the only haven you can trust

I broke this out into its own post because it didn’t really fit the thesis of the previous post.

Raph comments that if you don’t have a scripting language, you’re not a designer, just a content creator.

I believe that the divide between ‘designer’ and ‘content creator’ is one of the key reasons for crap designs — not just in MMO space, but all over the place.

I’m going to use the indie RPG phenomenon as my example here; indie RPGs are typically the result of one person, or a very small team of people, writing a tabletop game to explore some fringe idea they’ve got about how or why people should roleplay. They’re alike in only two ways: they’re universally pretentious as hell, and they are always really skinny. As in, there isn’t much to them. This is sometimes touted as a virtue: they’re stripped down to the bare essence for even more awesome roleplaying.

I think it’s lazy design.

I can design a system that requires no content. A purely procedural system isn’t hard, and simple wargames everywhere do it just fine. Roll a die! If it comes up 6, your target dies! Checkers is a system with no content, and chess is a system with only marginally more content than checkers, contained entirely in how the pieces move. Unfortunately, there are only so many variations on system-without-content that are worth playing, and most of the really good ones (chess, go) have been invented already. I’m not going to get anyone to play my awesome game that’s just like go except there are three colors on the board.

I can also design a system that implicitly requires content, and this is where the test of design laziness comes in. When I create a system by which you can construct your own spells from a list of spell components, what do I do with that system? The indie RPG answer is: Nothing! Let the players use the system. Don’t limit their creativity. This is the wrong answer.

What I do with that system is create a bunch of content with it. And I put that content in the rulebook right next to the system itself. Because not doing so means I haven’t actually thought through the implications of the system; I haven’t tested its limits; I haven’t explored the possible gamespace the system contains. Without actually using the system, I’ve just engaged in a thought exercise, and left the remains of my mental masturbation for someone else to clean up.

To bring this back to Pirates and MMOs: Let’s say I propose a system in which you can train officers, who will improve your ship combat stats as well as fighting alongside you on land. I say, ‘Officers have skills such as sailhandling, gunnery, and leadership. Each time I gain xp, the officers I have equipped gain 1% of that xp. I can spend the officer’s xp at a rate of 100 xp = 1 point of skill for the officer. Each point of skill improves the characteristics associated with it by a defined, tunable percent.’

That system I’ve just outlined is bullshit, and here’s why: I haven’t told you what the skills actually are. I haven’t proposed relationships between skills and ship performance characteristics, just suggested they’ll be ‘tunable’. I haven’t told you how many officers I can have equipped. I haven’t sketched out any officers.

I cannot count the number of times in the Pirates development process we had a system that was useless and broken because it needed many hours of content work to make it fly, and the designers weren’t doing that content work. This led to my Rule Of Content: If I am not willing to create the content myself, I should revise the system. Which is not to say I create all the content — but what I’m delivering is a working system, not a system that will work one day when it gets fleshed out.

Our economy is a perfect example of this. After I designed it, it was clear that without content — structures, recipes, goods, resources — the system was inert. I recognized that making it function was going to be a shit-ton of content creation work. And I did that work; I created all the structures, all the recipes (over 800 and still going), all the goods, and I laid out the initial resource map. I did it for two reasons: first, my responsibility was to deliver an economy, not a bunch of pretty documents and some untested code. Second, if creating the content for the system I designed was actually godawful scut-work I wouldn’t wish on an intern, then what kind of jackass would I be if I walked away from the mess and said, ‘Have fun, content creator person!’

Well, actually, that’s easy. I’d be an indie RPG designer: too lazy to do the hard work, only interested in the fun work.

It is only by using systems we design that we actually have any sense of how they function. And when a system calls for content, we only use that system by creating the damn content ourselves.

It all began with Joe’s post.  Then Damion picked it up.  Then Raph did.  Then Sara did.  Joe, you created a monster.

Rather than spam everyone’s comment threads up, I figured I’d just write up a few thoughts here.  I’m the guy who has to live with Joe’s anti-scripting bias, so I’m the only one with a dog in the fight, as it were.  (no actual dogs involved; please don’t ban me from professional football)

I’m a fan of scripting.  I’m also a fan of a game that doesn’t crash or have bizarre, untraceable performance problems.  I’m a fan of code reviews, and code written by people who are trained to do so.  I’m a fan of bulletproofing the mechanical operation of the game.  I’m a fan of tight security, and of not giving users unintended loopholes to jump their goldfarming bots through.  In short, I’m a fan of professionally-written code.

But I script a lot, because, as I said, I’m a fan.  I model systems in scripts.  In an earlier, simpler version of the PotBS economy, I wrote a script that included simple AIs making decisions about buying and selling goods and traveling between ports to see what a thousand players might do.  I have a set of php scripts that tell me the expected value for any good based on the cost to produce it.  I have another script that compares distances between resources for every nation, and a script that generates spreadsheets for all the outfitting in the game.  (And Joe makes me check all this into our source control system, because he’s anal about that.)

I would never, ever want any of my scripts to make it into production code that’s exposed to the user in any way.  See, I can make things go ‘beep’ just fine.  What I can’t do is anticipate the user who figures out how to use my ‘beep’ to launch a SQL insertion attack against the game servers.  That’s not my job, and it shouldn’t be my job.  I’m good at imagining how adding a mission that allows users to trade silver ingots for gunpowder will impact the market for ammunition in the French auction houses.  That’s the stuff we don’t expect the coders to do, and that’s why we have a design team in the first place.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect your designers to be pretty technical.  Everyone in my team is reasonably technical.  But to me that’s just part of thinking like a designer — thinking in terms of technical achievability, not just wild-eyed dreaming.  That’s the difference between designers and the guy on your forum who has a great idea and wants you to pay him $1,000,000 for it (no kidding, saw this on the WoW forums before it was moderated into oblivion).

But I don’t expect my designers to code.  We have enough to do just figuring out how systems should work, how they should be balanced, and how the content will express our ideas.  If we were scripting, too, we’d have no time to do design, and we’d create substandard code.  Or, if one of us wasn’t creating substandard code, it would be because he was part of the dev team, working for Joe, at which point he wouldn’t be a designer anymore, because we have way more things that need coding than we do coders to implement them.

I work closely with the developers.  In some cases, I work way too closely, and find myself getting shot down when I suggest things that they know — because they’re software architects and think about these things — are impractical or should be done in a different way.  When I propose a system, Joe and the dev who’s going to implement it go off and talk about how to make our object model do that intelligently.  My eyes glaze over.  I am not a software architect.  But when a dev is working on something I designed, there’s an enormous amount of back-and-forth, where he figures out what I want, and I figure out what’s possible.  Neither of us has the specialized knowledge available to do the other’s job.

So what do I think of data-driven design?  I think that I’d really like to have OR conditionals in our requirements system, instead of just AND conditionals.  Otherwise, it’s worked out pretty well.  And I believe it’s worked out because I’ve been involved at every stage of the construction of the systems, making sure they’ll produce the outcomes I need to create the systems I want.

This is totally unrelated to games, except in the most tangential way.

Last night, I decided to listen to music while playing WoW on the Media Center. It’s one of the few advantages of playing on a (relative to most monitors) low-resolution screen: all my music is on the Media Center. Almost the first thing I did when I got the Media Center was to rip every CD I own — so I’ve got hundreds of hours of legally purchased music on its hard drive.

But Windows Media Player claims I don’t have a sound card installed. It plays an alert sound while telling me this, for added hilarity.

I dig around in various options and settings, but everything seems to be working. I can still watch TV with sound through the sound card; I can still play games with sound. What I can’t do is play mp3 or wmv files.

Finally, I click on ‘Web Help’ in the error dialog. Something jumps out at me: Secure Audio Path. It’s DRM technology integrated into Windows that basically says: if your card’s drivers aren’t certified by Microsoft as protecting the interests of our sugardaddies at the RIAA and MPAA, you can’t listen to music.

Or, at least, you can’t listen to music using Windows Media Player or whatever variant is included in Windows Media Center.

Once upon a time, I was a die-hard WinAmp user. But as WMP gained features and became more like a real piece of software, I was lured away.

Hello again, WinAmp. It looks like, until Windows integrates this bullshit at the hardware level, you and I are going to be friends again.

Note the property rights implications in my story: I own the computer. I own the music. I own the software I’m attempting to use to play the music. And yet I cannot play the music, because someone, somewhere, is worried that I might have stolen an mp3 of ‘Baby Got Back’. So, in fact, what I really own here is an inert lump of metal, silicon, and plastic, and the only guaranteed use to which I can put it is as a doorstop.

DRM is going to be the dividing issue of the next decade. And unless the lobbyists for the content industries can come up with solutions that don’t make me, the legitimate consumer, want to see them strung up on rusty barbed wire by their large intestines, it’s a war they cannot possibly win.

If, on the off chance, someone at MS responsible for this bullshit reads this post — I know, not likely, they’re busy inventing new ways to rape babies — please drop me a line so I can tell you what I really think of your DRM solutions.

I recently found myself killing these guys in WoW. They’re basically not itemized at all, and while they certainly look like ugly doggies, they can’t be skinned either. (Read the comment thread at that link to see more people bitching about their itemization.)

This made me realize — by way of contrast — just how good the reward feedback is in WoW, and in the expansion specifically. I was killing the mobs, getting reasonable xp, had very little risk, and they were in plentiful supply. And I was completely unsatisfied.

Just down the road from them are these guys, and if you look at their drops, you’ll see ‘Mark of Sargeras’ and ‘Fel Armament’. Both of those are faction reputation turn-in items; the latter is converted into a kind of currency you can use to buy enchantments. Other than the faction items, they generally drop more junk loot per kill than the Hounds. They’re similar in risk, xp, and supply. And I could kill those guys all day long.

When you add a quest that asks me to kill them, I feel like I’m engaging in a fundamentally different activity than ‘mob grinding’. And in those rare instances when I have two or more quests asking me to kill the same mobs, I barely even notice the passage of time; the same basic activity becomes totally engrossing.

This suggests that all the time spent writing content in the world isn’t as compelling as adding another reward track. In an imaginary world where all resources for development are fluid and mutable, it’s better to spend a man-hour adding an additional way to offer rewards for killing 10 mobs than to spend that same hour creating a quest that breaks the mold of ‘kill 10 mobs’.

I mean, come on.  Is this a curse?  Is it really that hard to take multiple centuries of potential story material and turn it into some kind of online game?  If I weren’t the only person at FLS who’s a Rome nerd, I’d totally be pitching something Roman for our next project.

Damion quotes an interview with the TF2 guys. One line jumped out at me: “And as we found as we played it, wasn’t more fun because of it.” Damion goes on to talk about Doom and Deer Hunter and whatnot; go over there and read it.

Near the end is the part that got me thinking. Damion says, “I was working on UO2 at the time, and remember my producer wandering in and idly wondering if we shouldn’t be building an MMO aimed at the Deer Hunter market.” (emphasis added)

I started thinking about something I said on the Pirates forums years ago. I don’t feel like looking up the exact quote, but in essence, it was: “Ultimately we’re the ones deciding what the game is about. It doesn’t matter if all the players want elves in the game; that’s not the game we’re making.”

I still basically believe that, but a lot more exposure to players in much larger concentrations has added some nuance to my original thoughts.

There are three game experiences that you can use as a guideline for your development.

• Market Research. This is opinions about your game from people who are not playing your game. This is the inevitable sheaf of studies and graphs that tell you, with total confidence, that you need cockroach-wrangling in your dating sim game to hit the important 13 to 24 market. This is the least important game experience. This includes people on your forums who are not playing your game but have a great idea for how to handle PvP. If you don’t have players, they may seem like a really important source of feedback, but they’re really not. If your pre-beta forums are filled with people telling you your game concept is lame, you can probably ignore them.
• Player feedback. This means beta forums if you’re in beta, or your live forums if you’re live. But there’s a catch: this is only valuable if you run your own forums, and therefore you restrict your forums to your customers. You should not read the forums at ign or mmorpg.com and take anything there as useful game feedback. Those people are probably not your customers; they likely aren’t even playing your game, but are attracted to a dispute like flies on shit. Of course, on internal customer-only forums, there’s always a danger that your customers will only tell you what you want to hear, so in addition you need to encourage a culture of openness. Players should not feel like they’ll be punished for negative feedback. That said, this is a very important source of feedback. If these people say your game isn’t fun, you need to take that seriously.
• Internal feedback. This is the most important game experience feedback you can get. I’m not even really talking about your QA department, or your company-wide playtests. The most important source of internal feedback is you. Do you find your game fun? If not, you’re making the wrong game, and that’s true even if your other feedback is positive. Lemme say it one more time: the single most important metric of ‘fun’ in your game is your own experience with your game.

Yes, I believe you should ignore your players if what they want makes the game significantly less fun for you, the designer. It’s simple: if you’re not having fun with the game, you have no chance at having any intuitive sense of where the design should go next. If you don’t know whether the encounter needs 10 orcs or one ogre, because it’s all the same shit to you, you have no business making that decision. Step back from it. Why orcs vs. ogres? Do you really want robots instead? Maybe you don’t even like the encounter. Maybe you don’t like the entire idea of ‘encounters’.

I believe good design comes from passion for the game being designed (of course, that’s necessary but not sufficient; c.f. Derek Smart). If you don’t have any, because you find your own game dull, you won’t be doing good design. You’ll be doing by-the-numbers design, falling back on industry standbys and recycling other designs. (I’ve certainly said ‘How does WoW solve this problem?’ in enough design meetings…)

This is why design is mostly about people management, and not so much about game system construction. If you can’t get your team excited about a design, you’ll get crap design work. If you give up your great ideas in favor of what marketing says is hot, or what the community manager says is popular on the forum, and you do that every time, you won’t design a game; you’ll turn the crank of the same design you’ve seen a million times, and your game will be uninspired and uninspiring.

We are all achievers. Games just don’t always provide us with sufficient metrics to measure our achievements in spheres other than ‘how many mobs have I killed?’.

If you have ever run close to an enemy town in WoW to fill in that last bit of your zone map, you are an explorer achiever.

If you have ever looked at the size of your guild, or your friends list, or counted how many ‘hellos’ you get when you log in, you are a social achiever.

If you have ever looked at a PvP leaderboard to find your position, and attempted to raise your position on that leaderboard, you are a killer achiever.

Given UI feedback, every playstyle can be supported as well as the traditional ‘advancement’ achiever playstyle.

I was on a panel at PAX talking about the future of MMOs, which is a fancy way of saying they gave me a microphone and let me answer questions for an hour.  Somehow, those questions all kept bringing me back to the same idea — player-created content.  I’d been idly thinking about writing something about the ‘are we creating games or worlds?’ debate, and after the panel I started thinking about what player-created content meant for that debate.

Then, last week in Austin, I went to Damion’s talk, and one of his theses was that the game vs. world debate was really a three-axis model, including game, world, and community.  That seemed more reasonable, but ‘community’ seemed to be begging the question — adding ‘community’ as a metric to the game state without really asking what ‘community’ brings to games.

I’m not going to try to write a full lecture with slides, here; this is just a collection of my idle thoughts about the issue of community and player-created content, and a little deconstruction of the idea of the MMO.

My first assertion: MMOs are about problem-solving in small, potentially ad-hoc teams.  If you just want to solve problems, there are a lot of single-player games out there, many of which do a better job of presenting challenges, and balancing those challenges in terms of difficulty vs. reward.  If you just want to hang out with friends, with no problem-solving, there are many social networking sites that do a better job of connecting you to people with similar interests.

My second assertion: MMOs require a persistent social context.  You can get personal, non-persistent achievement independent of any social context by unlocking achievements in Crackdown for the 360.  You can level your FF10 characters up until you can kill every single optional boss, and then brag about it on a message board.  These things simply aren’t as satisfying as when similar achievements are placed in a persistent context.  Note that the world doesn’t even have to be persistent — only the social context.  Leveling to 99 in Diablo 2 is kind of pathetic.  Doing it on Battle.Net — or, god forbid, in hardcore mode on Battle.Net — is awesome.  Nobody cares about how you beat Sephiroth in FFVII at level 99.  Lots of people are very excited that you beat Kirin at level 75 in FFXI.

My third assertion: We play MMOs to consume content.  I’ve talked before about ‘playing the system’ vs. ‘playing the content’, but I’d like to step back from that and make a broader claim: systems are content. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that everything that is not interface is content — and, in some cases, the interface is content as well (as in, for instance, any DS game that requires you to draw things on the touchscreen).  There’s a more important implication here, though: other people are content.

Ok, so here we are: “MMOs are small-team problem-solving exercises in a persistent social context; ‘problems’ refers to any content available in the game, whatever its source.”  This captures both raiding and PvPing; it captures roleplay and xp-grinding.  With a loose enough definition of ’small team’, it covers soloing as well as 40-man dungeons.

That said: I don’t believe there is a difference between worlds and games.  The question to ask is: who creates the content?

In a traditional ‘game’, the developer believes he is creating all the content; in a traditional ‘world’, the developer believes he is creating tools to allow players to create content for each other, and themselves.  Neither one of these things is true.  In both cases, the developer is creating content, and in both cases, the developer is providing tools for players to create content for themselves.

There is no system so open that there are not inherent limitations and structures in the system that act as content for players to consume.  Even in Second Life, the fundamental architecture of the game world — the buying of ‘land’ and the uses to which that land can be put once bought — provides some structure that becomes content.  In the case of SL, the content is the land-ownership metagame, with ‘land barons’ like Anshe Chung engaging in problem-solving generated by the architecture (with the problem being ‘how do I get more land and money?’).  In more traditonal MMOs still on the ‘world’ end of the spectrum, the structures and systems are more obvious.  How do you get money in (pre-NGE) SWG?  How do you get resources?  If you and some friends want to build a business empire, where do you begin?  There are answers to these questions, and many of those answers will refer back to the inherent structures of SWG.  That’s content.

There is no system so closed and on-rails that there are not opportunities in the system for players to create their own content, and create content for each other.  I think this one is self-evidently true; Google ‘[your favorite IP] fan fiction’ and prepare to be horrified by the, uh, creativity of content consumers.  Read the comments thread on any given item at wowhead or thottbot.  Browse through server forums for any MMO.  People are out there creating content for each other whether you let them do it or not.  Anything can serve as a hook for player-created content, and I could make the argument that everything eventually does.  If I keep an item in my backpack in WoW because it entertains me, not because it’s useful (and let me tell you, keeping a stack of entertainingly-named items for shift-clicking into guild chat is a lot more fun than you might imagine), I’ve just turned that item into player-created content.  I’ve added a wrapper of my own creation to that item.  Even if I never tell anyone why I keep that kobold candle around, I’m telling myself that story every time I see the candle.

If systems are content, and stories are content, and players are content, and you yourself are content for yourself… then everything is content.  The question isn’t ‘is this a world full of systems or a game full of content?’ but ‘how much of the content in this MMO is created by me, and how much is created by you?’  And I’m not even assigning values to ‘me’ and ‘you’ in that sentence.  Anything that meets the criteria above can be an MMO.  Wikipedia is an MMO — it’s small teams (the local editors of an article, plus miscellaneous pick-up group members) solving problems (the contents and verifiability of an article) in a persistent social space (read some of those guys’ talk pages!).

Of course, we talk about MMO developers, and the content created by the developers, for a couple of good reasons.  The first and most obvious is that we want to make money, and making money requires that we have some value-add proposition.  We have to be able to provide something unavailable at Wikipedia for people to pay us. The second, related reason is that you can’t set out to create the player-generated content of Wikipedia — or at least you can’t guarantee it will be present.  We need some minimum set of problems that players can attack, or the first player will wander off again having not found any content to consume.

To the degree that we choose to spend a bunch of money creating systems and stories, we’re asserting a minimum quantity and quality of content, and we’re trying to direct the course of the rest of the content that players will inevitably create for themselves.  We create a fantasy world in hopes that players will create fantasy content for each other, or a sci-fi world in hopes that players will create space content for each other.  But we don’t actually control that; we provide some context, but I cannot imagine that Blizzard designed the Barrens with Chuck Norris in mind.

But look at some of the direct ways that we can steer the kinds of player-created content that show up in our games: EVE has byzantine plots, backstabbing, and betrayal, because they built a system that explicitly enables that kind of gameplay.  WoW has guild drama because their raid content forces people into larger, internally competitive groups.  Second Life has flying penises because…

Pirates has large mercantile guilds, and smaller PvP guilds, and basically no PvE guilds.  This is because we have content — and I’m using the word generically here, to refer to systems, players, and stories — that requires varying levels of player coordination.  We don’t have raids (yet) so we don’t have raiding guilds.  We do have a complicated economy that explicitly demands multiple people working together, so we have mercantile guilds.

My final assertion is somewhat of a plan of action.  As the number of players grow, our ability to create the baseline minimum level of content will decrease.  We must allow players to create our games.  Or, to put it in the terms I’ve been using throughout this discussion: Players are already creating content in our games, whether we like it or not.  If we give them tools, we can direct their creative energies towards the content we want created.  If we want content that resembles medieval feudalism, we can give the players the tools to create feudalism themselves.  If we want a plethora of magic items, we can give players tools to craft their own magic items.  Anything for which we provide a tool, the players will create.

Yes, there will likely be cocks.  But that’s just another kind of content you can turn over to the players — the ability to police the presence of cocks in the game, and remove them.

‘Web 2.0′ isn’t just a stupid buzzword.  It’s an irritating stupid buzzword that’s almost as entirely content-free as you suspected it might be.

When your volunteer staff acts like stormtroopers, I am forced to start thinking about the way you run your convention in terms of the Stanford Prison Experiment.  I’m sure there was some super-important reason you couldn’t let people hang out in the back of the room and watch the talk, just like they’ve done every other year, and your diligence was rewarded: you came across as total douchebags.

I saw four genuinely worthwhile, useful talks, which is better than I’ve managed in previous years.  Raph’s talk was full of crunchy stuff.  Honestly, in my current context, I don’t have a lot of use for the ‘design for everywhere’ concept, but anytime Raph starts talking about a formal grammar for game design it makes my socks go up and down.  Damion’s talk was entertaining, and started me thinking more closely about a contention I have (that there is no ‘world/game’ split), and will explore more in a future post.  Bethke’s talk was not immediately useful to me, but included lots of practical examples from an actual live game, and illustrated Damion’s point that communities will push a game towards a balance of ‘world’ and ‘game’ regardless of your best efforts to the contrary.  (I’d link it but any mention of it seems to have been drowned out by the press from his throwdown with Marc Jacobs.)  And then there was Scott Rigby’s talk on intrinsic need satisfaction; it was worth the price of admission alone (which, granted, I did not pay so perhaps I’d reconsider if I saw the bill).  I like walking out of a talk with work items.

Austin was like a city-sized sauna.  So glad I live in the PNW.

The SOE party was much larger than the CCP party.  This decided which one I’d attend — not because I particularly wanted to go to a ‘big’ party, but because I am five foot eight inches tall.  The CCP party was a sea of tall men’s nipples to me.

For the love of god, turn down the motherfucking music.  We’re not a pack of ravers; nobody is going to bust a funky move at a game dev party.  We’re there to talk, and if the only way I can talk to someone is to get one fucking inch from their ear and shout, the party is essentially useless.  This has been true at every game developer party I’ve been to since I started going to AGC; am I alone in finding loud parties a waste of time?

Damion would not confirm that Bioware is working on KOTOR Online.  Sara did confirm that Spacetime is working on a game set in… space.  I assume also time.  Charles from CCP would not tell me anything about the World of Darkness MMO — but I was pretty drunk at the time, so maybe he just had no idea what I was saying. (’Hey man alkdfldj asoipgjofn adnalsnvlsdfv eoaifhoas yeah?’)

Everyone else in the industry is much much more hardcore than I am in WoW.  It’s kind of depressing actually.  ‘We’re raiding 8 nights a week and also twice in the mornings!’ … ‘Um, my hunter is level 67 now…’  Maybe I should roll a druid.  They seem to get all the raid lovin’.

I want to talk briefly about perspective.

Sometimes, I go read comments and ratings at Amazon or IMDB.  One thing I’ve slowly come to realize about the rating systems these sites employ is that they’re basically superfluous. Having written a rating parser myself for work, I’m aware of the contortions necessary to make ratings meaningful in an environment where there are no consequences for rating.

For example, find any popular, well-liked and well-known movie at IMDB.  Chances are good, if you read through the user comments, you’ll see some negative ratings.  For almost every negative rating, the rating will be one; that is, the minimum possible rating allowed.  This is an actual comment title for The Godfather, widely regarded as one of the finest movies ever made: “Good but not the greatest movie by far”.  Rating?  One star out of ten.  Here’s a comment, bizarre quote marks intact:

“The Godfather” is a ‘terrible’ film.  It’s ‘the worst’ movie I’ve seen in a decade. The acting in this film is ‘excruciatingly painful’. The whole family are ‘watered down Sopranos’ who show some phenomenally strong ‘lack of’ chemistry. The ‘boring’ weeding scene is the ‘highlight’.

Naturally, one star out of ten.  Even commenters who admit the movie is a good movie give it one star out of ten.  Some commenters include their own rating (’I give it 3 out of 5′) and still rate it 1/10 in the official rating system.

I have seen terrible movies.  I’ve watched all of the Dungeons and Dragons movie.  I’ve watched late-night Showtime original movies.  I’ve seen the garbage Sci-Fi tries to shovel out at us.  Whatever I think of the Godfather, I would be totally fucking insane if I tried to claim it’s on the level of those movies — if, in other words, I claimed it was a 1/10.

Enter The Deathly Hallows.  I’ve now heard several people — some of whom I actually know personally and respect — claim they ‘hated’ the book, and that it ’sucked’.  Oh really?  Have you not actually read Magic: The Gathering licensed fiction?  Or J.V.Jones’ excremental The Baker’s Boy?

(In the interests of disclosure, I finished the novel last night in the wee hours, and believe it’s the best book of the series, with a level of maturity and competence that was sorely missing from the early books, and only started gradually emerging in the fifth and sixth books.  Granted, I don’t really like Harry Potter all that much, so being the best of what I consider a decent but not amazing series isn’t exactly like shouting hosannahs to the heavens over the book, but I liked it well enough to read it in one sitting.)

The keyword here is perspective.

HP7 is not the worst book ever.  If you have any glimmering of that thought in your mind, whether you identify as a fan or not, please go take a cold shower and calm the fuck down.  You’re insane, and should seek medication.

HP7 is not a terrible book.  That’s distinct from ‘worst book ever’ in that it’s something that a reviewer with any desire to maintain some scrap of credibility might say.  The Baker’s Boy is a terrible book.  Fiction-by-numbers mystery novels by talentless no-names in the remainers bin?  Those are terrible books.  HP7 is not.  Take a deep breath: perspective.

HP7 is not a mediocre book.  If it was, you wouldn’t care.  I have shelves full of mediocre books towards which no one has ever directed ire, anger, hatred or venom.  Seriously; there are some Dean Koontz novels on my shelves that are utterly forgettable and impossible to hate because how could you muster enough ‘give a damn’ to do so?

HP7 is not badly written.  I’ve read a lot of tortured sentences.  I’ve read Hubbard’s wretched droppings, Rand’s twisted abuse of the unfamiliar English language, King’s stilted and uncomfortable dialogue, and dozens of no-name writers whose mastery of grammar and word choice are tenuous at best.  Rowling’s writing is workmanlike, servicable, occasionally clever, and is sufficient to get the characters, the plot, and the setting from her head into my head.  If more writers could manage to stop masturbating for long enough to just tell the damn story, as she’s done, I’d be a happier reader.

HP7 did not need an editor.  It had one.  Seriously, I promise you, cross my heart and hope to die, it had an editor.  We’re talking about a multimillion dollar franchise that depends on each book being as exciting and well-received as the last.  They didn’t just have an editor — they had their best editor.  I guarantee it.  People who don’t write professionally, or who don’t work in a creative industry, like to imagine the author/designer/artist as a pompous self-important artiste who can take no criticism and who, once successful, shoves aside any editors/QA/critics in a huff.  That’s bullshit.

Now, to the nasty bit.  Sorry if the next two paragraphs offend you, but it has to be said.

Only fans think the book sucked.  The reviewers all say basically the same thing: ‘It’s a good, satisfying end to the series.  The middle bit dragged some.’  Only self-identified HP fans are flipping the fuck out.  That’s why I mention ‘perspective’, so let’s come back to it.  If you have been investing a large portion of your self-esteem in this series of novels and the fandom that surrounds it, you need some perspective.  Take a step back and think about it.  Did you wait in line for this book?  In fucking costume?  Did you have a party?  Did you camp out at midnight?  Have you been embroiled in arguments about the plot for the last year?  How in the name of god could any book ever live up to that level of expectation?

And here’s my final suggestion about perspective: if you are someone who believes that HP fanfic is ‘better written’ or ‘truer to the characters’ or any other similar pile of bullshit: I’m sorry Snape doesn’t end up buggering Harry in the canonical storyline.  Have a tissue, go cry somewhere else.