T w e n t y S i d e d
Last week I somehow messed up my Experienced Points article and ended up making people think I was unhappy with BioWare, rather than celebrating their efforts. That is, I ended up saying more or less the opposite of what I intended. I tried to patch it up with additional comments and such, but alas the thing was published and its errant message was already delivered to the hearts of thousands of now-annoyed gamers. In print, you cannot un-say something, you can only append “clarifications”. I did what I could with the tools I had, but some people no doubt think of me as “that guy who hates BioWare”. Most wounding of all were the messages from people who do in fact hate BioWare, who were welcoming to their fold and accepting me as one of their own.
I began to think it might just be easier to learn to hate BioWare than to clear things up.
I suppose this sort of thing happens from time to time. I’ve written about 23 MB of text here in the past four years. For reference, that’s more text than The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and the The Silmarillion combined. With that kind of output, it’s amazing this kind of misunderstanding doesn’t happen more often. It’s like the old analogy: If you put a monkey at a typewriter long enough, sooner or later he’ll type something you’ll have to apologize for.
So anyway, I was careful to make the gist of this week’s article as unambiguous as possible. I even put the message into the title, so that even if you never read my articles and you only click-through so you can look at my picture, you should still leave with the correct impression of my thesis. Then I made sure to link it four times, to make sure you wouldn’t miss it.
I’ve done what I can.
