.

I am definitely not talking about my new gig. First of all, one of the many, many reasons I wanted to work for a startup was because startups rarely do that sort of thing to people. Second of all, I’m… me. Y’all, I am too old, too tired, and too mean to put up with the gun-to-head nonsense. If someone says “you will post this pack of lies as if it were your idea,” I will snicker and go back to freelancing.

That doesn’t mean I have always been, or will always be, enthused over every single thing I post. At the end of the day, a ship only has one captain, that captain isn’t the community person, and all of us holding oars gotta row in the same direction. I am a professional and I’m proud to do my best for my hire.

But I’ve never lied. What I have done on a few very rare occasions is post a pile of bullshit and pretend it was frosting, and THAT I won’t do anymore. It’s a waste of time, and I am now old enough and confident enough to say so. Why is it a waste? Players can always tell when something about a voice is off, especially if that voice is distinctive.

I’m not the only community weenie with a distinctive voice, and I’m not the only one who ever had to post a monumentally stupid idea in a way guaranteed to offend my core audience. My tweet was meant more as reassurance to other community reps who find themselves at the table this morning or on any other, trying not to get any “frosting” on their hands. The fact is, you don’t need to tell your players there was a gun to your head. The good ones already know.

(Yes, I know I am talking about content that is three years old. Without a guild I’m really slow to level, what can I say.)

(EDIT: The following contains spoilers. I assumed I was the last LOTRO fan to get through the content, but the comments section reminds me yet again of the old saw about assume. Anyway, if you’ve already “done” the entry-into-Moria stuff, and done Book 3 of the epic line, you will know what I’m talking about. If you want to be surprised by two awesome quests, do not keep reading.)

Anyway, it is brain-melting awesome. It evokes the original book without being slavish. It is well written. The encounter is scripted, but I still felt like I was doing something unique and special. You do the encounter in “session play,” meaning with a character they built especially for the encounter (you are the dwarf who wrote the journal found in the chamber of Mazarbul). Then they tuned it so that you barely beat back waves of enemies, eventually succumbing to overwhelming force… but you die a hero.

It’s brilliant, but it’s brilliant in the same way the LOTRO team always handles content. I once wrote in a review that the great thing about LOTRO is that you’re always part of the larger story of the book – you don’t walk into Moria with the Fellowship, but you do get to be the guy who makes sure Bill the Pony gets home safely. You only rarely act out something directly from the book, and I’d have said it would have been nearly impossible to do it well. “We Cannot Get Out” not only does it, but kicks ass in the process. I wish I could shake the writer/designer’s hand just for that ten minutes of gaming bliss.

Everyone working on a license with iconic characters should be playing this game and taking notes.

All right, enough squee, back to bitching.

This, by the way, is why some engineers hate talking to those of us who majored in the fuzzier subjects. We’re slippery. We can change an entire conversation with a single adjective. A noun is a noun until we use it as a verb. A word can mean its definition or its exact opposite. We can take something that should be binary, either on or off, something or nothing, and warp it with sarcasm and context and inflection and holy crap, how can we talk to you when we don’t even know what you’re saying!?

If it’s any comfort, engineers, we drive you crazy but you frighten us. People are all about optimism and false predictions and rationalizing. The human brain may be a computer, but it’s stewing in a bath of hormones and performs differently depending on the last substance consumed. Using that squishy system to interface with machine logic defies reason, and makes me suspect some kind of cyborg implant is involved. An implant you only get in engineering school.

This is why engineers who write novels will eventually rule the world.

Anyway, trying to discuss indie game development always seems to end up at an impasse because we can’t communicate what it means. The problem is the word “indie,” short for “independent,” meaning “stands alone without support.” That definition has few of the connotations of “indie” development, even though they’re the same word.

This is where I start sympathizing with engineers.

When I say indie, *I* mean:

• No parent studio – that means no game resources except what is within the company itself.
• No big budget – lots of money means you can hire outsourcers, consultants, temps, and PR to simulate the resources of a big company. You can also have endless amounts of time to tinker and polish. A real indie doesn’t have that kind of cash.
• Small – A hundred people is not indie. When you’re at a point where you need a full time HR manager, welcome to the establishment, man.
• No hyperspecialization – if you have someone on staff who can spend their days monitoring third party websites and nothing else, you are not indie.

Notice I said nothing about quality. Being indie is not a free pass to suck. But an indie project does need help from the community, if not in money (a la Kickstarter) then in time.

If you can fog a mirror, you’ve figured out that this is a communication challenge I’m facing right now. I’ve faced it before, but ten years ago, no one expected much from an MMO that had a budget, let alone an MMO from a company no one had heard of. I’ve got some ideas, but I could use more. If you’ve worked on a true indie, or if you have something to add/subtract from my definitions, please toss something into the comments.

Just now, every male reading this let out a hoot of laughter. “Respect? She thinks I get respect just because I’m a dude? Man, she oughta try life in my shoes.”

All I can say to that is that you haven’t tried life in mine, and that you do in fact get a “free ten percent off all bullshit” coupon just for being born with dangly bits. I mean 10% – it’s not a lot, it’s barely apparent (and not apparent at all if you’ve never known anything else), but boy howdy, it sure does add up over time. Remember, I was a writer before I’d ever even heard of MMOs. I’d even written rants before. People reading with the assumption that I had a penis had a different and more positive take on my work than they did when they knew I had a vagina.

Just now, many of the males reading this repressed a grimace at the thought of the word vagina. I don’t know why. The word “penis” is a lot sillier sounding.

Anyway, after people found out the MMO ranting was written by a female, the feedback changed. Only a little bit… see above about 10%… and I didn’t notice at first because I had an audience that was primarily made up of people who’d come to me assuming I was male.

What changed?

The post-gender reveal feedback was just a little more… argumentative. This being the internet, I’d always gotten mail from people who assumed I hadn’t noticed [insert obvious truth], but when it became known that I was female, those letters got slightly more frequent and the tone got a little more patronizing. I never got any email saying “you’re funny, for a man” but post-gender reveal I got “you’re funny, for a woman” at least once a month. What was really “funny” is that those letters were from people who were trying to give me a compliment.

By the way, lest you chalk that up to the weaker social skills of the typical gamer, I’ve got fourteen years of experience WITH gamers and I assure you, the gamer population has exactly the same social skill set as the general population. The fringe freaks get all the attention, but pound for pound we’ve got the same “types” as any hobby.

Now, please note: These are just observations. I didn’t give a damn. No one ever believes me about that, but I don’t give a damn about that either. But if you think about it from my point of view, first as a writer and then as a community weenie, you’ll see why. See, there are tradeoffs.

As a writer: My audience mushroomed. Females made up a bigger portion of the early MMO population than anyone realized, and there was a certain amount of “gotta support my sisters” attitude back in the early days. So the news spread and more women started checking out my site – a site they might have otherwise ignored because they thought I was just another boy in love with the f-bomb and masturbation jokes. More men started reading, because let’s face it, a lot of men get a charge out of women in love with the f-bomb and masturbation jokes. And there were men that came to wonder at how the bear could dance at all. Whatever! No writer really cares about why people are reading, so long as they read.

As a community person: All of the above arguments, plus one biggie. Men are more respectful to other men, but they are kinder to women. That is a generalization, and certainly being a female community lead put me in for a certain kind of nastiness about my sexual attractiveness and availability (pop quiz: Ever seen a poll on a male community lead with the options “I’d hit it” and “Bitch is a three bagger“? That’s happened to me on nearly every job I’ve ever had). But across the board, I think I’ve had it easier than any of my male counterparts. People are less confrontational, more willing to listen, and just… friendlier. Not much. About 10%.

There’s another really obvious difference, and it’s one you can see without being either a writer or a community weenie. Strange women on the internet get forced into a “category” pretty quickly, in terms of how other people define you – we’re either mamas, sisters, buddies, or flirts. (I say “flirts” knowing that on some forums, it’s actually “whores” but I’m trying to be gracious.) Men get pigeonholed as well (the genius/the jerk/the nerd/the smartass), but you’re a lot more likely to be allowed to just be… you. And your categories have more to do with who you are than your gender. Furthermore, people interact with you as an individual from the beginning.

As a female, you encounter a large group of people that can’t settle down until they know which category you’re in, and every interaction with you is filtered through that lens. You can eventually come to be treated as an individual, but you never get to start that way. You have to establish yourself, talk often, and have a very strong written voice. (Ahem.) Neutral, normal female voices stay in their category forever. It’s helpful at first, because it gives you a quick shortcut to establish a relationship. People feel like they already know you, because subconsciously they’re associating you with the women they know of that category. It gets limiting pretty fast (you’re never X, you’re always X The Girl), but again, with the right kind of “voice” a female basically gets the head start on bonding and then switches tracks to have the advantages of individuality.

It evens out. I don’t waste any time in life trying to decide if it’s better or worse to be one gender or another. But it is different.

On TERA, I set out to hide my identity for a number of reasons, but I didn’t actually intend to hide my gender. Then it turned into kind of a funny thing. I was Schrodinger’s moderator – I was whatever you wanted me to be, and opening the box to find out for sure would have ruined the fun. And I found that yet again I was enjoying the best of both worlds. I had the automatic respect and the authority of a male, and I didn’t have any of the gross comments on whether or not I was good in bed. I had warmth, but no peen waving. I kept hiding my gender to see how things would go, honestly. I knew it would be out eventually, either at the first fan gathering or the day I left for my own community, whatever came first.

Then it came out by accident – one of the guys was in a hurry one day and used the correct pronoun instead of a neutral – and nothing really changed. Just that ten percent. Ten percent less respect, ten percent more warmth.

It was a fun experiment on a grand scale, one I may never get to repeat. But it’s one I wish everyone could try.

Here are two entries from that file. Since I’m only briefly in between gigs, I gotta post them now while they’re just my own thoughts and not The Word From Up The Mountain.

***

I personally get very nervous when I see multiple server types but only one full design. It seems to end in tears.

For example, take AOE damage. On OWPVP servers, AOE damage ends up being lethal “friendly fire.” If it is lessened in range or intensity, the people on the PVE servers are dealing with a nerf that might unbalance the class against all of the PVE in the game. Even on the OWPVP server, the AOE dealing class might find it impossible to solo or survive in anything less than a raid group.

If the devs balance the class for one server type, it is unbalanced on the other server type. PVP servers for games designed and balanced for PVE usually die within weeks, because the only survivors are the ones who either logged in during the first week and made it to max level via PVE in peace, or the ones who belong to guilds that have the manpower to post guards around their lower level players. New players have no interest in being sheep. And without a steady supply of sheep, the wolves starve. UO is held up as an example of a PVP game that worked, but people forget that it had insane churn and terrible retention – and furthermore, the numbers were trending straight down when they gave in and created a carebear refuge. The carebears essentially funded the PVP.

A good half of the arguments of PVE vs PVP are completely silly, given that the participants are mocking people they will never, ever meet in combat and arguing over rules they can’t change. What PVP people should really be hoping for is that the game is balanced from a PVP perspective, so the above scenario doesn’t occur. Leave players who will never play on your server completely out of it, because it’s muddying the discussion.

And carebears shouldn’t be so sensitive. They outnumber the PVP types so drastically, and modern MMOs tend to be so thoroughly balanced around their needs, that the name should be utterly without sting.

***

Please, make it stop. My teeth grind when someone says “WoW Clone.” Lately, I have been seeing people say, without irony, that certain things are “WoW Clones” even though the things in question predate WoW.

And that’s pretty much the heart of my nerdrage over any kind of clone discussion. I’ve worked on two different games that predated WoW (and played every MMO that predated WoW), all with features that WoW directly copied. Yet I get people who’ve played both WoW and my games swearing on a stack of game manuals that my games “stole” something from WoW.

WoW’s peculiar genius was synthesizing innovation from other games, laying their own fully realized world on top of it, testing the early parts of the game fully before launching it, and setting the bar to entry directly on the ground.

WoW is itself… a clone. In my humble opinion. But it dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s, the bits I’ve seen were written by people with actual writing talent, and your mom can play it on Sunday afternoons nearly as well as a person who raids for eight hours a night.

Anyone looking to compete at that global level needs to do the same. There’s no particular honor in making a game that only appeals to feral manchildren with snakelike reflexes. No one owns the definition of fun.

If you DO want to own the feral manchild market, you make a niche game and you take pride in that niche. You don’t delude yourself into thinking your niche can dominate the market… though ironically, not trying to dominate the market is how original ideas come to life. And just to bring this argument full circle – once an idea has come to life, that’s when someone with a billion dollars and fifty QA slaves polishes it up and puts it out there for mass consumption, at which point I gotta listen to some newb complain that WoW did it first.