Daxx, I do indeed think many of your points are valid and your post is intelligent and well reasoned, however I believe the crux of the entire issue stems from this misconception that many members of the community have:
...the tournament organiser broke the social contract first by deviating from expectations about how the event was going to be run.
It is highly delusional to think that the organizer(s) of this free event deviated from any reasonable expectations. Whether that is because the expectations players had were themselves delusional, or whether it's because players thinking that when their expectations aren't met that gives them moral authority to "act like dicks," is somewhat moot.
We exist here in a community of many with a rather unrealistic perception of what their roles in fact are. A community like this runs best when people feel engaged, like they can participate and like that they are contributing to the overall creative work that is the forum and the game community. And that's not negligible; in fact it's a measurable asset. If Zanzarino were to sell his software tomorrow, the fact that it is attached to an active community would garner more money in the sale. Nonetheless. The large amount of "titles" given to folks around here are more about community building than they are about serious responsibility when it comes to maintaining the website. Understanding exactly what it means to "run" something is really pretty nuanced and few people grasp it under age 30, and often not then except with experience. ScaredGirl is a person who
de facto runs this site; she has actual tangible responsibility which comes directly from the fact that she built it with her two hands. Beyond her, everyone else is really just a community organizer of some degree or another. People do make contributions as is always the case in an open community and some of those contributions may become permanent parts of the ouevre, but it does not take more than about ten sober seconds to realize that this is ScaredGirl's ouevre. Perhaps it will morph into the ouevre of 2 or 3 people depending on how much creative authority ScaredGirl cedes to those people. But that is her choice and it's pretty obvious that it has not yet happened to any great extent for the over-arching structures of this site.
Here there are community contributions and there are many useful roles played by volunteers; but they and no one else is in an actual managerial role with actual responsibility to maintain the website. That is just the way free websites work. That realization may be helpful to many who feel entitled to levy their influence on content design -- because: since they are without responsibility for design they have no real authority. It is this basic principle that explains why the expectations you refer to in your quote above are off-base. No person here who came to this website by discovering and playing Elements on the internet and then deciding to volunteer to help the community should delude himself into thinking that he is now entitled to redesign it. These people are free volunteers; they are not programmers sitting in an office hired by Zanzarino; they are not associates of ScaredGirl. They have no actual responsibility over website content and there is no actual authority.
I think it is a mischaracterization of statements that I or SG may have made to think that we're painting this as an ethical dilemma; I don't find it useful to argue that participants are ethically bound to much of anything in free online gaming forums -- that's the nature of the medium, as you correctly pointed out. More accurately, I think we see it as a basic matter of maturity. You don't like something, so you throw a temper tantrum: that's the simplified version of what happened. It did not happen unilaterally across the community, but rather was pushed forward by the typical immature intellectual force that is 16-to-24-year-old gaming males who like to invoke concepts they learned in government class when they paint themselves "activists" in what ultimately amounts to whining and pouting. This is not descriptive of everyone, surely not, and these movements happen by way of unspoken group consensus more than bad intentions on any one person's part.
So in many ways I actually agree with you entirely that there's no real validity in saying people acted unethically and should be lambasted as such. But by the same measure all of the posturing and theory spouted by some members of this community belie an utterly inexperienced view of the way the world basically works, and I can only describe it as "silly." Pages of arguments about what "rights" an unpaying, could-be-anyone internet user should have with regard to a product designer are arguments that simply have no context in "real life." I build products for a living; and
even my paying customers, including those who pay a subscription fee and receive content from me regularly that they may not always like,
have no right whatsoever to dictate their opinions to me let alone control my creative endeavors. I don't need to have arguments about a video game to understand these facts: they are simply how the world works, as any single person who designs products like me professionally already knows. When it comes to customers, the reality is, if they don't like it, they can stop paying and go elsewhere. The payment they are making is voluntary and based on their own expectations. As long as I am not broadcasting expectations to the contrary -- like that I say I sell apples when I sell oranges -- they have no legal or ethical right to be upset if they don't like what they get. Here we're in an even more extreme situation where the only thing that members have invested is their recreational time and
not their money, so it's even more ludicrous to think that people here should have rights over something the organizers design. And ScaredGirl never told the community that Event Cards were not going to favor one element over another; and it is implicit in any video game like this one that luck is a factor. It is outrageous to claim that ScaredGirl acted irresponsibly therefore: Both because she is not bound to any set of expectations anyway and because she didn't misrepresent any aspect of what she was doing.
It's not a "nuance" but two completely different things that are not hard to understand when one says a person has no
right to creative control or on the other hand that his opinion
doesn't matter. Those are not the same things and no one has ever said or ever believed that someone's opinion here doesn't matter. Not being in charge and not mattering are different.
For example, of course I care immensely what my clients want and how they feel about what I sell them -- so it's an important aspect of my business to make myself open to that feedback. But I'm not somehow beholden to them because of it. Exactly the same is true for ScaredGirl -- she is not bound to screen her design past anyone. But she does, frequently. And she engages the community to help in design frequently too -- because she cares what people think, like any good designer. It is not that hard to understand that a community member's opinion being important and desired by the organizers is not the same thing as that community member having authority and the designers being required to heed those opinions.
I don't need to speak for ScaredGirl but I can say: in spite of the extremely true fact that I would be an idiot not to care what my clients think, that doesn't change the fact that if any one of them were to make similar statements of insolence to some of the ones I've read in others' posts on this website, I would probably find them so ridiculous that I wouldn't even be mad -- I would just write them off as infantile. So if ScaredGirl was pissed, upset, what-have-you, I understand -- and I'm not such a condescending self-important prick that I say it's because she's "emotional" (not that I'm implying you have said anything even close to that, I'm just making the point). Even if she is the most emotional person on the planet. That would be like stealing something and getting in front of the judge and feeling like the whole problem was caused by the fact that this was the meanest judge in the world. The problem of course was with me and what I did -- not how other people reacted to it.
Anyway, that is a frank assessment of this situation and I hope you can understand my perspective even if you disagree. I do believe that most people who create products think about these things much the way I do, and that they would find customers' presumption of rights over the design process ludicrous. Perhaps the status quo for free internet games is somehow different, but my experience with them and my reading of ScaredGirl's posts suggests otherwise.
There you have it, those are my 2¢.
