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Dihydrogen monoxide will be found in the tumour.

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It’s a theory anyway.

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While Napoleon was correct it should be noted that he was not alive in the time of EA (unless you believe the conspiracy theorists, in which case he’s Danny DeVito).

“All of this has happened before, and it will happen again.”

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Do the event organisers have to green light such competitions too? They’d know the crowd better than anybody. Is anybody even trying to change anything about these events because of this? What’s the point reporting this at all? It’s just “haha, look at EA”. Investigate. Make it a proper scandal for everybody involved, encourage change! Change the World! Yeeeah!

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I would like to point out that you, Hypocee, descended into rant mode before I did and despite your eloquent retraction I believe your knee jerked first and hardest. However: that was yesterday and this is the internet. I took offence to your implication that, because I suggested it was deliberate, I was some sort of conspiracy headcase. You did the conclusion jumping, I did the frothing at the mouth, neither of us got anywhere. Yay internet.

And yes; you are correct I was implying the marketing thing was deliberate and an established practice. Doesn’t mean that every time it happens it’s deliberate and I didn’t mean to imply that (although I clearly did imply that) but this one was textbook enough to be unlikely to be a mistake (and it’s EA, who’s marketing department is bigger than God’s, they rarely make mistakes).

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My goals in writing comments here have nothing to do with Inferno‘s or even EA’s bottom line. 1. Simply venting. The callous contempt for various parties that this contest displayed enrages me. By writing, discussing, fact-checking, reading and editing my reactions I add nuance to my memory and fix it in place, besides which it simply feels good to talk to other people to whom this storm in a teacup is important. 2. To raise and preserve awareness. To keep whatever public pressure we can on the powers that be. To remind myself and others to keep watching them. To raise the odds however slightly that anyone who’d gotten hurt by this or gets hurt by any future iteration would get help, sue, go public, set off an investigation, whatever – and in turn, in distant theory, to encourage the profession responsible for it to put in a bit more thought, display a bit more class, next time they’re playing ‘edgy’ marketing games. Maybe there’ll be some small but important policy change at SDCC as a result of this. Hey, it could happen. In that light I actually view it as a good thing that I mostly see stories leaning toward ‘EA done fucked up’ rather than any attachment to Inferno. The game doesn’t have any relevance, this is a thoughtless screwup (or a sinister stunt!!) by a team at a big, powerful company that could have happened with any of half a dozen of their franchises.

At the very least they greenlighted the idea because either way it’s a win-win for them.

As you see, I dispute that. Cynical as I try to be, I think this sort of flap is more likely to hurt than help them on a wide front, and to be irrelevant at best on the narrower front because of the public connection to EA rather than Inferno. I even fondly imagine that an editor or two might deliberately have chosen that perspective just so that they wouldn’t be publicising the game, though that one’s probably false. Anyway, I also refuse to believe without evidence that the team thought a brouhaha would be a win. Napoleon’s Razor – I choose, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, to believe in incompetence over malice. It is naive in some cases. I still consciously choose to do it. Keeps my blood pressure down, if nothing else.

Do you have a chart, some kind of guideline of when to use italics and when to use all caps? I’ve always wanted to work out the pattern used in internet rants.

I do apologise for the discomfort to bystanders. 1. I am somewhat averse to using italics for agrammatical clauses. 2. I was deliberately trying to channel the newsgroup/TimeCube/InfoWars flavour, and shouting seemed the more appropriate style. 3. When I went back through the editing passes, the caps gave an excellent visual rhythm to the litany that I couldn’t bear to strip out. 4. In the past 24 hours I’ve been burned thrice by failed tag closures :) Of course, those are entirely personal and situational reasons. As you can see from virtually any of my text, I view the ability to spit on any particular style guide as a great Internet privilege, to be exercised at every opportunity.

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Here is another. It employs sarcasm, the lowest form of wit.
It twoo. Anything that does not completely kill a company forever is not a mistake and does not cost money. Acclaim. MS’ entertainment division’s profits, planned vs. minus a couple billion. Sony (specifically ‘people will buy anything with “playstation” on it’ and AllIWantForXmasIsAPSP).

So what were you oh-so-subtly ‘hinting at’ with this?

As the reaction to this kind of thing is statistically predictable I guarantee you we’re all, right now, dancing to EA’s happy little tune exactly like they wanted us to.
…
Look at some other instances of this sort of thing and you will see that all of them follow a pattern. That’s because there’s an established pattern for this sort of campaign. If they follow it to the letter then expect some form of headline grabbing legal action arising from this (that ultimately goes nowhere and quietly vanishes without trace) in the next 4-6 weeks.

I thought you were saying that EA’s Inferno marketing team produced and distributed these contest flyers with the premeditated, primary goal of causing outrage. Have I misinterpreted you?
What would you expect to happen if this were a lamentable – and lambastable – mistake by a few thoughtless people in a large entertainment company?
Does this differ in any way from your prediction for what will happen if we’re all ‘dancing to EA’s happy little tune’?

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No matter which direction the issue with this contest goes in, it’s for the most part unrelated to the actual product because it’s taken on a life of its own. The result is that the news of the game’s release rides on a wave of something that has a lot more power to spread by itself than the release of another shitty EA game would’ve done. It’s not negative press for the game, it’s negative press for something else, it doesn’t matter what.

At the very least they greenlighted the idea because either way it’s a win-win for them.

OT: Do you have a chart, some kind of guideline of when to use italics and when to use all caps? I’ve always wanted to work out the pattern used in internet rants.

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Microsoft: yeah both them and the X Box market have slid into obscurity since that little fiasco.

GTA IV: only shifted 1,890,000 units. Just on the PS3 (that’s made by Sony by the way) and SA was the biggest selling title ever on the PS2.

As with all the cases you’ve cited you’re confusing shitty business decisions and shocking QA for deliberately generated bad publicity.

Also thanks for thinking you have the slightest clue what I was hinting at and for equating marketing tactics with belief in the Illuminati and 9/11 conspiracies. Equivocation and ad hominem in one very long BAAAAAAAAAAW post? Was the MENSA office closed today or were you just bored of 4 Chan?

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