Super Opinionated!

Google announced yesterdaythat they’re removing the social features from Google Reader. They’re pitching this as an attempt to “clean things up a bit.” They also claim that, “the end result is better than what’s available today.” They acknowledge that removing the ability to friend or follow other gReader users, among other non-specified “things like” those social features, might cause people to “feel like the product is no longer for you.” Their proposed solution: export your data from gReader. The end.When talking about this announcement with people, I get the impression that most people don’t really understand or use gReader’s social features, so I can see how this wouldn’t seem like a big deal. For me, this is the destruction of the only online space I truly give a shit about. (Sorry Twitter, Facebook, etc.) I’m actually really upset about this, as it’s eliminating a social space I’ve been participating in for several years.

I’m not going to explain how RSS readers work, as I think you can solve that part for yourself. The part that makes gReader great is that as you read your feeds, if you come across a post that you find interesting, worthy of discussion, full of kittens, whatever, you can hit “Share.” OR you can even click “Share with note,” if you want to add a little blurb at the top with your feelings or thoughts about the post you’re sharing.

But who is seeing this stuff, right? For me, it’s a small group (I think the largest it’s been is around 40 people) who can view all of my shared items, can view my comments, and can comment on my shared items. All three of those things, btw? Configurable. I have the ability to make groups from my Google contacts and control their rights when accessing my content. Those people also have control over who sees what of their stuff. You can follow people, which means you can see their shares — and if that person is super private, it means they’ll have to give you rights to see their stuff in order for that to work.

What this means is that I have several RSS feeds that, rather than a site’s posts, are items shared by other people. They have their own section, “People you follow.” When I’m in a hurry, I often mark-as-read my “normal” RSS feeds and just read and comment on the shared items of my friends.

The coolest part of gReader, for me, is the Comment View. This also lives in “People you follow,” and it displays any item, either shared by me or someone I follow, that has new comments on it since the last time I clicked on it. Not just stuff I’ve personally commented on, but anything that my friends are discussing. If two of my friends comment back and forth on a shared item, I will keep seeing their discussion, even if I haven’t contributed yet. As new comments appear on items, they get bumped to the top of Comment View, so I don’t miss anything and can jump in if a discussion works its way around to being something I want to participate in.

When I started using gReader, my community was about half the size it currently is. However, there would be people commenting on my friends’ shares, people I didn’t know, who were funny, or who mentioned stuff I liked, or whatever. And so over the first year or so, there was a lot of, “Oh hey, friend from art school who loves modern novels and hipster fashion, you should TOTALLY be friends with this friend-of-a-friend who works in the fashion industry and is awesomely intellectual,” type of stuff happening. It was, and continues to be, the only social network where I interact with people with some semblance of normal real world humanity. (And by that, I mean it’s like we’re all at a mutual friend’s house party.)

We discovered that if you click on “Shared Items”, you could write an original post and share it with the group. (Topics covered in that manner: job interviews, buying houses, getting engaged, moving across the country, pregnancy, child care, cancer scares, deaths in the family, holiday-related family drama, and the occasional “this day is the absolute worst, someone please remind me I’m a valuable human being”.)

We visit each other and go out to dinner together when we’re passing through town. We travel to stay at each other’s homes for a mini-break. About twenty of us rented a house and took a vacation together last summer. This community is the primary way I stay in regular contact with many of my closest friends, it’s the network I tell first about things that happen in my life, and it’s often the only place I vent when I’m upset enough about something that I don’t want to risk mis-speaking in highly public spaces like Twitter. I am a more sensitive person, a more aware person, a more progressive, more feminist, more sympathetic and more open-minded person because of the years spent reading things I’d never have read, seeing things I’d never have seen, and getting to discuss these “new” ideas with people I respect.

This is the community I’m losing.

One of the most important things for me about gReader is that it balances the two primary uses of the internet: information and communication. Discussion that follows the sharing of information – blog posts, news items, opinion pieces, editorial images, book reviews, pictures of Zoe Saldana, etc – is more meaningful, directed, and interesting to me than post after post of people talking about themselves. I like that the primary verb of gReader is “share” – but not about you; about content that’s meaningful to you. I like that I have to click on a specific tab in order to get the little window that allows me to post only about myself. I like that gReader provides a single interface to both read content on the internet AND discuss that content with my friends.

Google’s new alternative to Reader’s social features is Google Plus. Apparently, if I share something that I see in Reader, it will generate a post to whatever circles I select and display it on my Plus account. If you’ll recall from a few paragraphs ago, Google is pitching this as, “better than what’s available today.”

So let’s look at what’s available today. I read a post in a design blog’s RSS feed on gReader featuring a house I think looks really cool, so I share it. Here’s what that share looks like:

(Credit for the fancy numbers and images goes to Darius Kazemi)

The majority of the page (66%) is dedicated to the content the user is viewing, and you can scroll down in the pink section of the page to read the entire content of the item being viewed. Google’s using about 1/3 of the page (31%) with layout and various features. The navigation section to view other peoples’ content is 3% of the page. The mechanism for sharing items (not pictured) is a button at the bottom of every post that says “Share”, and it’s so small that I didn’t measure it.

Some things I love about this:
- Content shared by my friends is automatically collected as feeds labeled with their name, making it easy to navigate to any person’s shares quickly.
- Most of the page is dedicated to displaying information and whatever comments are connected to that information.

And now let’s look at the “better” end result. I read a post in a design blog’s RSS feed on gReader featuring a house I think looks really cool, so I click the share button and generate a post in Google Plus. Here’s what that post looks like:

The majority of the page (57%) is dedicated to layout and various features. Other peoples’ content is automatically displayed, and that takes up 25% of the page. The content I shared gets 14% of the page, and the mechanism for sharing items takes up 5%, front and center.

Things I love a lot less:
- This is an entirely different site, so in order to read items shared by my community, I have to leave gReader, go to Plus, and then I guess make a circle for the people whose shares I want to see? And then either read all of their shares en masse, or click through to each of their profiles and scroll through to see what they’ve shared since the last time I checked?
- I have no way of easily keeping up with discussions going on in my community (compared to the way Comment View currently works).
- Posting links to Plus does not display the content of the item you’re sharing. Notice that in order to read the full post, you’d have to click the link and open a new page or tab.

In short, this is not a workflow designed around sharing information and communicating about it. This is a workflow designed to make people click on things.

Taken in hand with the earlier announcement from Google that they’re shutting down Buzz (another quirky social network that didn’t achieve Facebook-level popularity), part of me suspects that someone in Google corporate looked at the Buzz and gReader communities, looked at Plus’s less-than-vertical adoption & use rates, and concluded that by killing Buzz and gReader’s social elements, these communities would migrate over to Plus.

That is, however, a ridiculous idea. Buzz operates in your Gmail inbox and gReader is an RSS feed reader. The majority of employers don’t block email or RSS feed readers. You know what a lot of employers do block? Self-described social networks like Google Plus. In addition, guess what gReader lets you call yourself? You guessed it: anything you damn well please. I have friends who refuse to join Plus because they’re worried that if they get griefed as a ‘nym, they’ll have all their other Google services (like Gmail) frozen. How am I supposed to interact with these people the way I do now?

Also, where is it written that because a large number of people form one internet community, that must be how all online communities are organized? I don’t care if Google wants Plus to get bigger, I care about me and my friends who seek to read and discuss the entire internet every day. Is there really no space for different kinds of people to form different kinds of social spaces in Google products? Are they really that fucking stupid about how communities work?

Or, as I suspect, is it just that Buzz and gReader aren’t nearly as effective as Plus at collecting data about my internet use?

Trigger warning for depression and attempted suicideThis post has been a long time coming, and all credit/blame for it happening now can be laid at the feet of Ray Merkler and the session on mental health he ran at GameLoop 2011.

This is supposed to be a story about my mental health, the idea being that public conversation about this sort of thing helps create room for acknowledgement and discussion and could potentially help others…but because that is a subject I actually have a surprisingly difficult time writing about, we’re going to talk about why I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer so damn much. In some ways it’s the same thing.

Puberty did quite a number on me. Not the physical development – that took ages – but whatever it is that starts changing in your brain and making you into an adolescent. Winston Churchill apparently referred to his depression as, “the black dog,” and that feels about right to me. It was like I suddenly had a pet that required endless care-taking, but no one else knew I had it or could see it. I remember the first time I wanted to kill myself, I was 11 years old. I don’t remember what the situation was or who else was in the room, but I remember looking across the kitchen to the knife block and yearning to stab myself in the chest so I didn’t have to feel myself inhaling and exhaling anymore.

I think that kicked off the phase of my life when I became very concerned with being “normal”. I knew what was expected of me, and I did those things (school, activities, etc), and sometimes I enjoyed them. It’s just that other times, I wanted to go to a construction site and throw myself into one of the machines. But I felt very certain that when asked, “What do you want to do after school?” the answer was not supposed to be, “Hope a wild driver hops the curb and hits me,” so usually I just said, “I dunno, let’s go to the mall I guess,” or whatever I thought someone normal would say. And some days I had fun at the mall. And some nights I’d lie in bed and stare at the bedroom wallpaper covered in little red hearts and think, “I need to die, I need to die soon, I can’t do this much longer.”

Now let’s add to this hot mess of hormones, denial, and fear by introducing High School to the mix. I was fortunate enough to transfer into a high school that was pretty well-equipped to deal with eccentric kids, so what had felt like an urgent need to steal one of my dad’s guns and shoot myself in the head managed to simmer down into just feeling like I wasn’t reacting to life the way everyone else did. But I could live and get through the days and more often than not I was just left feeling hollow inside, not full of poison.

I had friends for as long as I could maintain them – which wasn’t very long, as it was exhausting to, y’know, care about them. Or at least care about them consistently day to day. I would make a friend, and then another friend, and then those two friends would stop talking to me and just carry on being friends together without me around. That bothered me – I knew it wasn’t supposed to happen like that – but I also felt that there was something wrong with me and it was inevitable that people would eventually notice and not want to be around me anymore. And I figured this was just what life was going to be like; surrounded by people who weren’t interested in what I was interested in (although to be fair, very little about life was interesting to me), and who didn’t understand or want to be around me.

Meanwhile, I was doing Model UN, Academic Superbowl, speech and debate, taking guitar and piano lessons, performing in the high school’s plays and musicals, and participating in stuff like Students for a Free Tibet, all while landing on high honor roll every semester. (People with mental health disorders don’t often look like the pharmaceutical commercials on TV. We don’t normally sit in bay windows while watching rain fall and sighing.)

I also happened to be home, done with dinner and homework, and watching TV one Monday night when a new TV show aired, based on a movie I’d liked a few years earlier.

I thought the two-hour pilot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer seemed pretty okay. I mentioned it to some of the kids I sat with at lunch, but they either didn’t watch it or didn’t keep watching it after a few episodes. Because of my schedule, I happened to catch all but one episode of the first season. I remember channel-surfing several months later and coming across a new episode (the season two premiere, it turned out), and for some reason I popped a tape into the VCR and recorded the episode (I remember I labeled it, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer – they all got haircuts”). I started taping all the episodes and scheduled the VCR to record that time slot weekly so I wouldn’t miss an episode because of play rehearsal or something. I don’t know why I did it; I think it was just something to do.

About halfway through season two, the WB moved Buffy from Mondays to Tuesdays, and it was a Two Night Event. Night One was “Surprise” aka Buffy And Angel Do It. I don’t know how I felt about it, because by that point, watching Buffy was just this thing I did by myself, and when I had downtime throughout the week I’d re-watch episodes because I was bored. Night One ended with Angel running into the street yelling Buffy’s name, seemingly in pain. I was very interested in knowing what happened, so I updated the VCR programming to record the new time-slot, which was important since I had play rehearsal on Tuesday nights and so I’d need to watch the new episode once I got home. So I got home late Tuesday night, rewound the tape back an hour, hit play. Buffy and Angel doing it, Angel running into the street, Angel yelling Buffy’s name…aaaaaand static. For the only night in it’s entire operating history, the VCR did not record something. I had missed Night Two of the Two Night Event.

It was during this time, while I sat kneeling in front of the TV clutching the tape cassette and crying, that I realized I was a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

If you will recall/imagine, this was 1998. In 1998, if you missed the original air date of an episode, you had to wait until summer reruns. “Innocence” aired in January, so summer was a long. way. away. It was clear something SUPER IMPORTANT had happened, which meant that I couldn’t watch any future episodes because I wouldn’t know what was going on, which meant I had to stop watching this show…which I was quickly realizing was maybe the most important thing to me on a week-to-week basis.

While I was lying in bed that night, still crying a little, I had one of the most important ideas of my life. This is not hyperbole: I have no doubt in my mind that I would not remotely resemble the person I am now if not for this idea. I might not even be alive. I stared at the wallpaper with the little red hearts on it and I thought, “…I wonder if there are people on the internet who also watch this show. I wonder if one of them will tell me what happened tonight.” Up until that point, I’d used my 14.4 modem and AOL account mostly to lurk in role-play chat rooms and convince men to email me naked pictures of themselves. Sometimes I played Warcraft 2 with a friend of mine I had a crush on. That was All The Uses Of The Internet to me in 1998. It’s not like I was allowed cite anything on there as a source for homework assignments. But now it was decided: I would fake being sick the next morning, and dedicate my day to seeing if I could find someone, anyone, online who had watched that night’s episode of Buffy and somehow convince them to tell me what had happened.

Now this is the part where I reference the bit in 2001: A Space Odyssey when Dave goes through the wormhole and all the lights are on his helmet and his eyes are the widest that eyes have ever been because he is seeing the untapped potential of the human species. That’s pretty much what it was like to type “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” into Altavista or whatever I used in 1998 as a search engine.

I like to get rid of useless crap, but one of the only things I’ve ever regretted getting rid of was the print-out of the email (in two parts! because it was too big for AOL!) I got from a person named “Anna”, which was essentially a line-by-line script of Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 2, episode 14, “Innocence.” Which she wrote out the day after the episode aired. From memory. For me. Because one of the (many) websites I found was a forum that seemed friendly and active, and I wrote a post about how my VCR had betrayed me, and OH MY GOD WHAT HAD HAPPENED WHAT WAS GOING ON WITH ANGEL SOMETHING CLEARLY WAS WRONG WHAT WAS WRONG I HAD TO KNOW.

I cannot describe what this was for me without it immediately descending into horribly florid prose and hyperbole. It’s all so normal to us now, connecting with other people who we have never met in person. But this, at that time, for me, was like figuring out I’d been breathing wrong for all these years. The one thing I gave a shit about…there was this whole universe filled with other people who also gave a shit about that thing. Who cared if no one at school watched it? I had the equivalent of the entire population of my school, more than that, unknowable masses of people who would talk to me about it. Who would talk to me. Because on the internet, no one knows you can’t keep a friend.

So that became a huge part of high school for me. Buffy Night was a known thing about me, and eventually it was the framework for fellow students coming over, for study groups, for more people hanging out in my living room than I could count on one hand. It also was the structure for my days; get up, go to school, go home, and talk to my real friends – my online friends. I graduated high school…I actually graduated high school when Buffy did. Our high schools have the same school colors as well, so our ceremonies looked pretty similar (although mine was lacking in a giant snake monster).

Jumping forward a bit, I went to college. Buffy went to college. It didn’t go quite so hot for either of us, though. On March 26, 2001, I took a bottle of sleeping pills in a suicide attempt. On May 22, 2001, Buffy Summers threw herself off a building and died.

I don’t recommend trying to kill yourself, and I especially don’t recommend doing it via Tylenol PM. After several hours of no effects, I turned to the internet and found a website (which doesn’t exist anymore as far as I can tell) that detailed how an overdose of Tylenol kills you. (Spoiler alert: it shuts down your liver. The whole process takes 4-6 weeks and is reported to be very painful.) One of the requirements for graduation at my high school was doing at least 10 hours of volunteering, and one of my friends senior year had volunteered at a youth suicide hot-line, so I had their number (1-800-273-TALK) somewhere in my memory. Right around the time I got on the phone with a volunteer, the PM part of the Tylenol PM kicked in. If the 18 hours of Benedryl-fueled hallucinations I had are anything like what LSD does to you, then I do not see the appeal.

Eventually I got an ambulance ride, my stomach pumped, a couple scary days of waiting to see if I’d permanently damaged my liver, a week in a psych ward, and daily therapist appointments when I was discharged. Something that I remember is that every person I encountered, from the police officer who was called out to my apartment when I told the poor unsuspecting volunteer on the phone, “Look, we can talk later, but I took a bottle of pills five hours ago”, to the ambulance crew, to the nurses who kindly held me down and pushed the plastic tube down my throat to empty my stomach, to all the people in the psych ward who checked on me or delivered my food or watched me take my medications…all of these people, they’d greet me or say goodbye by saying, “I’m glad you’re here.” Which was fucking weird, since I *definitely* didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to be alive at all. And looking back, I’m pretty sure they knew that.

Have you ever seen the movie Velvet Goldmine? There’s a scene where Arthur is watching TV with his parents, and his character’s idol, Brian Slade, is giving a press conference. Brian answers some reporter’s question about his sexuality rather boldly and confirms that he has sex with men, and Arthur has a brief fantasy of pointing at the TV and turning to his mom and dad and saying, “That’s me! That’s me! Look!” as a way of coming out to them.

That’s what watching season six of Buffy felt like for me. There are things one can easily criticize about that season of the series, but the depiction of suicidal depression felt real and accurate to me (and I finally, finally understood and could admit that I was dealing with depression..hey, all it took was almost dying). Being able to do something I normally did – watch Buffy with my best friend on her couch – and turn to her and say, “That. That is what it feels like”, helped me start and get through a lot of incredibly difficult and embarrassing – but necessary – conversations.

Seeing that part of my life, and my brain, articulated by someone else…it was helpful in a lot of ways. It was like hearing, “I’m glad you’re here”, every week from one of my favorite groups of people. It told me that I wasn’t alone. That someone else understood and – somehow – they’d lived through it. It told me that what I was dealing with was *survivable*.

Look, I’ve never met anyone involved with the production of Buffy. And I realize that it was a TV show that aired in millions of households every week. I know it was made for mass appeal and was intended to be well-liked by the majority of US and international viewers.

And I don’t care. They didn’t realize it, but they were making that show for me.

She was for me.

She gave me something to care about when I didn’t care about anything. She gave me *friends*. In *high school* of all places. She woke me up and she let me know I wasn’t alone. She let me know I could stay alive, somehow.

I do not believe he will ever see this, but wherever he is, whatever he’s doing: Joss Whedon? Thank you. *Thank you.*

This isn’t a happy ending, because there isn’t an end. And I’m not saying that I watched a TV show and magically was “saved” from depression — a long-playing orchestra of doctors and medications persisted in my life for about five years after my suicide attempt. One of my jobs for the rest of my life is to make sure I have a list of people I can call day or night if I’m in trouble, and to actually call them if I feel like I need help. It’s my job to keep myself alive and healthy and not hurting myself.

But there is a difference between keeping yourself alive and *wanting* to be alive, and Buffy gave me the latter, in spades, at a time when not much else did. I know it’s easy to dismiss the things people love as dumb, especially  if it isn’t a thing you love too. Whatever. Fuck that. Saving my own life was pretty much equal parts attending my therapy appointments, taking my pills, and getting my ass out of bed in the first place. Without that last third, what’s the point of the other two?

If it gets you out of bed, and it’s not hurting anyone, go for it. I love you for it. And I’m glad you’re still here.

I recently finished a rather grueling week out of town, speaking at the IGDA Summit and then attending Casual Connect. I could say a lot about each event itself, but instead:

The People I Want to Stop Running Into at Videogame Industry Conferences

The Obnoxious Biz Dev Person
I start talking to someone who turns out to be a developer working on something cool. They tell me more and I *definitely* think their project is super, super cool. They offer / I demand a business card, more information, a playtest right there, whatever they can give me. And just when I’m starting to get really excited that I’ve found someone whose work I want to follow…in swoops their business development person. And that person is so grating, so oblivious to social cues, so loud, that I leave the encounter not wanting to pay attention to the company or game anymore, lest I be reminded of this person’s existence.

I get that for small studios and teams, especially for solo designers, it can be overwhelming to promote your game/company/brand/soforth. I know you didn’t make your game because you secretly wanted a product to sell; I know you love it and it’s your baby. Also, it’s really draining to solicit, set up, attend, and follow up on meetings with potential business partners/publishers/whatever. I can see how having someone on staff to handle all the business development stuff can be a godsend – especially because it is a whole separate job that requires a lot of skills (which you probably don’t have).

HOWEVER. A skill that I *would* suggest you cultivate is the ability to recruit and hire people who can work with you as a team. If your selection criteria for your biz dev person is, “willing to do all this crap I don’t like,” and nothing else, then you run the risk of ending up with someone who is just fucking terrible. They may know a lot about biz dev theory (or at least, know more than you do), but if you’re not going to be the mouthpiece and public promoter of your game, then the person you hire to do that for you should really have decent social skills. That means not cutting you off in public, not cutting off other people who are trying to ask you questions, not jumping in and answering questions that were aimed at you not them, etc. When I come away with the impression that any further access to your ideas and your game is going to have to come via your biz dev person, and I can’t fucking stand your biz dev person, then I’m walking away and looking for someone else who’s got a good idea and a working prototype.

If you are a biz dev person going, “oh my god, is she talking about ME?” – I would posit that the fact you’re even concerned about the impression you leave with others probably means you’re not the kind of person I’m referring to. Enthusiastic promoters of a game: awesome! People so obnoxious I manufacture an excuse within 30 seconds of meeting them: less awesome. If people refuse to stand and talk with you for more than two minutes, and/or you notice that you are always, *always* the first person to initiate a business card exchange…maybe it’s time to brush up on the ol’ interpersonal capabilities.

The Person Who’s Desperate for a Job in Games
I have been there, I know it sucks, but you have *got* to come up with some line about what you’re doing at the conference…and no, “I need a job,” is not an acceptable line. I’ve noticed that the people I like most in videogames seem to share an insatiable intellectual curiosity. Unless you are literally sitting on your couch and staring at a wall every day of your unemployed life, I assume you’ve got some personal projects going on. I also assume that you reached out to other people in your network who maybe needed your skill set on their projects, so you’re doing various levels of work on various independent experimental thingers and game-like jobbies, even if it’s unpaid or paid under the table or in “I totally owe you” friend-stock. I assume you got really involved in your local PTA or community garden or church vestry or some shit. You’re filling your days somehow, right? Because one thing I don’t see in a lot of people I meet in the industry: acceptance of boredom.

I know we are in the shittiest US economy in three generations. I can’t speak for hiring managers, but I personally don’t bat an eye at, “my day job is [whatever], but I’ve been spending a lot of time experimenting with [thing actually relevant to games].” Props for paying your rent, and now we can talk about your personal project. Ditto for unemployment, even long unemployment. I know it is terrible and our society is designed to make not having a job feel like a judgement against you. I can promise you that anyone smart enough to be worth talking to will be able to connect the dots between, “I was most recently at [company],” and “…that contract ended in 2009.” I’m not going to take it as a sign that you suddenly stopped being able to do good work. Open your conversations with the stuff you’ve been doing since then. You’re probably going to be more excited about it anyway, and I’d much rather talk to a Really Excited About Unity Person than a Worked Somewhere Three Years Ago Person.

The Student Who Complains That Content “Doesn’t Feel Like it’s Aimed at” Them
Programming designed to be informative and relevant for students of videogames exists already. It’s called “school”. You’re not actually at school right now, and you are not paying to be led by the hand into discussions, ideas, technical information, or anything else at the conference. If you’re just starting to learn something and you find yourself in an intensely technical deep-dive talk about that thing, I feel strongly that you’d be better served by jotting down any terms or concepts you don’t understand and then researching them later… not by trying to corner the speaker afterward and making them educate you on the spot or, even worse, by asking your 101-level question at the mic during the Q&A.

You most definitely don’t want to lament to anyone who will listen (ie: me) about how “not accessible” you’re finding the programming, or how “not relevant to where [you’re] at right now” you think various talks are. I interpret that as being uncomfortable around people who are smarter than you, or not knowing how to learn, or a variety of other unflattering qualities. Bitching about session content is a time-honored tradition at conferences (or at least it is to me), but I feel like there’s a difference between good-natured smack talk and advertising to people around you that your knowledge of the content is rudimentary at best.

The Overly-Familiar Twitter Stalker
If you follow someone on Twitter and then you see them in real life, I’ve found it’s good general practice to semi-forget everything you’ve read in their tweets, especially as it relates to their personal life. People I follow have gone through some heavy shit — dealing with substance abuse, relationship problems, deaths in the family, all kinds of things — and when I run into them at events, I don’t open with, “So, how is the divorce going?” Even if it’s someone I’ve talked to before. Even if it’s a friend. People like to manage their own information disclosure, so if you want to talk to someone, let them decide what (if anything) of their personal business they want to bring up.

If nothing else, please do not interrupt a conversation that someone you Twitter-stalk is having in order to bring up a painful subject. Doubly so if part of your interruption involves wrapping your arms around the person before they can back away and stop you from forcing them into a hug. Strangers don’t hug, they shake hands, and it’s a good idea to get consent before pushing your body up against another person’s. And yes, you are a stranger to that person, even if you’ve read every tweet they’ve ever written. Remind yourself that you are at a professional conference and then act professionally.

The Industry Outsider Who Thinks They Know More Than Everyone Else
In the past this has totally been me and I’m confident the only reason I’ve escaped ultra-massive public humiliation is because my husband was around to cut me off before I really got going down a conversational road to ruin. Lots of reading and listening have helped get me up to speed a bit (along with personal mantras like, “I don’t give a fuck about Call of Duty”), so I usually know what I’m talking about these days, or at least I know when I’m bullshitting. But while I still find it mildly entertaining when someone pompously makes a bunch of incorrect statements, after a while it does get tiresome to hear a really exciting, quickly-changing industry “summed up” by idiots who can’t realize that no one’s disagreeing with them because their ideas aren’t even relevant enough to qualify as *wrong*.

Somehow there is a default assumption that you, the individual, know more than everyone else around you until proven otherwise. This is probably not true. Probably, people have managed to build careers and create amazing games by being very, very smart. Probably, the thorny issue that people are trying to discuss in a hallway between sessions is not going to be solved by your sweeping generalization. Give professionals in their field some credit; don’t talk to them like they’re as new to this as you are.