Alzrius
The EN World kitten
prosfilaes said:I have a hard time making sense of that in a commercial environment. If you're a professor happy with your salary, go ahead and make your art however you want. But these are people making a full-time living off their games.
Are you saying that theme doesn't matter? If you find some themes are so distasteful or uninteresting that you won't buy games using them--a game where you race to fuel the ovens with bodies at your concentration camp, or a game where your pony-unicorns race to deliver the fairy ice cream with sparkles to the children--then game companies who use them will lose out on sales to you. That's the censorship of the dollar. If you have a theme that a lot of people in your target audience don't like, and you want to make money, you should change it.
I have little sympathy for FFG here. What you decry, I suspect FFG hoped for. They sent out a blurb testing the waters; when they got back too much negative response, they toned it down. They tested the theme as wise companies did and got some publicity for their upcoming game in the bargain.
I'm not complaining about FFG having changed the product statement; I'm complaining about the complainers who apparently raised enough of a stink that they convinced FFG to change the statement - those people are the problem.
It's fine for people to have their own opinion, but I can't stand the idea of people wanting something to be changed for no other reason than it offends them; I find that to be unforgivably arrogant, to say nothing of borderline fascistic. Just because you don't care for something is no reason to say that it can't exist - my problem with that attitude has nothing to do with whether the person they're complaining to capitulates or not.
1Mac said:Well yes, and my point was that what you think the facts are are "rooted in personal politics," as I put it. I thought the point of subjectivity was covered in that statement.
I was underlining your point.
It's what lots of other posters were discussing.
Yeah, but as I said, it's not what I'm discussing. I'm discussing the idea of intolerance towards that which someone doesn't like.
That's about the only reason to advocate that something be changed!
I disagree. A discussion is good; healthy debate is good. Simply saying that something is bad just because you don't like it is not good - it's closed-minded. You don't have to look at something or participate in something you don't care for, but it still deserves to exist.
This wasn't censorship. No one forced FF to retract and reprint a marketing blurb for their game. If a good chunk of FF's fanbase complained about the blurb, they weren't violating FF's right to free speech; they were exercising their own right to free speech. FF could have chose to either heed or ignore these complaints, and they apparently decided they were worth addressing.
That's not the point I was making, though.
The issue for me wasn't FFG's reaction to the people who were apparently outraged; it was those "outragers" themselves.