Penny Arcade

You almost certainly know about Draw Something already - like Words With Friends or Hanging With Friends or Inadvertent Castration With Friends, it is an asymmetrical nod to some absolutely commonplace entertainment which modern life has made difficult.

“Photoshop Hero” may not exist as such, but the prevalence of touch displays means that more games may leverage its noble spirit.  Gabriel’s ChatRoulette mod “The Game” provided hours of entertainment, for example.  Draw Something Else, his newest release, may reach a wider audience.

I’m hooked on Kickstarter now; I always wanna be startin’ something.  Double Fine Adventure and Wasteland 2 are only a few of my recent ventures, followed up by The Banner Saga yesterday, which I found sort of irresistible.  I’ve mentioned that I have a hard time accepting “rewards” beyond the product I’m trying to make real.  Having once been in the position of trying to make an Adult Company out of a cool idea me and a friend of mine had, I don’t want them spending their time on me like that.  I think it’s an incredibly powerful lure, and it’s core to the philosophy which attempts to create stronger links between people and thing and the people who make things.  I don’t get the NPR tote bags either.  I don’t know, I’m weird.

Having just completed our Warmachine tournament I’m still very much in that Mode, so the Kickstarter for Mobile Frame Zero: Rapid Attack fell into fertile soil.  It’s essentially a tabletop wargame system designed for use with Lego bricks, and they’ve already made their nut, so this pitch doesn’t have the imperative some others do.  I am fucking hooked on their Lego designs, though: they’re on that ultrasimplified tip, where the detail is all in the broad strokes and the silhouettes.  Even better, enthusiasts of the project have already started putting up their own designs.

Rabbit Hole alert.

This momentum of that site really is marvelous to behold; I want to wring everything I can out of it before the inevitable High Profile Failure that transforms all that momentum into a bucking serpent of jagged, shredding metal.

(CW)TB out.

i have none

You have almost certainly heard of “Retake Mass Effect” by now. One of many grassroots efforts to get a new ending to Mass Effect 3, it’s part community, part online petition, and part (here is where things get complicated) Child’s Play Donation Drive. They have stopped taking donations now partly because they basically won and partly because we don’t know how to feel about this use of the charity.

As the main point of contact for Child’s Play, Jamie has been buried under mail about this situation.  Apparently some of the people giving to the cause seemed to think that they were paying for a new ending to Mass Effect. She’s been asked what the goal is, and how much they need to raise in order to get the ending produced. We’ve also been contacted by PayPal due to a high number of people asking for their donations back.  This is in addition to readers who simply couldn’t understand how this was connected to Child’s Play’s mission.  We were dealing with a lot of very confused people, more every day, and that told us we had a problem.

We have policies in place to deal with direct abuse: we don’t allow companies to use Child’s Play in order to sell more stuff.  To that end we do not allow deals like “1 cent of every dollar goes to Child’s Play!” or whatever.  But this isn’t anywhere on that continuum!  This is a passionate community that formed around one thing, and some of that passion was expressed in charitable giving.  I actually support this cause, but I am a pessimist, and I’m thinking about the next time something like this happens - when someone attaches Child’s Play to something we can’t get behind, or leverages your history of generosity and fellow feeling for their own weird bullshit.  So, we need to have something like a policy on this.  This is the best way I can think to say it:

Child’s Play cannot be a tool to draw attention to a cause.  Child’s Play must be the Cause.

Nothing like this has ever happened in the almost ten years the charity has been running, so it kind of threw me for a loop.  Thanks for listening.

(CW)TB