ROSS'S GAME DUNGEON: DARKSPORE

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More Game Dungeon! First off, I want to apologize for the delay on this one. I was hoping to get this one out a week sooner than I did. While that's normally no big deal, this is one episode where there are potential consequences for viewers having it out later, but not so late it's a disaster. Without giving away too much, I'll say this is one episode I hope for some of the most audience participation on.

 

I may have to revise my plans of having two more videos out this month. I'll certainly try, but it's possible I could be late seeing as how long this one took to make. I'm not certain, but this one might be a record for the number of image inserts in a Game Dungeon. Lots of info in this one!

 

COMMENTS

I really like that project.

 

It needs whole thread for itself, so that we can discuss details.

You should have a letter writing contest to encourage diversity in the form letters. And by you I mean Danielsan.

 

I know in retail at least that higher ups take a far greater interest in letters than in emails, so you're completely right about that. In my company if someone writes a letter, the general manager is expected to personally contact the customer and try to resolve the issue.

 

You know one company that's made arrangements for player servers is Turbine with Asheron's Call. Pity the game's a bit too dated for that to matter much, but I appreciate the effort a lot. Man, I still need to make my Asheron's Call story.

I guess I'll start off with the business addresses. A few quick Google searches on the executive names didn't reveal much except for a few Bloomberg listings. After looking in a bit further, it seems that Chris Bruzzo's business address is outdated (pointing to Starbucks). However, Peter (Robert) Moore's address seems to be more accurate (http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?personId=7654971&privcapId=27963).

 

The address listed (209 Redwood Shores Parkway, Redwood City, California 94065), according to Google Maps seems to point to Electronic Arts, which does seem to be one of their headquarters (http://careers.ea.com/our-locations/redwood-city-ears). Here's the EA Bloomberg ticker for anyone interested in continuing my search: http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/EA:US. I may actually search some more, however I'm rather tired now.

 

NOTE: I can't vouch for this information being accurate so check it before you rely on it.

 

EDIT: Link Moore's page doesn't seem to work every time. If it doesn't for you as well, you can Google "Peter Robert Moore Electronic Arts executive profile Bloomberg"

I think I found the address of Ken Barker, the Senior Vice President, Chief Accounting Officer at EA.

 

 

[CENSORED BY ROSS]

 

The distance between the headquaters and this address is 28,9 miles, and as far as know, there is an M. Barker living there, also, their home phone number is [CENSORED BY ROSS]

(This is his home addres because wtf what is a business address)

 

 

Still, I'm not 100% sure, but as far as I can tell, everything checks out, so if someone get the same result, then I think we got him.

I think I found the address of Ken Barker, the Senior Vice President, Chief Accounting Officer at EA.

At 22:54, Ross said "Accounting officer; no, he won't care" while showing the part where Ken Bark's bio was.

 

(This is his home addres because wtf what is a business address)

Don't post home addresses (I'd suggest editing it out/deleting it since the address for the accounting officer is not relevant to this matter) - the last thing we want is a harassment campaign (that's something that Ross actually warned against in the video). A business address is the place where the executive works, not lives.

I think I found the address of Ken Barker, the Senior Vice President, Chief Accounting Officer at EA.

 

 

[CENSORED BY ROSS]

 

The distance between the headquaters and this address is 28,9 miles, and as far as know, there is an M. Barker living there, also, their home phone number is [CENSORED BY ROSS]

(This is his home addres because wtf what is a business address)

 

 

Still, I'm not 100% sure, but as far as I can tell, everything checks out, so if someone get the same result, then I think we got him.

If people really want to contact the Accounting Officer, they can go ahead, but do it at EA's office (the address is up in the Youtube description). The personal addresses won't help the situation. I don't see the need to unleash the internet on his family over this.

Oh. Well if only I knew what business address meant, I could've saved a lot of time, anyway, sorry for the post.

So phase 0 is to get the message spread as far as possible, right?

 

I think it would help very much if whole thing had a name.

For example, when there were serious security holes found in some open source projects, they got their name (for example Heatbleed and Shellshock), which helped very much with PR and recognition among masses.

This thing needs a name that can be used in short messages on social media and even as hashtag on Twitter.

Something like Ross' master plan, Operation Mailbox, AwEAkening, etc...

Edit: I'm blind, Ross already named it "Operation: Communicate with EA"

It's not very short or hashtaggable, but still, it has name, no need to make new one.

 

It is getting a lot of traction already, since well known internet personalities are sharing it, so it would be great if people who want more information and want to participate know what to search for and where to look at.

I don't think that comments below Youtube video are the best place to do it.

 

Also, could http://www.accursedfarms.com/irc/ replace client with something that does not need Flash Player to work?

If possible set up qirc, or just embed Mibbit's client or something.

Naming things is hard. "Sunset Letters"...too gothy. "Project Chainmail" Too generic been done. "Accursed Sunset"...hmm. "Project Chainmale" probably already a porno.

Ross you may want to have some sort of written guidelines to follow along with your video in order to avoid further problems. Putting up something like PERSONAL INFORMATION IS NOT ALLOWED before this gets any larger would be best. I feared this might happen. We just had someone misinterpret the guidelines you provided in video and accidentally doxxed someone in the process within hours of you announcing the operation. If we're to get this operation off the ground then harmful actions made by misinformed people is the last thing we need. These guidelines need to be as clear cut and dry as possible with no room for misinterpretation. You should also take every opportunity you can to provide these guidelines as well. If people willing continue to misinterpret your guidelines and continue their harmful actions in your operation's name then you need to actively distance them from your operation. They should be branded as not having the support of your group and are properly ostracized. These measures may seem to be harsh but they're absolutely necessary if our operation is to be successful.

 

TL:DR You should treat people within the operation as if they were on a forum(like this one). Establish some rules and ban people for breaking those rules.

Naming things is hard. "Sunset Letters"...too gothy. "Project Chainmail" Too generic been done. "Accursed Sunset"...hmm. "Project Chainmale" probably already a porno.

Sorry, I watched video again and realised that I'm blind and it's already named "Operation: Communicate with EA"

 

Ross you may want to have some sort of written guidelines to follow along with your video in order to avoid further problems. Putting up something like PERSONAL INFORMATION IS NOT ALLOWED before this gets any bigger would be best. We just had someone misinterpret the guidelines you provided in video and accidentally doxxed someone in the process. These guidelines need to be as clear cut and dry as possible with no room for misinterpretation. You should also take every opportunity you can to provide these guidelines as well.

I agree with absolutely everything he said

Ah, Darkspore. Allow me to tell a thematically-relevant story about this game. I've followed production on this since I was six and it's traumatized me. It's haunted me.

 

Spore was going to be the best game of all time. I do not mean that people said it was going to be the best game of all time. I mean that it was actually destined to be the best game of all time. Barely a game, really (ie, something with a win condition), but more of a creative open-ended narrative experience. The Sims for people who like science documentaries instead of soap operas, Sim City for people who can picture greater ambitions than micro-managing New York, the freaking Holodeck manifested in the earliest years of the twenty first century. People like to talk about how games are hyped beyond all reason, and Spore is often presented as an example alongside the likes of Peter Molyneux. But it wasn't. All of the potential Spore had - it was all real. The alpha was on a great track, and it didn't overly rely on prerendered tricks, ie, it was real. If the alpha had continued on the path that it should have - that it could have - I wouldn't be a functional human being today. I would have spent my teenage years playing Spore and would have become more invested in it than I was in reality.

 

So what happened? EA wanted to murder the SHIT out of this game in the crib. I'm guessing that they were scared that it would raise the bar and, seeing its awesome scope, gamers wouldn't let them get away with their crappy shovelware games anymore. EA knew that they couldn't explicitly kill it, because it had already been demo'd in public and gamers wanted it badly. So instead they stirred up conflicts amongst the developers; a small splinter group formed inside Maxis who wanted to reenvision the game in a heavily neutered fashion; more on that in the next paragraph. EA empowered that group and basically engineered its takeover of the project. Spore was delayed many times, and ultimately came out several years later than it was expected to come out. It's often assumed that that was because there was a lot of work to do on it. The work was actually involved in neutering the game.

 

Spore as originally envisioned - and as originally made - is an experience where you take a single cell, progenitor of all life on a planet, and guide a single line of organisms through their evolution to an intelligent race, then guide a single line within that race through their development to the dominant group, and then guide the entire civilization through their exploration of space. Spore as released, post-neutering, is superficially similar, but is aimed squarely as the nine-year-old demographic, and I don't mean nine-year-old me, either, I mean a nine-year-old as envisioned by a marketing executive. Amoebas and, to an extent, animals, look more like plastic figurines than life forms. Herbivorism is presented not as an ecological niche but as a pacifist moral choice, like a rabid vegetarian's take on a video game morality system. There are exactly three technology levels, primitive, modern, and futuristic, and advancing from one era to the next happens all at once and is occasion for a loading screen. This is just scratching the surface - in general, the running theme is that scientific realism is stripped away to appeal to the Pokemon crowd and the experience is stripped away and replaced with a half-baked series of minigames. None of these things were true of the originally-intended game which, I reiterate, is not a fantasy but rather an actual thing that was fully possible and that almost existed.

 

When Spore finally came out, it was a flop. This was often blamed on the game's terrible DRM, and though the DRM was indeed terrible and a harbinger of things to come, I actually think it's just a scapegoat here. The game sold two million copies in its first three weeks, breaking a lot of records and whatever, but the sales dropped off when word of mouth got around, and the game's servers tell the real story: the game is online-only, and online activity for the game dropped very, very early, because the replay value - hell, the indefinite play value - had all been stripped out of the game in favor of making it more palatable to executives, ie, shallow and inoffensive. I think EA was, on some level, genuinely surprised that their neutered Spore didn't succeed with the public, because they had all kinds of movie deals and spinoff games lined up, which have naturally died off. Darkspore is the only spinoff game of Spore that was conceived after Spore's failure, and I think it was an attempt to fix the problems with Spore, based on player feedback that EA didn't really understand. They put real violence and a somewhat less cartoony approach to science fiction back in, but they also made it a standard action adventure game, ie, not Spore.

 

TL;DR, Darkspore is a deformed bastard baby chewing its way out of a eunuch that doesn't know it's a eunuch.

How about Gamer's Wake?

 

I've contacted archive.org and Jason Scott to see if they could help since things shutting down and being unreachable is kindof a big giant pissoff button for them.

On the subject of making sure harassment doesn't happen, there are some people in the Youtube comments talking about asking [email protected] of @kkad for support. [email protected] is a harasser from "that hashtag" so I would suggest for Ross to quickly tell those people not to contact him before this gets out of hand.

 

Edit: Replaced some words at the request of posters further down the conversation.

It needs whole thread for itself, so that we can discuss details.

Better some info on the website. Than I can write about that on my web too and link to it…

On the subject of making sure harassment doesn't happen, there are some people in the Youtube comments talking about asking Sargon of Akkad for support. Sargon is a harasser from Gamergate so I would suggest for Ross to quickly tell those people not to contact him before this gets out of hand.

I agree, for the sake of our own integrity let's keep those pseudointellectual neckbeards out of this. Infact we'll want to make sure that their support is unwelcomed here. They will bring nothing but hyperbole into the discussion and drag us all down with their innate stupidity.

 

I would suggest that we refrain from mentioning their actual names as this will undoubtedly draw more unwanted attention to the operation. Just refer to them as something else like I did and preferably refer to them as something uncommon. As this will make the Accursed Farms Forums less likely to pop up in a search by distasteful people. We're a pretty obscure forum so let's not give away one of our greatest lines of defense so easily without merit.

On the subject of making sure harassment doesn't happen, there are some people in the Youtube comments talking about asking Sargon of Akkad for support. Sargon is a harasser from Gamergate so I would suggest for Ross to quickly tell those people not to contact him before this gets out of hand.

I agree, for the sake of our own integrity let's keep those pseudointellectual neckbeards out of this. Infact we'll want to make sure that their support is unwelcomed here. They will bring nothing but hyperbole into the discussion and drag us all down with their innate stupidity.

 

I would suggest that we refrain from mentioning their actual names as this will undoubtedly draw more unwanted attention to the operation. Just refer to them as something else like I did and preferably refer to them as something uncommon. As this will make the Accursed Farms Forums less likely to pop up in a search by distasteful people. We're a pretty obscure forum so let's not give away one of our greatest lines of defense so easily without merit.

 

This is very important; letting Gamergate get its hands into this movement would be a complete disaster. It could very easily cause our attempts at opening a dialogue with EA to be strangled in its crib.

This is very important; letting Gamergate get its hands into this movement would be a complete disaster. It could very easily cause our attempts at opening a dialogue with EA to be strangled in its crib.

 

That's why we should very quickly help Ross come up with strictly defined objectives of this.

For example, step 3, "Anything else you can think of" is very broad and very open to interpretation.

I can think of flying a drone with explosives into EA building or getting few people with Ebola to visit EA headquarters, but those are absolutely not the right steps to achieve goal of making EA stop killing games.

That's why I think this whole project needs central place with all related information and tool for discussion.

 

For example, I'm not from US, and I'm thinking of writing my own letter instead of using template provided by Ross.

Is it ok if I bitch to EA how mad I am at them for killing Westwood and C&C frachise. Is it ok if I send mail to all top 3 on the list? Where do I ask this questions to get definitive answer?

 

Like I said before, I think first steps would be to make new thread for this and revive Accursed Farms IRC for real-time discussion. With first post in thread being constantly updating relevant information.

This is very important; letting Gamergate get its hands into this movement would be a complete disaster. It could very easily cause our attempts at opening a dialogue with EA to be strangled in its crib.

^ Agreed. The worst case scenario of this project is getting tarred with a brush that undermines the credibility of Accursed Farms, Ross and all of his fans and supporters. We don't need to worry about the core community - from what I've seen here, everyone is smart enough to follow the rules and tackle everything intelligently. What I'm worried about are the types of people who attend a peaceful protest and start fighting the police escort, because that is what everyone else will focus on (it's what happened at the march I attended last year - it only made the news because a couple of troublemakers were arrested).

 

I hope something good comes from this.