Saturday, March 1, 2008

An Unwise Idea: Some Experiments Should Not Be Run

Now, an idea hit me just a little while ago and seemed like a good idea at the time, but now that I think about it more it's not a wise thing to do. However, it still strikes me as one that should be shared, as community reaction was the whole concept behind it to begin with.
The idea was to put a post under a false account name on the Telltale Games forums, the support forums specifically, complaining about how a pirated version of the game doesn't work in Vista and saying that I'd complain to the government if it didn't get fixed. The whole thing was really an experiment in community reaction- the Telltale community here is one of the best I've seen on the internet, you see. Most of the people there are intelligent and loyal to Telltale, which is one of the best games companies I've ever given money to thanks to not only the quality of their product, but to the quality of their support and the fact that no other developer I know of (excluding the incredibly tiny, niche ones- Telltale is a small company and is fairly niche to be sure, but they're not a couple of guys hacking together code so they can release freeware on the internet while begging for donations) actually has people who talk to the customers directly and know what's going on with the product- the two or three employees that are on the forums regularly do know what's going on in the company, this isn't 'put some random people on the internet and tell them nothing so they can't let anything slip.' So, I asked myself a question: "How would they respond to a pirate?"
But it couldn't just be any pirate, oh no. That wouldn't do at all. They'd have to be an idiot, a complete nutjob. The spelling and grammar would have to be below YouTube comment standards, and they'd have to be dumb enough to actually ask a developer to fix their pirated game. Now, I don't really do that. I've always used good grammar, and there's no way I'd be able to pull that off. The answer? Write it out in plain English, with some common word shortenings, and plug it into Babel Fish a couple of times, then make the spelling worse. Here's the result:
It incrs ur gme suck teh i, ws adn with the net which wll move with lotsa breakin this that it will crry it did and cyess the contribution which view it divides it stoled or me it is helthe inside ur person and connects or it works in bcuz and it will make, teh trade mobility it gets teh hazard ur govt.
This is completely unreadable, which is what I was going for. I eventually decided against it, though, because I don't know what the community backlash would be. I couldn't just not take credit for it, but who knows what they would have done? It's probably not wise to do something that might get an entire community of gamers mad at you, at least not when you're actively part of that community, plus I think that would qualify as trolling. The end result is that the whole thing ends up here. I'd put it on the forums, but that strikes me as kind of stuck-up, assuming that people would be interested in this like that, so here we are.

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