An Open Letter On Enforcement and ModdingI submit a public complaint in opposition to the deletion of opinions that the establishment finds disagreeable in nature, which do not impair the function of the site, do not present a danger to the community computationally or otherwise, and do not present a legal risk to anyone by remaining on the site.
No civilized society on Earth believes that it is in the best interests of any community for judgements to be handed down such that all evidence of violations is summarily deleted from the record; this only serves to make the community paranoid at the prospect of secret policing and promotes disharmony. The continued existence of evidence is formidable only to those judges who do not have conviction that their actions will be accepted for the true and just things that they are; and in a case such as this topic, even the briefest of explanations or perhaps none at all would be sufficient to explain the policy and how it was violated, if the offense itself was available publicly; and so when evidence is removed and explanation is not forthcoming alongside it, the mind of the public is drawn irresistibly to the assumption that the powers-that-be are full aware that their actions are indefensible in any discourse of reason.
Reading carefully, one may note that the aforementioned complaint is only concerned with the natural consequences on a community resulting from a particular course of action; it is an argument regarding natural human reactions to a situation, not regarding rightness or justness; as such it does not pretend to be any kind of warning or threat, nor any kind of claim that the establishment is obliged to operate its private forums in any particular way; only to caution the establishment of a lesson in jurisprudence, of which mankind has been keenly aware for centuries.
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As a modder, I would also like to confirm that I have complaints about a lack of features/documentation.
Without bringing up those specific complaints - which I already know from years of first-hand experience would be totally ignored anyway - I'd like to address what was
specifically mentioned in Blockland's defense:
To my knowledge the
overwhelming minority of gameplay features are
open source in any reasonable sense (unless one classifies every individual asset as a gameplay feature on par with features like the planting of bricks or the functioning of jets, which I hope we can agree is ridiculous). As a game mode modder, literally the majority of my time ever spent developing mods for Blockland has been spent reverse-engineering gameplay systems so that I could duplicate or modify their functionality for my own purposes. The claim to gameplay elements being mostly open source, or to call a lack of documentation "total bullstuff", is so patently false that it bears no further comment.
The idea that no game has better mod support than a low-budget indie title, which I've mentioned to literally dozens of people and none of whom have ever heard of, is (to put it nicely) an extremely bold statement. I give the benefit of the doubt and assume you exaggerated in anger.
But if not, then you might want to take a look at some of
Bethesda Softworks' or
Blizzard's publicly-available tools for some context on what might today be considered roughly the level of a would-be role model for the entire industry.
Finally I would like to weigh in that, as someone who almost exclusively worked on game modes when he was an active modder, and who has an interest in releasing some (though admittedly in my day I only released Creeper and Bot Wars), and who released several other mods: I never found an issue with helping other people to install and use my mods - documentation and self-explanatory design being my responsibility as the designer. On the other hand, I have found the Gamemode system cumbersome and rushed, with a cumbersome interface. Since Badspot himself has recently made a joke about strawmen, it distresses me that I need to dispel the generalizations made in the "explanation" for the lack of Gamemode adoption: I am not worried about anyone stealing anything of mine and have long encouraged people to "steal" any ideas from anything I've done and any code from anything I've released, so there's nothing to do with glory; yet I find it more convenient to manually execute a script from the console in a Freebuild game than to start a new game with a Gamemode. Granted, I am a mod developer, so that wouldn't be true of normal users, but when that's the situation - even if just for people like me - then there is indeed a flaw in the system, and it's not sociological. To dismiss the issue as a problem with the community in general is to both deny the opportunity to improve the existing system, as well as to divert the discourse away from the possibility that perhaps a different solution
can engage creators and
can break the cycle of toxicity, if we suppose it indeed exists, and so improve the existing community.
Valve employees speaking publicly (search YouTube for talks by Gabe Newell or peruse some
Steam Dev Days) often talk about their great success in giving their community "the tools to create value" and then "getting out of their way"; this proves that success and user engagement from a community-content-driven model is completely possible (yes,
including game modes and conversions), and to blame failure on the community, rather than assume that the correct model hasn't yet been found, is ultimately defeatist and counterproductive, and serves neither the developers' interests nor the community's.
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The most depressing thing about this entire matter, I feel, is that I wrote this entire post, and then hesitated for a very long time in hitting the "Post" button, out of a fear of being banned for my heartfelt, thrice-revised, solution-oriented commentary. That I genuinely fear being banned for reaching out to Badspot and trying to give him new perspective that he may not have considered, so that he may continue to do what he feels is best for the game, as he's always done. This fear, a fear of providing feedback, a fear or contributing, a fear of
being a part of the community at all, is exactly what the first section of my post intends to warn about.
Then I realized that I barely come to these forums anyway, and there's really no sense in trying to preserve membership to a club where trying to be a good person gets me banned; and so this open letter finds its way to the internet, hopefully to open minds and willing hearts.
