Shacknews LoL

Nothing wrong with going home at 5. E-mail should be ignored at home.

Should still get stuff done during work hours though.

HEY SHACKNEWS!]q]q]q]q

It's ThomW Day on Shacknews.com!

Happy Birthday, Thom!

Let today forever be known as ThomW Day on Shacknews. Long may he [lol]

http://chattypics.com/files/ScreenShot20151113at15636AM_58yg19c1wt.png

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CwYvMLicRA

#heloveshiswife

Have a great day, buddy!

She just got out of surgery. She's being set up in the ICU right now. All went well. Will let you know more when I do.

I'd like to weigh in on this as a guy that conducts interviews pretty often. And considering I'm at the hospital on my phone with plenty of time, I figure I'll go nuts on this.

I'm not saying John Walker should have lobbed nothing but softballs at Molyneux, but that first question is such an insult and so disrespectful to the interview subject that it makes the rest of that piece hard to read. It's cringeworthy. It sets a negative tone right out of the gate and even goes to so far as to dehumanize the person on the other end. Video games already have a huge problem when it comes to dehumanizing developers and making them out to be autonomous labor forces. Peter Molyneux is a human being and one that's capable of making mistakes. Does he get himself in over his head? Quite a bit! Godus, Fable, etc. ended up being far less than he made them out to be. Hey, guess what? When you dream big and you have visions of creating something that'll make thousands of people happy, you're going to get caught up in your own hype and oversell it. That's just what happens. To treat him like he did this out of any sense of malice is the height of smugness and arrogance and is such a turnoff. And yes, I say this as someone in the writing profession.

Want a comparison? How easy would it have been for me to ambush Phil Robb last Monday during the Evolve event and come right at him with questions about the DLC plan? Maybe I should have started that interview by going "Phil, are you nickel and diming your customer base?" But that would have incredibly disrespectful. Should I have avoided that topic entirely? Absolutely not! That's a genuine concern and I have a responsibility to the readers of this site to ask about that. That's why I engaged respectfully, worked my way up to the topic, and asked it in a direct, yet polite, manner. Yes, he opened up about it. Yes, he was honest with his answers in a way and responded to me in a genuine way that he would not have if I had taken the asshole route. And he wound up coming across as a very real human being, one with ambitions, dreams, and yes, with faults. I am very proud of that interview, and many of my other interviews like it, because it doesn't just portray these people as monkeys working a conveyor belt. They're people and they deserve to be treated with the same respect that any of us would want in that same position. Not everyone is out there to screw over the paying customer and it's unfair that many game designers are painted with that kind of broad brush.

I don't want to live in a cynical gaming world. The publisher model, Metacritic, et al. give us enough bullshit and cynicism. I don't want to see the sad cynicism spread like this.

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we gotta bring back the porn, shit is getting weird

The backyard.

Shack's front page is like...filled with content now. I've been going there quite frequently.

Good work, Shack staff!

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