Divorced from reality - RPGers & Corporate America

[Silverblade The Ench]

Krensky
no worries mate

We Humans always take things to extremes...like business. The concept maybe fine, the execution though...lol!

Decent people fear responsibility because they have a conscience and fear causing harm...greed blinds folk to danger (quite literally, been interesting psyhcological studies on this, thus the market can NEVER self regulate because of that)...corporations have such vast wealth and influence they can warp lawmakers' judgement...they can be beyond national ties so fear no government's censorship, etc.

So in the end, corporations are just as bad as any other extreme we've made.
Oh, in the UK, what you reffer to is a "Limited Company" (for liability), when I speak of corporations rather innacurrately I guess, I'm talking about any business over a certian size and wealth (listed company etc)

Anyway, back to RPGs...
look at the movie and music business, they have been running themselves into the damn ground for 20 odd years, because of such corporate, money-led style.
Corporations, and art, do not mix.

 

[Terramotus]

3. Companies aren't evil, but they can lose their way - I know we all love some Shadowrun, but corporations aren't evil. They may be run by evil people but it's orders of magnitude more likely that poor choices are made to support a business plan that's not achievable. There are businesses that put customers first because they understand that there will be no company without them. There are other businesses out there that put shareholder profits far above customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, or any number of other factors. #1 reason? The Internet boom. Many companies expect double-digit returns every quarter even when it's inarguably demonstrable to be unachievable. You know what helps drive that mentality? Being part of a publicly traded company.

I think here you disprove your own point.

I think that, in a publicly traded company, the organization will, almost inevitably, drift towards being institutionally evil. That is to say it routinely engages in practices that if an individual performed with a personally owned company, would be considered evil.

Terramotus' Law of Corporation Evilness: In the absence of government regulation, the evilness of a given corporation will increase proportionately to its size, the length of time the company has been publicly traded and the length of time since the retirement of the founder.

Let me explain: First, in a publicly traded company, you are not ever allowed to decide to make less money. Not only do individual jobs depend on this, the web of obligations to shareholders and legal responsibilities forbids it. So if something makes the company money but is unethical, so long as there are no laws to forbid it, and so long as public outcry does not impact profits enough to override the practice, it will always continue.

Over time, there will always be executives looking to move up in the company. Some of them will try unethical things to get there. Some of them will succeed in these unethical practices, and they will make the company money. Once this is done, it cannot be undone. Even after the orignator leaves the position, his successors will be obligated to keep the practice up in order to keep their jobs. These unethical practices will continue to pile up, unless stopped by laws or unless they Go Too Far.

The only brake on this is personal ethics of employees, particularly the founder. The problem is, the longer the founder is gone, and the larger the company is, the less clout any one individual has to change anything. Seriously, how often do you see any publicly traded companies announce a big new employee benefits plan that will cost them tons of money? The only exceptions to this are companies that still have an active founder (Costco springs to mind).

Sure, some individuals will seek to curb these practices, but it's virtually always against their self-interest to do so. It makes their job harder. And while sometimes large-scale passive-aggressive opposition to a practice can blunt its "evilness", in the long run self-interest will win. Eventually those individuals will move on, and the "ethical bloc" will be no more.

Sorry, corporations can definitely be evil. IMO, the idea that they can't is nothing more than a polite fiction people tell themselves to salve their own guilt. This of course is an entirely separate issue as to whether individuals who participate in these practices are ethically tainted by them.

 

[DracoSuave]

There IS a difference tho between 'So and So Corporation is Evil' and 'So and So Corporation is not doing what I want.'

The fact is, Wizards tried distributing PDFs and found that people were using that avenue to steal their work.

Lots of people. Lots of stealing.


And Wizards -should- be concerned with Piracy. How many of their books were leaked online before one could buy a copy? How many people have said 'Well I'd buy the book but I had the PDF a week ago?'

This isn't a small problem, and it's been really pronounced with this current edition.

The bottom line is that people were stealing their work, thereby crapping in the proverbial pool. So they had to make some sort of decision. Do they continue to enable the distribution channel that allows the thieves to steal their work? Do they start assigning DRM on their work making paying customers less able to access it?

The decision to pull PDFs could not have been an easy one for them to make. I -severely- doubt that it was made in the name of malice, but rather in -response to- malice. And they're going after the sources of that grievance, and they should.

Ask yourself this, if you worked hard to develop something and decided that your livelihood, whether or not your children get to eat supper, is based on the sales of this development, and someone was stealing it, would you be sympathetic?

The worst part of it is, the best justification anyone can come up with for piracy is 'Well you can't really stop it.' If someone stole from you and then said, to your face, 'Well, you can't really stop me' who is the dick here? Who is the real villain in this?

What if the sales for the PDFs were dwarfed by the numbers for the -stealing- of the PDFs? Then it wouldn't make -sense- to keep distributing them.

Bottom line. Wizards distributed PDFs, people used them to steal from Wizards, so Wizards decided to stop distributing them. It won't prevent all piracy, but it'll make it harder.

I for one want to protect the paychecks of the people who craft these game systems so I can enjoy them. I don't understand why -anyone- would want to endanger the livelihood of those that create what you enjoy.

 

[Silverblade The Ench]

DracoSave
simple question:
should Wizards, or anyone else, sue you to hell, because you have copied many of their books into your head?
think about it very carefully.

D&D and PC games I pay happily for, great value for money
music industry well lets say I object to having to pay for music I already own on vinyl, but lack means to convert to an mp3. I also bitterly object to how the they have run the music industry into the trash heap :/

Big Businesses motto "Might makes right" spoken though as "profit is always right"
I should post the "Ferengi Rules of Aquisition", lol!

Terramotus,
exactly!

 

[DracoSuave]

DracoSave
simple question:
should Wizards, or anyone else, sue you to hell, because you have copied many of their books into your head?
think about it very carefully.

Nor should they sue me for taking those copies and writing them out onto my character sheet. That's fair use.

But that's not what we're talking about. At all. There's a difference between copying parts of a work you paid for so you can use it, and distributing it to others so that they cannot.

D&D and PC games I pay happily for, great value for money
music industry well lets say I object to having to pay for music I already own on vinyl, but lack means to convert to an mp3. I also bitterly object to how the they have run the music industry into the trash heap :/

If your record player has a headphone jack and your computer has a microphone jack, then a trip to Radioshack gives you the means to do so.

It might not be a great copy, but you probably have the means if you're willing to spend 10 dollars at Radio Shack.

And in my country, that's legal fair use as well.

If you don't have the means, you can acquire them. It is not difficult.

Big Businesses motto "Might makes right" spoken though as "profit is always right"
I should post the "Ferengi Rules of Aquisition", lol!

Terramotus,
exactly!

Being a big business doesn't mean their acts are automaticly unethical or unwarranted. That's a logical fallacy and a broad generalization. There are many companies that don't screw people over, more so than the unethical ones.

 

[Tetsubo]

Heads up, folks.

The thread topic is interesting, but any attempt to turn this into an edition war instead of discussing it (hey Tetsubo, with that last line, I'm looking at you) will result in suspensions and most likely the thread's closure. Please try to keep the two topics separate.

As always, please report problem posts (by clicking on the triangular exclamation mark at the bottom left of every post) if you run across them.

Then you have effectively censored my ability to discuss the current game produced by WotC under the title of D&D.

I will make every effort to avoid such threads in the future.

Note: I posted to the Dancey thread before reading this warning.

 

[Mephistopheles]

Corporations can not be evil. They are not people. Corporations are amoral, not immoral. They do not and can not possess morality. The people who run them can be evil. Because they're people.

I don't think they're evil, but various factors - a number of which you summarized in your post - make them prone to psychopathic behaviour.

 

[Azgulor]

I think here you disprove your own point.

I think that, in a publicly traded company, the organization will, almost inevitably, drift towards being institutionally evil. That is to say it routinely engages in practices that if an individual performed with a personally owned company, would be considered evil.

Terramotus' Law of Corporation Evilness: In the absence of government regulation, the evilness of a given corporation will increase proportionately to its size, the length of time the company has been publicly traded and the length of time since the retirement of the founder.

Let me explain: First, in a publicly traded company, you are not ever allowed to decide to make less money. Not only do individual jobs depend on this, the web of obligations to shareholders and legal responsibilities forbids it. So if something makes the company money but is unethical, so long as there are no laws to forbid it, and so long as public outcry does not impact profits enough to override the practice, it will always continue.

Over time, there will always be executives looking to move up in the company. Some of them will try unethical things to get there. Some of them will succeed in these unethical practices, and they will make the company money. Once this is done, it cannot be undone. Even after the orignator leaves the position, his successors will be obligated to keep the practice up in order to keep their jobs. These unethical practices will continue to pile up, unless stopped by laws or unless they Go Too Far.

The only brake on this is personal ethics of employees, particularly the founder. The problem is, the longer the founder is gone, and the larger the company is, the less clout any one individual has to change anything. Seriously, how often do you see any publicly traded companies announce a big new employee benefits plan that will cost them tons of money? The only exceptions to this are companies that still have an active founder (Costco springs to mind).

Sure, some individuals will seek to curb these practices, but it's virtually always against their self-interest to do so. It makes their job harder. And while sometimes large-scale passive-aggressive opposition to a practice can blunt its "evilness", in the long run self-interest will win. Eventually those individuals will move on, and the "ethical bloc" will be no more.

Sorry, corporations can definitely be evil. IMO, the idea that they can't is nothing more than a polite fiction people tell themselves to salve their own guilt. This of course is an entirely separate issue as to whether individuals who participate in these practices are ethically tainted by them.

No, actually, they can't. The corporation, as stated upthread, is amoral. Whatever morality it displays or lacks is dependent upon the people running it. You've made so many sweeping assumptions, I'm somewhat taken aback.

Also, there seems to be recurring theme of "in the absence of regulation". Regulatory bodies CAN be a tool for good, but that is no more the case than a corporation always being "evil". Regulatory bodies can impede progress, punish companies and consumers, and abuse their power just as well. History has shown that governments have a far worse track record for abusing their power than corporations. I'll stop there to avoid steering into political debate.

To bring this back to the topic at hand, the point I was making was that it is ridiculous to say "Hasbro's the cause of the EEEVIL" while giving WotC a pass. WotC is a corporation - one with its own executives, staff, business goals, etc. And that EEEVIL corporation is made up of game designers, testers, etc. that many people like and respect.

WotC has successes, WotC makes mistakes. They own both. Each customer can decide what alignment label they want to assign and whether or not they want to do business with them.

 

[beverson]

And Wizards -should- be concerned with Piracy. How many of their books were leaked online before one could buy a copy? How many people have said 'Well I'd buy the book but I had the PDF a week ago?'

This isn't a small problem, and it's been really pronounced with this current edition.

Just to add something to the mix here - WotC products aren't the only ones being pirated - Adamant Entertainment has reported previously the availability of their entire catalog in the torrent channels, and I have personally seen torrents of the entire Paizo Pathfinder catalog. Granted, neither of them is the 800 lb gorilla that WotC is, but I would think the impact would be even more profound with Adamant - and they are still in business, and still getting income from PDF sales (I have no data on the level of said income, good or bad).

What about Green Ronin, Mongoose, White Wolf? I'm pretty sure they've got pdf products being pirated as well. Why have none of these other companies taken drastic actions to combat this menace?

Interesting question, no?

 

[Silverblade The Ench]

Mephistopheles
Pyschopathy, is regarded as "evil" by most people.
And as I've said elsewhere, FBI profiler concluded corporations act like pyschopaths
At least you can excuse a psychopath for having a literally defective brain (they can't empathize so can't understand cruelty they cause).
But if you are sane, and willfully act like a pyschopath..that is unequivacobly, evil.

I'n not against private enterprise, merely that beyond a certain point, a critical mass in an organization as it were...it degenerates, as all groupings seem to :/

Best if Gary & Co had been left running TSR, or that now, WOTC was sundered from Hasborg and restructured so the business and design teams were more harmonious, ie, business doesn't dominate, because they are completely out of touch with how their customers will react.
Business execs shouldn't get in the way of helping the players enjoy, and thus buy, D&D, so no more of the stuff we see now, which is just building up dislike of WOTC and thus, thier product. Current actions are typical lousy Coporate America/West, not creators intune with thier audience :/

Doesn't matter if WOTC plan was to bring back pdfs, all they have done is add more grist to the angst mill that's going to choke them as it's building up. It's asinine and no good for D&D

PirateCat,
that better?