You just used a lot of large words in an attempt to justify being a dick.
no no no no no no. the MTGS response would be "take that shit elsewhere" but fuck that, let's chop it up instead. in my experience, it's the idea that so much as breathing a single word that might hint at criticism of someone's work (let alone someone) that's been used (in the vein of "i'm offended") to justify much, much more dickishness than it's combated. why can't if you don't believe me, look at the culture on RiptideLab and look at the culture everywhere else.
on the mothership or on SCG they'll either use non-words like "professionalism" and "respect" and "offensive" to justify being dicks, or they just won't acknowledge doing it at all. not a single peep from SCG about firing Reuben B., for example, and he's a great dude, fairly outspoken as
MTG culture goes. he was furious he got shitcanned, yet his parting shot was full of falsehoods like "no bad blood" -- and for what? when they said "bend over," he bent over.
it's not a stretch to say that this attitude is what lets wotc get away with treating its player base like shit. why treat them better if they aren't even gonna speak up about it? Ceddy P. for example works 60-hour weeks and is paid ~$40k. when they say it's a "children's card game," they mean not that it has strategic depth befitting a child, but that immersing yourself in
MTG culture will turn you into a child. look at MTGS and tell me this isn't true; it's the tip of the iceberg. childhood can be combatted with money, but the only way to make money from
MTG is to work for wizards, and it's an open secret among my circles in seattle that working for wizards is miserable. modo for example isn't a piece of shit not because we have no programmers here (hehe) but because they pay the programmers <50% of a competitive salary. the people who would work for that are therefore only cultists, and the cultists reinforce the "you're a dick" garbage. only cultists (i include myself) would spend money on such a program. cultists need to be designed for, leading to bad limited and Standard formats as we've had in the last year or so. everything is affected, including the game itself. we can't escape all of that, even when we're cubing with people we like at home, but we can minimize it by adopting a more realistic attitude towards it, which is what we're trying to do here AFAIK. acknowledging stuff like
http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html exists, and not taking it seriously, is a good first step...
by contrast:
very good, but you could write an equally scathing entry about Pareene himself (to say nothing of Salon...)
yeah, duh. isn't that the point? would he get butt-hurt about it and call for their heads? does his article make him subject to blackballing and unemployable everywhere else? would a movement to have him discredited as a dick, universally, be treated with the same masturbatory onanism in the writing world that it is here? if you compare
MTG culture to more or less any other culture, this reflexive "you're a dick" BS will look as ridiculous as it is.
when most any context exposes the absurdity of MTG culture, it's tempting to say that the culture is unique, that it inhabits a weird space where you can care enough to praise it, but you can't care enough to condemn any aspect; where you can care enough to put yourself out there as a public figure to be praised yourself, but where you're not out there enough to be subject to the same kind of detached analysis you see in the pareene article. the truth is, it's far from unique. the flipside of external support is internal strife, and the inverse of complete acceptance is complete rejection. the gentleman on the last page who wrote "there's no business rivalry" was hinting at something profound here. wizards means for us to all be "wizards employees."
and for what? if they want me to have professionalism, they can treat me like a professional. in the meantime, i'll enjoy the luxury of saying what i want, cultivating an open exchange of ideas that tries to be as free of these undercurrents of corporate paranoia as possible, and actually liking my friends. again, that's what we do here, isn't it? that's why RipLab works.
