62: "I'm Evil"

[Goofonian]

the way i see it is the fanboy is obviously insane and the evil guru marketer is morally vacant. the only way to solve this is to buy the game that both parties recomend and if you hate it, rob a seven eleven to reimburse yourself and try try again.

or you could just pirate the game at no cost to yourself, the virtualy friendly solution to all money scaming jerk offs.

This would be the perfect solution if the posters labeled themselves as "fanboy" and "marketer". I think we need to add in a third title here: "cynic" - someone who is unreasonable in there bashing of any given game and by your definition equally as insane as the fanboy.

puzzle pirates is broken, that is one of the worst games ive ever played.

What games provide instead is a psychological reward, usually that of achievement, stress relief, fantasy enactmant, relaxation, social interaction, brain workout, and etc. In terms of puzzle pirates, it provides relaxation, social interaction, and brain workout, which clashes with the rewards most "hardcore" gamers look for: achievement, stress relief, fantasy enactment.

your point is certainly valid, but i really, really, really hate puzzle pirates.

How do I know who is the fanboy/cynic and who is neutral, perhaps you are both neutral and just have different opinions of the game. My point is, that it really all boils down to opinion and when your trying to decide what to buy you tend to rely on the opinions of people that you have had common ideas with in the past, whether that be 'real life' friends or people you've come to know as their avatar on a forum somewhere. If someone you've come to trust (i.e. the OGM's that do their job well) blatently lies to you because they've been paid to convince you to buy a particular game that may not be otherwise selling well, your gonna be pissed. but how are you gonna know?

Now lets not get confused here, really good games will sell themselves. Really bad games will get universally bashed and anyone who tells you to buy one will get laughed at by many people, openly. Its the middle ground games that some people will like and others will hate that the OGM's really do their good work on, because its these games that usually have the widest range of opinions floating around and which you usually rely on the advice of others to decide whether to put down your hard earned cash on.

It really seems to me like if an OGM is good enough, and has convinced you to buy something, there is
A) no way you could know you've just been had.
B) nothing you can do about it.

Or you could just pirate them, yeah.

 

[TomBeraha]

Even as a stoic PC person, the new Mac's are really really nice, were gaming not an issue, I'd be on a Mac.

So, Tom, are *you* Jack?

Nay, I be jack's slightly twisted side that does like the way OS X looks, my roomate gets on me about it regurally, I can't justify the costs of the apple hardware. (Which let's be frank are quite a bit more expensive than their PC counterparts) I was hoping with the switch the intel chips they'd come down in price and be side to side same cost as a dell or hp of comprabale power.

See, If apple was paying me to market their hardware, I'd tell you it was awesome for gaming, pointing out that quite a few games are infact released for mac and run quite well on it. *blah blah blah* so on and so forth. As they aren't, trust me on this, I built my PC about 6 months ago, I have a AMD Athlon X2 3800+, 2GB of ram, and a Radeon X850XT with 300GB of HDD space, the equivilent mac, would have run me about $1,500 more. (seriously). A flashy desktop which is admittedly where I spend very little of my time on a computer, is not worth that price difference. However, the aformentioned roomate told me their are some cracked versions of it that I could try running as a dual boot, and I'm thinking about giving that a shot to see how I'd like it as a general purpose / coding environment.

Treating piracy as a valid form of testing games isn't very nice to say on a gaming forum. IMHO, a better solution would be the re-introduction of shareware, which the Live services seem to get getting about doing so. Of cause it's nothing that we can actively do (unless you're a publisher), but at least there's good news about the whole issue.

I stand at odd ends here, I completely agree with you on the value of a good shareware / demo offering. For games that do not offer one, I will either pirate a copy, and decide I dont like it (or if I decide I do like it, buy it immediately to justify the stealing to my concience), or I will try a friend's copy at some indefinite point in the future when an opportunity arrives, I have yet to buy a game that I didn't play in some form first. I love game demos, it's why I own Psychonauts, it came on a Xbox demo disc my old roomate had and I loved it. I played a pirated copy of GTA:SA, and immediately felt compelled to buy the game. Oblivion is the result of 40 minutes playing on my best friends computer, now I own that too.

I don't try to argue that piracy is anything but stealing, But my concience doesn't feel bad about me testing a guitar before I buy it, nor would it feel bad about me testing a game. I don't make any uninformed purchase if I can avoid it, and if I have personal experience with the item, there is no question as to my feelings toward it.

 

[Goofonian]

Not trying to defend puzzle pirates, I have no idea if its any good and from your description I'm not sure I'll bother trying it, regardless if its free. I have too many games in my bookshelf that I know are good that I need to get around to finishing first.

I think your most definately jaded in this case, but I don't think your a cynic by my definition of the label. A cynic would be someone that tells you not to bother with mario galaxy, not because its a bad game but because they hate nintendo or hate platformers or still feel like sunshine was a sub par game and all other mario's will be the same.
If I happen to have the same common interests with said person in regards to say, god of war and shadow of the colossus and a whole pile of other games, then I'm likely to listen to them when they tell me that mario is a waste of time, despite the fact that mario galaxy is a game that no doubt will be a lot of fun and have multitudes of fans when it finally gets released.

 

[Virgil]

Now lets not get confused here, really good games will sell themselves. Really bad games will get universally bashed and anyone who tells you to buy one will get laughed at by many people, openly. Its the middle ground games that some people will like and others will hate that the OGM's really do their good work on, because its these games that usually have the widest range of opinions floating around and which you usually rely on the advice of others to decide whether to put down your hard earned cash on.

Well, sometimes. But I'm sure we can all think of really good games that didn't do well, and really bad games that have sold plenty of copies. Marketing really does have a big influence on whether or not a game gets 'known' - it really has to be something astounding to take off without it.

I think that this is what was being insinuated as a "method of last resort." I'm not sure what the pay scale on this is, but I do know how much ads on websites and magazines cost, and I have to imagine that it costs less to get the word out this way than to plaster the gaming space with up front advertising. Even if you paid someone $20 an hour, full time, for a month to do this, it'd cost less than a single-page ad in a print magazine and the results would probably be easier to notice.

Not trying to defend puzzle pirates, I have no idea if its any good and from your description I'm not sure I'll bother trying it, regardless if its free. I have too many games in my bookshelf that I know are good that I need to get around to finishing first.

It's not quite that horrible. If you like casual-style puzzle games, then it's worth trying. If that's not your thing, then you probably won't like it. The economy is definitely set up for a micropayment model though, so many things are purposely set to be more expensive than a normal player could earn purely through gameplay. Don't take my word for it though, I could be a plant

 

[Slybok [deprecated]]

I definitely found this article very interesting and to me, it is a nasty form of guerilla marketing. The psychological elements of the job would be interesting; spending all your days earning the trust of a community only to mislead them. I'm interested in what effect it has had on our dearest Jack.

Yeah, at times I wish I had a Mac for schoolwork and some artsy projects......

 

[Bongo Bill]

The difference online guerilla marketing and a regular old fan trying to talk you into liking something is that guerilla marketers are getting paid for it. And this difference is enough to make it evil?

 

[Gpig [deprecated]]

On top of the fact that it's deceitful, the difference is the fan is doing it because he wants the company and the game to do well because he enjoyed it and he wants others to enjoy it like he did while the guerilla marketer is tricking people into thinking he's doing it for the more noble reasons of the former.

"So act that you use humanity, whether in yourself or in another, always as an end-in-itself and never merely as a means"

So yeah, the difference is enough to make it evil in more than one way.

 

[TomBeraha]

The difference online guerilla marketing and a regular old fan trying to talk you into liking something is that guerilla marketers are getting paid for it. And this difference is enough to make it evil?

That's only true if the GM actually likes the game he's promoting, which is most certainly not always the case. I don't know that it's evil, but it's certainly decietful, and on shaky moral ground. I think of killing for no benefit as an evil act, this is a long way before that.

 

[C Town [deprecated]]

The difference online guerilla marketing and a regular old fan trying to talk you into liking something is that guerilla marketers are getting paid for it. And this difference is enough to make it evil?

That's only true if the GM actually likes the game he's promoting, which is most certainly not always the case. I don't know that it's evil, but it's certainly decietful, and on shaky moral ground. I think of killing for no benefit as an evil act, this is a long way before that.

TomBeraha, I agree.

GM = shill, simple as that. Fanboys/cynics (trollers excluded) have no economic ulterior motive for spouting their opinions; their feelings are genuine, whether you agree with them or not. People are increasingly choosing forums over professional critics because they crave a similar Joe/Jane POV. These OGM's poison the well-intentioned efforts of those who are willing to take the time out of their lives to share their experiences.

Whatever their names in the past, shills have been condemned since the begining of human bartering and interaction - Google or Wiki "shill" to see some views on the subject.

Side note: the quote that the bulk of the 18 - 24 crowd has been on the Web or 'Net all their lives is patently false. The Web has only been in existence 17 years, of that it has only entered into the public domain in the past 10 - 11 years, with mass adoption the past 6 - 8. I'm dating myself, but I've been on the 'Net before the web's existence, and I remember when the protocol came into existence (I'm in physics).