Friday, February 15, 2008

Lovers and Haters

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by the vitriol I experienced on one of my recent posts. Lesson learned. Don't create opportunities for people to post whatever pops into their mind. When people can put anything they want online anonymously it often seems there is little accountability. It reminded me of the Kathy Sierra incident last year. A sad episode in the history of the Blogoshere. And because I review games for AdventureGamers.com I have links from my profile there to here. Needless to say they have, oh, about 14 billion more visitors then I do. The thing is, I couldn't help but notice that the rude remarks seemed to coincide with a review that I had recently published, which generated some headed disagreement.

I have reviewed games for AG for ten years. Needless to say I have played a lot of games. On average I probably have a review up every 3 - 4 months and have for the past few years. Now, I feel I am far from being an expert, but just like with anything, the more you do the more experience you get. Being an adventure game fan I also belong to very small, but rabid community. A community that sometimes worries that is has been left behind by the x-box generation. And while it is true that adventure games don't get published in as great numbers as they once did, it is still a strong industry which puts out a good number of wonderful games. But this paranoia at times has the rather sad side effect of making players feel that reviewers should inflate ratings to help 'save' the genre. I understand that, and I love my adventure games as much as anyone, but I am not going to exaggerate a game's quality, it is not fair to the people who pay money to buy the game, the developer who hopes to make a living by their work, nor to the site I review for, which has an impeccable reputation for providing objective and fair reviews.

But further to this. I have noticed that I have a reader who constantly attacks one of my friends in my comments section every time she is mentioned in a post. While I appreciate that this person seems to enjoy reading my blog and hope they continue to find pleasure in it, I am not going to tolerate that kind of feedback anymore. If comments can't be constructive, they will be deleted. This blog is not a democracy, it is a heidiocracy and I make the rules.

4 comments:

Squirrelly Girly said...

Good for you!

Anonymous said...

Heidiocracy?!?!? God help us all sweet pea!

xo

Anonymous said...

It's your blog your rules! However, I want people to feel free to send me as many compliments as they like and I appreciate everyones concern for my well being.

Unknown said...

Well said! And yea, it's great to delete who and what you want, isn't it? Too bad we can't do that in REAL life!