Drive-By Commenters

On my last post, the drive-by commenter who calls him- or herself "NUNYA" posted that I should leave hardworking game shops alone, no matter how much they might renege on their promises to the people they use to promote their business, that I should "cut them some slack". Honestly, I do think that is fair. I am willing, after all, to cut slack to people whose Kickstarters are running excessively late (OK, I am thinking about two Kickstarters in particular, one gaming, the other something else). Why am I not so willing to give slack to a hardworking game shop?

I don't have a complete answer to this. I am trying to work through the issue, and maybe change my approach to one or the other thing.

First, there is a qualitative difference between running a raffle and putting together a creative work. A raffle only requires a way of randomizing (and I might suppose that a game shop would have some such method available to them), while a creative work requires a lot of very difficult, time-consuming work. As an author (published, actually, albeit as a co-author) and game designer (unpublished, but with an actual local following, even among gamers I've never met in person), I am very aware of this.

Second… no, actually. That first point is all I need. No matter how many conventions the people involved might have attended in the pursuit of their own interests, it shouldn't take four months to get five minutes together to randomize a winner, then perhaps another couple of minutes to post the results on Facebook, and finally email the winner (I exaggerate the amount of time slightly, but if the whole thing takes them more than an hour of work in total, they're doing it wrong). That is many orders of magnitude easier than putting together a published creative work.

That's not to say that NUNYA brought up the Kickstarter matter, but I hope that s/he isn't going around saying anything negative about, say, James Maliszewski's issues with getting Dwimmermount produced, given the extreme forgiveness that s/he is willing to give to a derelict game shop who took work from freelancers in exchange for a (currently unfulfilled) raffle entry.

Also, I updated in the last entry, but I do want to reiterate that Chronicle City Games, after my recent prodding, has said that they will post a winner tomorrow.