What does it mean to be top dog?

Every industry has them – I had a teacher who at one point could have picked up the phone, called the White house and the President of the United States would have taken the call.  I have known been friends with someone who was once a common sight on television, until one day she “moved on to bigger and better things”.  I heard from her years later, asking for recipes so she could “write a cook book”.  Back in the military a first sergeant threatened to shove a telephone up my ass if I hung up on him, which I promptly did – again. It seems the first sergeant didn’t like me questioning the ability of his commanding officer to bring legal charges against a soldier.  It was a good thing I did.  The first sergeant stole a firearm from the armory – not a happy little thing to do when the armory happens to belong to your favorite “Uncle Sam”.  Twenty Four hours later the first sergeant and his records were spirited away.

There is an expression in the theater that says “Be nice to the people you meet on the way up…you will meet the same people on the way back down.”  How true this is.  In a very real way being “top dog” has a lot to do with karma – both have a nasty way of coming back to bite you in the ass.

Another writer once wrote the following words to me (below). I will save the writer the embarrassment of naming him. With enough digging you can find out on your own.

“If a writer who gets paid to play and evaluate MMO games sees such striking similarities between a promotional video and a prior title, don’t you think the average gamer might have trouble differentiating?”

The writer in question obviously wanted those reading his words to take them as meaning more than anyone else’s.  Why? Because he was (and still may be for all I know) paid to write them.  Ask yourself how much weight the quote above holds.  Do words matter more if someone is paid to write them? Is a game better when it is developed with the force of one of the largest game publishers in the world behind it, or just 40 people working out of their own homes?

Many people, like Brenda Starr in the excerpt from this mornings comics (the most important part of the paper) consider the words to hold meaning, truth, or some kind of weight if they see print somewhere.  At this point we could debate how many magazines have closed up show to reopen on the Internet.  I could point out the words of a senior producer of our acquaintance who spoke to us on the subject – explaining to us how developers tend to heed the words of bloggers more often because they actually play the games and are part of the community.  In fact some of the most moving words I have ever read where by someone who was never paid to write them.  In fact they never saw the light of day until well after her death.  Now they have been translated into many different languages and more than a hundred years later are still studied. The author was a french nun, and her words were called “The Story of a Soul.”

Like that nun, someone of the nicest people we have met in the gaming industry, or any other for that matter, or those individuals whose names you will likely never see or know – the “unsung heros”.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather