The Death of Fez II and How To Deal with the Hate
http://kotaku.com/twitter-blowup-leads-to-sudden-cancellation-of-fez-ii-934548588
http://kotaku.com/dont-you-have-anyone-better-to-hate-than-the-guy-who-m-478837623
http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/swimming-in-a-sea-of-shit-the-internets-war-against-creatives
These recent articles concerning Phil Fish's decision to quit the games industry due to an endless stream of hate (and not just because of a Twitter argument) brings up an interesting question for local developers: As your game/creation becomes internationally known you start to open yourself up to the worst the internet has to offer. Have you or members of your team had to deal with any extreme animosity and how have you dealt with the vitriol, or how do you plan to deal with haters?
That Penny Arcade article has a particularly poignant example - the director on CoDBlOpsII being subjected to rape and death threats just because the fire time of one weapon was changed by a few split seconds. It's crazy stuff.
http://kotaku.com/dont-you-have-anyone-better-to-hate-than-the-guy-who-m-478837623
http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/swimming-in-a-sea-of-shit-the-internets-war-against-creatives
These recent articles concerning Phil Fish's decision to quit the games industry due to an endless stream of hate (and not just because of a Twitter argument) brings up an interesting question for local developers: As your game/creation becomes internationally known you start to open yourself up to the worst the internet has to offer. Have you or members of your team had to deal with any extreme animosity and how have you dealt with the vitriol, or how do you plan to deal with haters?
That Penny Arcade article has a particularly poignant example - the director on CoDBlOpsII being subjected to rape and death threats just because the fire time of one weapon was changed by a few split seconds. It's crazy stuff.
Comments
It may be just my personal nature, but if I get trolled massively I'd be glad that it was that and not anonymity after I create a game. In the end, the threats and verbal blahblah only has power over you that you give them.
Though the content is super valuable for anyone who has ever been distraught by internet commentary :)
The behavior you get is the behavior you feed. Having actually met Phil, I think he's a nice guy who doesn't filter his emotions much. If you know him, it's easy to hear his tweets and statements in his voice and how he'd emphasise things, which instantly turns them into much more comic statements than how most people seem to perceive them. I don't think he deserves any of the crap he's been getting, I just feel like he wasn't in control of doing the feeding in the shark tank.
That said, there's nothing right about going off at someone because you feel entitled to their creative output. Or heck, going off at someone for any reason at all, really. Even if they've done something reprehensible (like kill Trayvon Martin) you can still treat them like a human being. Tech-savvy people have a terrible habit of forgetting this and vehemently screaming profanity in order to "protect" whatever stupid assumptions they're operating under:
Sure, DD is nowhere near as big as Fez, but we get a pretty-much constant trickle of internet hate. We even have some pretty advanced trolls on our forum that we're having a hard time getting rid of. It seems like, the less anonymous you are as a person online, the more exposed to people's stupid you can be - this is borne out by the worst stuff being said about us mostly coming out of South Africa. Every article about the game somewhere always has an smattering of completely infantile filth, especially the ones about us getting cloned... All I have to do if I want to get ragingly upset at the planet is read the comments on one of those stories. Fucking hell.
The real problem comes in when, as Jon Blow said, you have to read a horrible comment to decide if it's useful or not. And sometimes they can be incredibly useful! I've turned hate-filled, abusive emails around by replying with stuff like "Oh, I'm sorry about that. I know you didn't mention it in your email, but could it be that you're upset about feature-X? If so, we're changing that a little bit in the next update" sometimes that turns people around. Other times it doesn't. Either way, really considering a possible reason for their complaint, trying to understand where they're coming from and why, then evaluating if that's just blind hatred/jealousy/trolling or something you should actually be working to fix in your game? That takes a fucking metric ton of energy. Every day.
I can fully understand Phil getting too tired to be positive anymore. And I can fully understand how recharging from the positive comments might be made far too hard when people in the media are actively channeling negativity about you as a person. I shudder to think what it would be like to be the target of tabloid culture, especially if your job required you to read through those tabloids in order to be better at what you do.
Getting out of game development when it's toxic for you makes a lot of sense. I don't think anyone should be okay with being part of that sort of toxicity, even as a bystander.
The problem comes in when social media is a big part of you having any audience at all. What tends to happen there is people gravitate towards a creative person that's open about their process. That's great while it's growing, but eventually it gets overwhelmed by people being shit-holes at the creative and their energy goes down the tubes. I think that's part of the reason why people get called sell-outs so often: They're moving to protect themselves from something that's pretty much gone the way of an awesome relationship turning abusive.
Not necessarily as a replacement to his own creative voice, just someone who's opinion he can respect who will tell him: Don't post that, rather tone it down or ignore it. It doesn't have to be a marketing person, just someone who can support the dude in times like this and who can spot this tragic pattern happening.
@Raithza has a way more level head than myself for instance, and he stops me from being a tit online fairly often. And we have one whole member at Free Lives who is responsible for message and press relations and keeping the rest of us sane. I think those safe guards have helped us not get any nasty comments during the development of Broforce, which has been an absolute blessing.
Someone who could have helped polytron craft its message, as that's not a skill Phil has, and marketing IS PART of game development, whether you care about it or not. I don't forgive devs who produce games that aren't fun, I'm not sure that I can forgive devs that fail this hard at marketing. Bad game development is bad game development.
My experience of briefly having met Phil was that he values honesty to an almost brutal extent (My whole experience was him saying his IGF acceptance speech was heart-felt and that's exactly what he wanted despite the speech being entirely unrehearsed on purpose). I think some of that filters into how lovingly crafted his games are, but it's certainly crippling in terms of being a celebrity on the internet.
I'm sad that this means we get less Phil Fish games. This seems like the worst of all worlds. i.e. Phil Fish burns more bridges, we don't get more great games by him, the perception that indie devs are unstable/weird human beings is strengthened, a little more animosity between press and the indie community etc. And this seems to me to have been preventable.
One RPG forum slated STASIS's screens, saying the the developers were clearly trying to lie to consumers by making them think its an RPG (again, Im using less colourful language here!).
And those little hits do take slight chinks out of an artists armour, especially when that artist isn't part of a team who can give yu the proverbial 'those guys are clearly idiots' speech.
I can DEFINITELY see how Phil Fish has had enough, and honestly, I would probably do the same if I was in his position. The truth is, however, that he will eventually come back to games. He is an artist through and through, and you CANT shut off that little voice inside your head that fills you with the NEED to create.
I really hope he comes back one day. I was so excited for fez 2 *sad face*
This kinda thing makes me scared of going indie.
I guess one thing to add is that, from what I've seen in the various threads here, having a community like Makegames means you as a developer can find a place on the net where you'll get genuine support and constructive feedback, without having to wade through the trolls and unhelpful critics. :)
I know that there are people that feel like MakeGames does victimise them as a community, but what's actually happening is they're unable to separate criticism of their ideas/outcomes from themselves. That's regrettably a thing that, as people have pointed out above, is a personal thing to solve :(
The way I see it from my experience on the internet, it seldom matters if I don't try to piss people off - just by having a strong enough opinion, you'll piss people off, and it doesn't matter if you have good intentions or not. And I've simply come to embrace that and adopt a walk away attitude to many things.
I mean seriously, we've had robust debates here, and you should see the kind of crazy robust (like so robust it's a robot-bust) stuff that goes on in card game forums (currently Netrunner), where the world (small forum world extrapolates easily to 4chan scale madness) is split in half and half will shit on any word you write. It's nuts.
But I check myself before I wreck myself :P
And I do wish more people (@PHIL_FISH sir) can do that because I think it's such a shame to waste one's time on that kind of negative stuff. Whether it's by bringing in a filter or learning to cope or learning to not care or having someone to hold you back when you wanna pummel that guy at the bar, it's (almost?) always the better way.
And finally, a robust robot-bust:
Bottom line for me is this is just sad news as I would have loved to see so more games from Phil Fish. Maybe he will start developing games under a pseudonym :P
Bolwouts and burnouts happen when people are exposed to torrents like these for too long. It is reactions like this that mean we can't have nice things.
Alrighty, then.
I can't wait until we start getting hate mail. I've had so much practice dealing with YouTube comments and handling thousands of kids on our Minecraft server that they won't know what hit 'em. :p
I will say that so far we've barely gotten any actual hate sent at us. There are a lot of people who don't think our game is great, but they don't make the effort to send us emails. The last time anything quite that mean was sent our way was over a year ago.
@Tuism I suspect he's on Linux and the webplayer won't work there. (Technically he could run the game's standalone under WINE, but right now we don't have an option for getting the webplayer working under Linux as a webplayer).
Weirdly, I kind of feel the alternatives he's promoting "literally a dozen or more free browser embeddable plugins that work for accelerated 2d/3d game development" are the hipster route. I perceive Unity to be kind of mainstream.
Considering Unity supports pretty much everything apart from Linux with the webplayer, and even then if you do the chromium thingy build (technical terms there - you can tell I'm not the developer in our team :D), I think it's pretty wildly inaccurate to call it anything even remotely near hipster. And secondly, considering he's using Linux, I don't think he should be accusing anyone of not being mainstream...
Regarding the OP. I reckon if Phil Fish used forums like these I think he wouldn't have had such a problem. Obviously getting hate sucks, but it sucks even harder if you feel totally on your own as well. It's nice sometimes just to be able to say "Look what offensive things this person is directing at us", and get some helpful responses and some lols.
I'd happily offer my services as a sympathetic forum poster if anyone does get some horrendous hate.
@WelshPixie I think we'll look into that "chromium thing" solution. We've been lazy up until now supporting as few platforms as is reasonable in order to optimize development time, but we'll have to do better in the future.
I think it could work, but mostly as a "Hey, here's how you can respond to this in a nice way" instead of a devs-vs-moaners kind of thing. That would take a lot of attitude management.
On topic: We do get the odd complaint that we don't support Linux via the Unity's NaCl build option, but we tried it in the past and it was about as stable as a tower made of squirrels. Plus we haven't upgraded to Unity 4 yet, would be keen to hear what that's like these days though.
- Brace yourself.
- I don't know a lot.
- Passion and PR don't go together.
- I don't like Fish(yet).
- People are assholes.
- People forget they are talking to people.
- I disagree with Blow.
- R2 in small change.
Please brace yourself for incoming wall of text. I apologize for it, but I just fell that I have a lot to say about this.
Let me just preface this by saying I have no idea how it feels to be on the receiving end of hate. I am not really a big user of social media and as such never really get much exposure. I also haven't done anything good enough to be noteworthy. A lot of the things I say might be said in total ignorance. So please call me out on stuff I'm just wrong about.
The first thing I noticed while reading those articles was that there seems to be two main things brought up. The first is that it's great to hear passionate people talk about games without getting filtered through PR and marketing. I agree with this. The second thing is that people are not supposed to be assholes on the internet. I agree with this also. The problem is just that it's probably never going to happen. So if you are planning on being vocal about your passion you should be prepared to constantly defend yourself.
My only experience with Phil Fish I have is from Indie Game: The Movie. Now I do realize that the movie has probably been edited to exaggerate some of the things Phil said, but that doesn't change the fact that he did say them. I feel that in Fish's case he has a habit of saying controversial things which creates some backlash to which he responds with more controversial remarks. Which is fine, but then he should be prepared for the comments/remarks about him. You don't poke a bear with a stick and expect it to roll over for a belly scratch and a tickle.
That being said, I loathe people that can't let other people be. If you can't engage with someone in a meaningful positive way then just carry on with your life and find someone to engage with that will bring you the happiness you are obviously looking for and don't diminish other people's happiness to momentarily forget about your own unhappiness. In (almost) no situation should anyone ever experience that level of hate.
When it comes to the way I deal with hate I usually keep two things in mind. The first is that the opposite of love is not hate, it's apathy. So if haters are sending you hate mail they probably care enough to follow your progress and will become very loyal customers if you can meet their needs. The second is that even though they have forgotten that you are a person(anonymity and all that) it's rather easy to remind haters that you are indeed a person by sending them a message that addresses them as a person. After they get over the initial shock of someone actually engaging them on that level you can usually have a meaningful discussion on what they really want. This might become extremely difficult if you receive too many messages but while it's possible it can be very rewarding. It also serves as kind off a test. If you fail to reach them on a personal level after two or maybe three messages then they are probably really just trolling instead of being sincerely unsatisfied about something.
I also disagree with Jonathan Blow that it's impossible to have comments that you read not affect you. It's not easy and takes some training but it is possible to read comments and even the worst hate mail and mine them for useful information. The trick is to realize that the person that sent the mail aren't talking to you or even a person, they are talking to this thing they are unhappy with. I don't think people become assholes so much because they are anonymous. I think it has more to do with the fact that people on the other end are anonymous to them so it's easy to forget to emphasize with someone at the receiving end of a message.
So yeah, that's my 200c or so...hope it has some meaning and isn't too all over the place.
PS. @Elyaradine....awesome, AWESOME link. :)
@Rigormortis: I disagree completely that passion and PR don't go together. Passion is the best kind of PR and any kind of publicity or visibility is going to be made better by obvious passion for the work on the part of the creator. What's far more likely to be harmful is narcissism and that's more likely to prevent anyone from actually completing something they're working on before it ever gets big (or good in any way really, seeing as it prevents feedback).
I don't understand what the point of not liking someone you haven't met could be. It's not as though disliking someone disproves any points they might be making ;) From what I can understand, Phil got upset mostly at people refusing to actually engage on the terms he was communicating: He'd say something about a design idea or a game he liked and people would go straight after him as a person, never actually addressing his points. That's going to be annoying no matter who you are.
I also don't think you're fully considering what Jonathan Blow's point was: The paragraph directly before you say you disagree with Blow, you're talking about having to remind yourself of things in order to properly process comments. That means if you don't do that, those comments are going to get to you... What if those comments have no redeeming features/information at all and you've just wasted your time and resolve on someone's irrational hatred for you? Yes, I agree that you can turn hatred around in time, but that takes a ton of energy. All the practice and restraint needed to be nice when others aren't is a cost that you have to pay. It's certainly not free.
I also happen to believe very strongly that the internet isn't by nature a tool to amplify assholes. Things like this community can be grown here, we can have positive environments not full of trolls and other destructive behaviors. We just have to foster the good and discourage the bad as much as possible.
That being said, if you want to promote your product you're going to have to engage on the bigger platforms - and taking the ensuing backlash from trolls without having a minor breakdown is really, really difficult. I don't know anyone who's thick-skinned enough to NOT let that kind of abuse get to them, aside maybe from people who dedicate their entire lives to 'letting it go'. And as I hear it, Buddhists monks generally don't include videogames in their Zen prerogatives. :D
I also don't like eating pumpkin. There's no real point in that either. :P It does however explain some of the biasses I have when discussing pumpkin soup. To be honest I didn't really follow a lot of what really happened around this in terms of actual messages being sent, but I get the feeling that Fish has the tendency to make sarcastic/ironic comments that people who know him would understand but the general public wouldn't. So the first time that happens he might have been surprised, but it's almost as if it was unbelievable to him when he kept doing that and people kept getting angrier about it. But like I said, probably totally ignorant here.
I am fully considering Blow's point(I think so anyway). I actually said it's hard and takes training but it's doable. The thing I want to suggest to you is that every comment has meaningful information. It doesn't necessarily help with developing the game but people can't help in letting parts of themselves slip into their communication. So at the very least you could gain some information about the person mailing you. The only irrational hate I can think of is trolls trolling for the sake of trolling, and them you can safely ignore. The other part isn't rational hate(I think that's an oxymoron), the other part is that the people don't actually hate you. They are just unhappy/unsatisfied and are hoping someone will acknowledge their frustration.
I can't argue you on the time and energy part though. I think that's a real problem. Doing what I'm suggesting usually takes too much of both and doesn't get the pay off it deserves.
Also, I never said you needed to be nice. ;) You can be stern or angry...just as long as you are actually engaging with a person and not some abstract concept your brain perceives at the other end of the line.
[quote = dislekcia]I also happen to believe very strongly that the internet isn't by nature a tool to amplify assholes. Things like this community can be grown here, we can have positive environments not full of trolls and other destructive behaviors. We just have to foster the good and discourage the bad as much as possible.[/quote]
Agreed
I think what's happening is you're running up against my own personal defense-against-the-troll-arts mechanisms. My love and tolerate people gland is kicking in at the very thought of disliking someone as a person based on pretty flimsy exposure to them via the internet, that's all.
That said - I think that the cost of evaluating comments and negative statements aimed at you is something you're underestimating. You really do have to read things to decide what you're going to allow them to mean to you, that can be pretty hard sometimes, especially when the volumes end up being totally ludicrous. What you want to do is make sure your correspondence is funneled in ways that help you ignore the negative/useless stuff entirely so that you don't have to pay the psychic cost of engaging with it.
Look, you're preaching to the choir in terms of mining all the worth out of any feedback and trying to convert haters to happy people by reading between the lines. What I find weird is that you're advocating this sort of stuff and still saying that you don't like Phil as a person at the same time, c'mon give the dude a break ;) Yes, I get that you're saying people should be careful of the same sorts of circumstances, but there's a lot more to handling this sort of stuff than focusing on being extremely zen yourself: That will always, eventually, slip. Then the internet at large will jump on you.
"Step right up, step right up! Geeetch'yer Patent All-Natural BroForce here! Just one bottle of BroForce will turn you into the handsomest fellow or lady on the street, and the smartest too! Turn right up, turn right up!
That's right, little lady, the first half-bottle's free, the second costs you only a dime!
Look right here folks! See here the amazing photograph-plate evidence, the latest that science has to offer! See what my dear apprentice looked like before taking BroForce! And here he is now!
You're right to gasp, ladies and gentle-men! The effect of BroForce is truly astounding! And he's an official member of Mensa too! Roll right up, roll right up! First half is free, second costs only a dime! ..."
;P
(I'm afraid that I have little to add to the actual conversation at the moment. ^^; )
"Yes, but you've actually tried pumpkin before, right? ;) "
I love you guys! I will never use another example again :P Made my morning.
I guess I have to clarify a bit on saying I don't like Fish. It is a bit misleading to say that I don't like him. I should rather say that I don't like the behaviour he has been exhibiting. I only have a very small sample of behaviour to base my opinion on but based on that sample I'm predicting that we would probably not be BFF's. This does not mean that I have made up my mind about him and that I'll never like him because he's more successful than me said some nasty things. My opinion about him is still very much open ended and I'll only begin to make up my mind once(if) I meet him.
I think that I am indeed underestimating the cost of dealing with this. I have no idea how harsh it can get since I don't follow other people's stories about things like this that closely and don't have my own hatemail(yet :P). I'm afraid that I have this idealistic/naive view that will get shattered if this ever happens to me so this thread is good. But in terms of "normal" bullying and dealing with unruly clients it has served me well in the past so I'm hoping the knowledge carries over.
On the topic of my Zen breaking down it usually depends on the source of the comment. I mean if someone like Jonathan Blow says I'm an idiot and he doesn't respect me at all and every game I touch turns into crap, it won't touch me on a personal level. I might re-evaluate my decision to make games, but I won't feel bad because I know he doesn't know me. If however one of my close friends says something "minor" like "Did you brush your teeth?" I'll probably have a nervous breakdown.
I'm not actually sure how sleds work