mearls said:
This entire thread demonstrates why a lot of people just stay the heck away from GAMA and ignore the entire mess it has become. GAMA politics are decisive, polarized, pointless, and ultimately harmful to the aims that GAMA is supposed to work towards. In the long run, all both sides have done is render GAMA a disaster zone that few people are willing to deal with. It would take a Herculean effort, one that would require a team that has nothing to do with either side of the feud, to repair it.
Well, only one side had a member that spied on the board.
At this point, I'm not sure anyone who doesn't have an emotional stake in GAMA politics could be bothered to take part in reforming the organization.
I think matters with GAMA are reflective of problems within the whole industry. For the past few years, there seems to be a terminal failure of the imagination when it comes to honestly confronting our common situation and looking at ways to improve it. When company owners can tell you with a straight face that the shrinking number of gamers is not a problem and they'll recoup it all from collectors, you have a problem. You have a catastrophic failure of vision.
A lot of people have an axe to grind with Ryan. Some of them have legitimate issues. A lot of people don't - they're just along for the ride, or for the game industry social cred, or because they hate Ryan for the success of d20. I've found that while many people in the game industry like to build worlds with shades of gray, they live in one that they see as awfully black and white. The truth behind this entire mess, not just this situation (Ryan is obviously in the wrong for accessing the list), rests somewhere in between the two sides' views.
GAMA definitely needs changing. At this point, though, I seriously doubt that this is going to require collective effort. Individuals can't really make things better now, but as we've just seen, they can sure as hell make things worse.
Ryan made a terrible mistake, one that is obviously unethical. I suspect that any lawsuits filed against him will, in the end, consume a lot of time, money, and energy that would be better spent elsewhere. The lawyers I've talked to, some of whom specialize in exactly this kind of stuff (hooray for the contacts an Ivy League education gives you...), wouldn't bother prosecuting this case unless there was a clear case of industrial sabotage, one that involved actual monetary damages. That said, I expect we'll see lawsuits and charges filed - there's too many axes to grind for this to just go away.
Well, we're not talking about a board of idle senior citizens a local library wondering what happened top the coffee fund, here. GAMA moves over a million bucks a year now and is supposed to represent an industry worth as much as half a billion dollars annually.
As for axes to grind . . . well, the hard truth of it is that sometimes, one's suspicions are vindicated.
The current board made a mistake in not immediately calling for Ryan's resignation. Their failure is an obvious blow to their credibility, especially since they promised to bring transparency and accountability to GAMA.
This is one thing that definitely indicates to me that their mandate is gone. It looks like this took what, maybe a month?
Personally, I think GAMA should sell GTS and Origins to Peter Adkison (if he'd take them... I doubt he'd want to run Origins. Maybe the Gamefest people would take it.) and disband itself.
GAMA's done a fine job with the STS and Origins, it seems. Where it eoncounters problems is with its work with gamers and the general public, including the Origins Awards.
Mike Stackpole's work to correct whacko, fringe charges against gaming could continue under a charitable organization that Stackpole or some other volunteers oversee, funded by a trust created with the money raised by the sale of GTS and Origins.
Does anybody still believe that this is still a going concern? This end of things is at best a volunteer operation. This is not to trivialize past concerns, but the industry isn't in any real danger from censors. It's in danger of bleeding away gamers.
Let the ENnies cover d20 awards, and recruit the GPA (an industry organization for small press companies) to create and manage a body of non-d20 RPG awards.
The Origins Awards suffer from severe legacy issues. Ryan Dancey's suggestions to correct them were inane and self-serving, but that doesn't mean they done't need to be changed. Traditional wargaming should be spun off into its own set of awards. It no longer has industry-wide relevancy. In fact, so many categories bear little relationship any more.
RPGs, though, still crossover between D20 and non-D20 groups in a robust enough fashion that there ought to be a common set of awards for both.
The only thing that could truly save GAMA is if it comes under the control of a group that can build bridges between disparate groups and form a consensus. The current administration would have to pull off a dramatic turn around to achieve that. I'm hard pressed to name a group of 5 people who have the willingness, never mind the skills and contacts, to do that.
GAMA can't have a consensus because the industry won't willingly go for that. We've spent 5 years operating under the subtext that everybody with money to burn is a "publisher, where" that there's some sort of secret forumla for success involving corpspeak and the idea that unbelievers are chaff in the way of true growth and where overreaching means that we suffer a constant creative brain drain to better-paying fields. The trouble with GAMA is that it really does represent the games industry, warts and all.
