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 own two cents: Scott is being a little too modest, here. What he is not saying is that he wrote that CS tool, from scratch, in six weeks. His brainchild outperformed every other such program available in 2001, and he did it with no time or resources. In a closet. An actual, literal closet next to a poorly ventilated bathroom used by 40 heavy smokers.

*My* office was a very nice coat closet that had its own window. The only real problem with it was that the coat hooks were directly behind my chair and at the same height as my skull when I stood up.

Anyway. My contribution to this stroll down memory lane: Like everyone else, I’d been working solidly for six months without coming up for air on my own tasks, so I absolutely did not know any of the stuff that Firor talked about in terms of numbers and load expectations. I also did not know anything about business projections or prior MMO sales performance. All I knew was what the beta testers were saying and how many people on the big news sites were excited about the game. So I figured we’d hit 100K customers easy, right out of the gate, even though that was by no means a guarantee for AAA MMOs in 2001. I also assumed that everyone shared my confidence.

When we actually hit that number, I was too green, too inexperienced, and too ignorant to realize what we’d achieved. For me it was just… yeah? So? When’s the first patch? I walked in on one celebration (involving shots of either scotch or whiskey in dixie cups, I don’t remember because I’m basically a slushie drinker) and just stared at everyone, like, “sure, I’ll have a shot, but why are you all so happy? And what about this quest problem?”

I think it was Mark Jacobs at the celebration lunch a few days later who asked me why I wasn’t bouncing off the walls, and I said something like, “Of course we’re a hit. It’s been obvious all along.” He just stared at me, speechless, for the first and last time in his life.

Now that I have more context, in terms of what the odds really were against us and how close we came to not launching at all… my god. In some ways, I would give anything to be that confident about anything, ever again. On the other hand, I was an insufferable git, so it’s for the best that I have a clue now.

I’m pretty sure that as soon as Scott finished the CS tool, we got cracking on the Herald. That was fun. No one had anything like the Herald at the time, so it was exciting to just invent something. And as with pretty much everything else about DAOC, we did it because we didn’t know we couldn’t.

It was the most fantastic, most glorious experience. The seven of you were there with me. Thanks.

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.

If you saw the tweet or the post, you know I’m looking for CSRs and that remote is okay for those spots. But there’s one position my company is hiring for that is not remote – and that’s the CS Manager/Director (which it is depends on the candidate ). I need someone who:

- Will relocate to Chandler, Arizona. (This is a suburb of Phoenix, which is basically like a normal city but in a place where it’s always sunny.)

- Has management experience in customer service. That means you managed a team of customer service people. A shift, a whole pit, a special strike team, whatever, that’s fine, but you actually need to have been someone’s boss.

- Has experience doing customer service in an MMO.***

Ideally, the management experience was in the CS pit of an MMO, but as long as you can check off both boxes, we want to talk to you.

Bonus points for (in no particular order):

- Being able to relocate immediately

- Being able to write clearly

- Having done MMO customer service for a PVP title

- Not secretly hoping to be a developer/designer

- Being fun under pressure

- A history of managing down, not up

- Experience managing remote employees (there are some great resumes coming in, but those people won’t be in AZ)

If you meet the top three criteria (and there is no number of bonus points that can be combined to substitute for one of the top three), please email me right away at my work addy – sanya AT pitchblackgames DOT com.

*

Just a few side notes – some of the resumes I’m getting are breaking my heart, because the senders (and I know many of you) are brilliant, thoughtful, interesting, and I know you could learn this job. I KNOW you could. But this is a startup MMO team. The initial CS group (the one that gets paid out of financing, not income) is going to be small and lean. Even the front liners are going to be contributing to policy writing and standard setting. At the outset, we can only use people who have done this before.

*I* do not count as having done this before in a CS sense. (Okay, I did, but it was 1999.) I have said many times that I could not have been a good community weenie without top flight CS people as colleagues, and so yeah, I’ve worked closely with some of the best. As such, I can write policy and do planning, but I am still not qualified to lead the team.

Also, related customer service experience is only relevant to a point. If you managed a call center, or ran a team doing live product support, I’d be excited – but I’d still want to see some evidence that you understand and respect the needs of MMO customers.

These customers are my players. I feel a responsibility for them that you cannot understand unless you also do community. The person who gets this job is going to be my colleague and partner in doing right by people.

***Lots of people have been asking if volunteer CS counts. Since that is how I started… okay, seriously. If you took tickets, answered appeals, handled low level problems, escalated big problems without making them worse, then yeah, it counts. If you hung around in a chat channel answering newbie questions, no, it doesn’t. Those things are related but not the same.

If you are applying for the boss job, and your only MMO experience is as a volunteer, your other CS experience would have to be pretty amazing. But yes, it would get you in.

Awesome, I love ice cream.

Uh, sure? I’m really excited about these cookies.

What, don’t you like ice cream?

Sure, I love ice cream, but we’re making cookies.

Why can’t you make ice cream? It would be really popular.

If we were opening an ice cream store, that would be brilliant. But we’re selling cookies. We’ve built this whole business plan and bought all this equipment for cookies. You would need totally different equipment to make and store ice cream. We don’t have the room or the money or the time. So, about these cookies…

Ice cream sandwiches.

What?

Ice cream sandwiches. Ice cream AND cookies. You’re just making excuses not to make ice cream.

That’s not the kind of cookies we’re making, and ice cream sandwiches are bland as hell. We’re making really good cookies. Someone else might make really good ice cream and make you happy, but we cannot make you happy. I’m sorry. If you want a cookie, though -

An ice cream sandwich doesn’t have to be bland, if you hand made the cookies and used special ice cream.

And that would scale how well?

You’re awfully greedy, you know that?

I’m not greedy, I want to make cookies. And that reminds me, there’s the equipment issue.

You don’t need special equipment.

We’d need freezers.

Nah, man, ice cream is better when it’s a little melty.

No, it’s not. And why am I even talking about this? We’re making cookies.

But I want ice cream.

Go next door!

They aren’t making the kind of ice cream I want.

Make your own ice cream.

I want you to do it.

/headdesk

This is either the most ridiculous way for a grown woman to make a living, or the most awesome. Possibly both.

Anyway, the thing with the steepest learning curve is the freakin’ acronyms. It’s not that they change, exactly, but new acronyms do come into play over the course of years. Twice now I’ve found myself frantically googling an acronym, muttering to myself, googling a second time with +MMO at the end, and then staring in horror at a few dozen completely contradictory links. The meaning changes depending on which game the player is “from,” and in order to do a good job, I’ll need to keep that in mind. It’s awfully like the word “fanny.” The different meanings aren’t terribly far apart, as it were, but in the context of… player versus player contact, you reeeeeeeeeeally need to know which fanny you and the other player are talking about before you issue/accept any invitations to duel.

That’s not thing making me QQ the most. The seven (the eighth one got here too recently, sorry) of you might remember that three plus years ago, I posted something about my personal life. Well, he’s starting to read. Mainly the internet catches his attention when it types in all caps. Sometimes, I’ll think the toy train session is in full swing and I’ll start reading a message board, and then I hear a little piping voice carefully read out “W…T…F.” I turn around to find the Ninja Preschooler standing there at my elbow with a big grin, and then he capers off chanting “WTF! WTF! WTF!”

Which, really, is one of the saner reactions to the internet.

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.