Hmmm, well I think Jim takes it a little too far here mainly because he's taking a scattershot approach to so many separate issues, and also kind of dancing around the problems that lead to this kind of thing to begin with.
To be blunt I don't think threatening the kids of the Dragon Age 2 writer was appropriate. Something I am stating before people read other things I'm about to say and decide to jump on my case acting like I am saying it was, which I am not.
The central issue that this comes down to is untouchable corporate entities, and the rage they are generating by doing so many things wrong and upsetting so many people without much of a way to call them to task for what they do. Video games are just one business where this has become a problem. The old philosophy of "vote with your money" isn't really an option because the deck is so heavily loaded in many cases where you pretty much have to endure the practices of the big businesses or go without the product, which is at least going to bring annoyance to you if it's something you want enough to be upset to begin with. When it comes to certain kinds of products, luxury goods like video games and the like in particular, which involve a high level of investment, actually depriving the companies of money is more likely to drive the investors away and cause an industry crash which will simply cause you more deprivation rather than causing the policies, practices, or product to change.
To be brutally honest people are getting more upset with the global corporate stranglehold than ever before, your seeing violence and threats being leveled against all levels of business, it merely stands out when you see people getting so angry in general that they start issuing death threats against the families of video game writers who really aren't far up enough on the corporate food chain to matter for these purposes and ultimately haven't done much of note. Mostly this is spillover from bigger problems where such behavior isn't quite as inappropriate as many people might think, as unpopular as that point of view is (though it is slowly changing, hence the climb).
To explain when it's right to threaten someone on this level is when they threaten you on that level. Your unscrupulous banker, real estate mogul, corporate big wig, and other sorts who would gladly turn your entire family out on the streets and leave your children to starve, deprive your family of medicine, and take away your home because of the backlash of some housing scam beyond your control or because they figure they can make more money off of the land some other way (pushing for local Eminent Domain if nothing else), are all increasingly fair game. Basically if someone is willing to kill or hurt your family, being willing to do the same back in reverse becomes something else entirely. The argument that you should let the system handle things like this don't apply when these guys run or work with the system intended to police them, and argueing that you can't do this without becoming as bad as they are has no practical weight because the moral high ground doesn't matter when your family suffers when these guys pad their bank accounts and for all intents and purposes might not even acknowledge you as being human (it's all numbers). You threaten a guy in particular, he might not take that particularly seriously or feel threatened if he's confident, threaten his family however and that changes since nobody can afford to have them 100% protected all the time. Of course threats are meaningless, it's a sign of worse things to come I'm afraid, we saw the epic failure of non-violent protest against this kind of thing with "Occupy Wall Street" threats seem to have been on the rise since then, and I imagine it's only a matter of time before we start seeing a lot more domestic terrorism leveled against the untouchable classes through their families and holdings/employees if not against them directly. I actually don't like it believe it or not, I simply see what's happening, can't fault the arguments in any absolute sense, and pretty much take it as "the world sucks" since people get themselves into these problems. When things start to get this hot, on this level, just by the numbers your going to see a lot of threats and maybe even later on violence, directed against inappropriate targets as a spillover.
I'll also say that the guys making the threats against people like video game writers might not be right, but that doesn't suddenly excuse the wrong those people have done. While video games are a luxury product a lot of the bigger issues are being fought not just over things like housing, loan sharking, predatory banking practices, and other issues, but how business is done in general and to force the kind of accountability for quality that video game companies have been rapidly defining as not applying to them through things like their EULAs. The idea is that if you can force the people at the top to change, through any method, it's going to trickle down to the point of not getting this kind of crappy writer in a position like this to begin with. When it comes to "Dragon Age 2" so much was wrong with that game beyond the horrible writing that you can't point at one person and say it was their fault, it was a failure of oversight and someone trying to make a quick cash grab after the success of the first game, while not even having the resources for a GOOD cash grab allocated to it because of so many Bioware employees being tied up on things like "The Old Republic" as their primary responsibility. Bioware's usual policy of focusing on one game and polishing it to a high shine in every aspect simply hasn't been happening under EA management.
In the end the bottom line I'm getting at is that this is a sign of the times we live in. Ideally I'd prefer there to be a case where the checks and balances against capitalism worked a lot better, and it was possible for people to hold big companies accountable for their actions. That has failed for the moment. People have protested, and have largely been made into a bad joke by not being willing to take action. Now your starting to see the kind of simmering hatred that is going to lead to real problems, and this kind of rage while justified to an extent in certain arenas spills over into cases where it's not.
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I expect most people to skim over the above (at best) and not agree with me even if they read it. However I wanted to also say on a separate track that I think Jim was out of line with the whole claiming gamers are hypocrits for going after creators who give them the creativity that we claim we want.
The reason for this is simple, when your dealing with franchises your playing with an established product/world/style/way things work, producing "more of the same" is pretty much the entire point of a franchise, which is to create a predictable experience for people who like a certain kind of thing. There is a lot of room for creativity within a franchise, but at the end of the day your confined by a pre-existing vision and way of doing things. When a writer works on a franchise, it's not THEIR work, or their rules, they are simply being allowed to play there and things need to be treated with the utmost respect, especially when a particular formula has garnered a following that is coming back with their money specifically so they can get more of the same.
What gamers want is for gaming companies to create more, original, properties, rather than sticking within the same franchises. People still want those franchises as a baseline, but other things to do as well, from separate kinds of products. The problem is that gaming companies have gotten into the habit of wanting everything to be part of a franchise for advertising and promotional purposes. Rather than creating new games and IPs they instead take ideas that should be their own game, and then try and cram them into a franchise which tends to annoy fans that wanted a very specific kind of experience.
In the case of "Dragon Age" the entire thing was a spiritual successor to "Baldur's Gate" it was even promoted that way. It succeeded on those merits. It was never meant to appeal to the more action oriented gamer who wants to control the action directly as opposed to watching things unfold more slowly through phases. Like Baldur's gate it was developed around the idea of making your own protagonist, with different people's characters being able to be very different from each other's in terms of looks, gender, race, class, personality, etc... The kind of franchise that would expand by building on these foundations adding more options rather than left, much like how "Baldur's Gate" started out with very basic D&D classes, but "Baldur's Gate 2" added things like kits to expand the character options.
Now, at it's core "Dragon Age 2" was a fine idea, and would appeal to a certain kind of player different from the demographic of "Origins", the more action oriented player who found it too plodding. Not to mention people who aren't all that interested in creating their own characters and are just fine with being handed a pre-made character and told who it is, rather than defining itself. If Bioware had actually taken the time to polish up the game, add more enviroments, deal with issues like monster pop ins, and similar, it could have been really, really, good. Likewise the writing was mostly bad because it didn't work within the framework of things already established in the first game (such as how likely mages actually are to become abominations). If EA/Bioware had chosen to simply create a NEW franchise for more action oriented fantasy gamers, and let the writer develop her own world based around the specific kinds of plot elements she wanted as opposed to trying to re-define an existing world, things would have been a lot different.
The point here is that the whole argument about creativity is pretty straight forward.
... and again none of this justifies the threats, because honestly it's not a situation where a video game writer is going to cause someone's kids to freeze to death on a street corner by taking away their home or making it so you can't afford to feed them or whatever. Even by the points I was making above where the threats basically come down to "if you go after my family, I'll come after yours". But as I also pointed out you can't blame *Gamers* specifically for this when your seeing it happening everywhere, this is merely a bit of collateral spillover caused by general sentiments with people flapping off at the mouth at businesses in general because they are pretty much spewing so much bile at all of them.
I also kind of predicted things were going to come to this, and probably where they are going eventually if things don't change, back when "Occupy Wall Street" was starting and I saw it's epic fail on the horizon due to a complete lack of teeth and how easily it was to ignore by the people it was supposed to be getting to change. Some smelly dude in a lawn chair doesn't mean much when you can just fly over him in a private helicopter and his basic threat is "reform big business or I'll sit here like a sack of flesh and refuse to bathe". For the most part, the threats and increasing hostility we're seeing will fail too. Give it a few years and we'll probably see incidents of violence targeting businesses (or branches of them) on the rise more than they are now, probably followed by some serious riots where people start trying to do things like storm Wall Street and it's offices.
