Opinion: Lord Of The Rings, RMT, & Jaffe's Jam Jowling
Thanks to Sharkey for pointing out his new 1UP article quizzing Turbine's Jeff Steefel about 'real money trading' comments, since a recent Eurogamer interview, referenced on Joystiq as 'LotRO Producer Says Real Money for Game Items is the Future', ignited the Internet into a frenzy of ululating.
Sharkey quite correctly points out: "Weirdly, none of the quotes, when stripped out of the articles, seemed to be saying anything definitive about the future of anything, let alone in regards to The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. And shoehorning a publisher-sanctioned RMT (Real Money Transfer) setup into Lord of the Rings seemed pretty out of character against conversations I'd had with Jeff just a couple weeks before."
[For the record, the closest to a 'money' quote in the Eurogamer interview is: "We all know that something will happen in the next two to five years to business models in general, so we're paying attention to what's going on; watching what's going on with Sony Station whose servers support and manage this."]
So what, is this spin control? Steefel explains: "I think the part of the conversation that could be interpreted out of context is the acknowledgment that we are also businesspeople who have to kind of look at the direction the industry's going and understand that there's a large secondary market out there that's not helpful to our game. But it's happening. And it's a behavior that we need to understand, not a behavior that we want to provide in our game."
So who's in the 'wrong' here? The issue seems to be that bloggers and journalists alike can bring increasing focus to isolated comments, with increasingly spiraling editorializing reinforcing the point - though, Games.net, I'm slightly disturbed by your comment that: "Hmm, I find it kind of funny that he says they don't support fold farming." Now I have an image in my mind of gigantic sweaty guys in basements growing things in their body flaps!
The problem, if it exists, seems to be quotes presented in isolation, and opinions expressed alongside those quotes. Say, for example, David Jaffe randomly comments during breakfast at GDC: "You know, I really dig honey, but I'm not the biggest fan of jam" - and I overhear and post it on a blog alongside a couple of paragraphs about how he is completely right and jam is sticky and difficult to spread.
After that, the blog commenters chip in too, condemning him - and then the California Grown campaign posts a public statement asking him to rescind his slurs, which could potentially put the California Strawberry Commission out of business. Jaffe is then forced to apologize and make a commercial in which he eagerly promotes California strawberries, possibly while dressed in a strawberry suit.
(Obviously, David Jaffe has not, in this case, condemned fruit preserves, but I'm just illustrating why the public's need for drama and the websites' need for hits, alongside the power of the Internet to both anonymously allow extreme opinions and swiftly allow rumor and gossip and mounting 'opinion flow' to spread, meaning that context is swiftly removed and hysteria ensues.)
Comments
People do this all the time in regular life. This is nerd gossip.
Nice picture.
Posted by: Corey Holcomb-Hockin | June 8, 2007 11:44 PM
I think the core issue is that Joystiq and facts are barely even on last-name terms.
Posted by: Tetsuo | June 9, 2007 9:43 AM
Tetsuo, I think that comment would be fair if the indicated Joystiq article was reporting something that was factually inaccurate. I think Simon's point regarding quotes being stripped out of context is a very relevant one, but I don't believe this was a great example.
The Eurogamer interview establishes that the topic at hand is the secondary market, after which Mr. Steefel states that LoTRO (best shortening since KOTOR!) won't be taking part, BUT "we all know that something will happen in the next two to five years to business models in general, so we're paying attention to what's going on; watching what's going on with Sony Station whose servers support and manage this." This is not a quote floating in a vacuum, he's expressing an opinion about the secondary market (which is a business of trading real money for game items) and the future, one which he affirms again above. Joystiq reported and commented on that -- there was never any implication of it being shoehorned into LoTRO. In fact, the quote where he says it won't be is included in the post.
When the producer of a big MMO comments about changes he thinks might occur in the future of the business, it's relevant to gaming and worth talking about. When David Jaffe talks about food, not so much. Is talking about relevant issues now lumped under the "need for drama" and hits?
And just so we're clear, honey is awful, awful stuff. ;)
Posted by: Ludwig Kietzmann | June 9, 2007 10:42 AM
I'll add to Ludwig's response. This is Alexander Sliwinski from Joystiq. The quotes are quite clear and specific on what Steefel said. At no point in the post do we say that LotRO is going to begin any RMT. We even contacted Turbine's PR company regarding the EuroGamer quotes in an attempt to clarify the issue. We received a response from the company a couple days after we posted our story saying "thanks" for the way we handled the information and the fact that we gave them the "heads up" about how the EuroGamer interview may be misinterpreted -- which it obviously was. Steefel went on to emphasize again in the 1UP article the same things he said in the EuroGamer interview. Those are the facts and that's what we reported. Thanks for reading.
Posted by: Alexander Sliwinski | June 9, 2007 11:00 AM
Hey Joystiq folks - just to be clear, I don't really have a clear answer for this - when someone who _is_ the LoTR Online producer _does_ say something about RMT, it's not like it's untrue to quote it on its own - and indicate that he said it.
But as it passes down the line of readers who don't bother to click through and read the original interview, it often gets further highlighted and takes on a meaning far beyond the initial, fairly vague comments.
A great example of these that I've used before is the Pope Benedict XVI Islam controversy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Benedict_XVI_Islam_controversy
Posted by: simonc | June 9, 2007 12:43 PM
Guys, It's a business world. And when anything concerns money we can't predict human's behavior.
http://www.lord-of-the-rings.org
Posted by: Lord of the Rings fan | December 6, 2007 7:55 AM