Private Goes Public : GW2

Inventory Full doesn't purport to be any kind of journal of record and I frequently decline to acknowledge (or even notice) major events in the MMO world. Still, when something newsworthy happens in the main games I play, or at the companies which make those games, I do make a bit more of an effort to tag it here, if only because this blog is supposed to work primarily as a kind of personal diary.

Even so, there's a good chance I would have skipped over this week's latest firestorm at GW2, had it not finally gone supernova and burned itself out in spectacular and somewhat unexpected style yesterday. In reporting the events here, I find a satisfying synergy that signifies, to me at least, that blogging is very much not dead: were it not for bloggers I follow, I might not even have known about the whole sorry farrago until it was over.

I don't propose to rehash the entire saga in excruciating detail. I first heard about it via Jeromai, whose post has a link to a reddit thread that includes, close to the start, a reposting of the Twitter exchange that set the whole thing in motion. The surprising - and to me surprisingly encouraging - conclusion of the affair is covered in some depth in a post and comment thread at Endgame Viable.

I'm particularly grateful for the coverage given by those blogs because my regular news source, MassivelyOP, once again chose to preface their report with a gloss so nuanced and slippery that for the hundredth time I found myself considering my options on where I might find a reliable and comprehensive source for MMO news that didn't come with so much baggage.

For anyone who hasn't followed events as they happened and who doesn't care to click the links, the gist is this: one of the GW2 writers posted a lengthy series of tweets on her personal Twitter account, going into some considerable detail about the difficulties of writing for a protagonist (The Commander) who represents the player character in the narrative. It was an interesting read.

Did she really say that?

A GW2 player, who is also very well known and respected in the GW2 community as (to use the somewhat uncomfortable current buzzwords) an Influencer and Content Creator, tweeted a polite, intelligent and entirely innoffensive reply. The ANet employee (my deliberate and highly relevant choice of descriptor) responded sarcastically and dismissively, whereupon the Influencer acknowledged the response and withdrew, gracefully.

Had it ended there, so much, so little. But it didn't. The discussion spiralled out of control, dragging in gender politics and descending into exchanges of insults between, on one side, the ANet dev and another ANet employee who chimed in to support her and on the other... the whole of the internet.

Reddit gets a lot of stick for stirring things up but reading the linked thread above what I see is measured, intelligent discussion. Also, and more importantly, a much-needed collective defence and support network for an entirely innocent internet user who, out of nowhere, became the focus of attention for someone who perceived they had an authority to which they were not, in fact, entitled.

There have been some attempts to flip this narrative to portray the developer as the prey of a baying internet mob and I'm sure there are vast quantities of repulsive comments swilling around the periphery from the usual suspects, who jump any bandwagon rolling to wave their tatty, tattered flags. The thread I linked doesn't do that. 

Instead, as the person who started it concludes in a short summary at the top, "we stood up together as a community to defend two innocent people from hateful words". Well, I didn't. I don't have a reddit account. After this, though, I feel perhaps I should.

All this arguing just makes me tired.

There is always a tendency for an "us and them" attitude to develop between customer and supplier, audience and artist. In all walks of life people who feel themselves to be on the inside refer to those on the outside as "civilians" as though holding a job in  sales or accounting was akin to being in the armed forces. Bad things are said between work colleagues about those they work for all the time.

That's accepted as inevitable, even if not approved. (I personally don't approve it or participate in it in my own workplace, or not at least as a matter of course. There can be moments of frustration that need and deserve a venting but if it becomes a habit then you're probably in the wrong line of work.)

What everyone knows - or should know - is that, as an employee, you do not express these feelings and opinions directly to the customer or client. You very definitely don't express them volubly and vituperatively in a public forum visible to the entire world. And, crucially, when you choose to preface your opening comments with a statement that specifically identifies you as the employee of a company, which you name, everything you say thereafter can and will be taken to represent that company.

If you want to keep your thoughts and opinions private, don't put them on Twitter. Or reddit. Or, indeed, in a blog that someone other than you can read. You certainly do not choose to use one or more of these platforms to describe someone as a "rando asshat", when that person is not only well-known in the community that surrounds the primary product of the company for which you work, but has been specifically picked out for praise and reward by your own work colleagues (the Influencer in question has an NPC in-game named after him for the sterling work the Fractal Team felt he'd done to promote that aspect of the game).

Think happy thoughts.

Neither do you blithely state that you don't have to pretend to like customers when you're not at work as though that permits you to openly dislike them to their faces when you are self-identifying to them as an employee of that company in order to add weight to an argument you are making about the work you do for that company. Well, not if you want to go on working for that company. Which you pretty soon won't.

All in all, an object lesson in how not to be a professional writer - when the nature of your professional status is reliant on a paycheck from a named employer. J.K. Rowling can have all the Twitter spats she likes. Her views are hers alone and if her publisher doesn't like them they know what they can do. That's a different kind of professional writer entirely. You want that kind of power, go create the next Harry Potter.

In terms of freedom of action and self-expression, working as a writer for a video game gives a person no more leeway than working in the customer service department or the mail room. You will have signed up to the same company standards of service and you will be expected to abide by them in the same way.

If you don't like that, start your own video game company and make your own rules. Be your own Derek Smart and see where that takes you...