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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eyebeams" data-source="post: 1685814" data-attributes="member: 9225">Well, only one side had a member that spied on the board.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.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.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.This is one thing that definitely indicates to me that their mandate is gone. It looks like this took what, maybe a month?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. 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.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.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.</blockquote>

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