Firstly a big hello to ModDB, I’ve recently taken up an account there and will be duplicating my “The Dam” articles over on my personal blog there. This is firstly for my own personal sense of exposure and also to give the blogs somewhere to go when we faithfully release BM, and please, don’t try to construe the fact that BM is close to release from this. I signed up as a way to help team members deal with a spam problem I won’t go into and duplicating the blog seemed prudent, you’ll know when the mod is close to release. I intend to duplicate over my backlog of blogs from the Black Mesa Dev blog when it seems appropriate, but onto the controversial topic at hand, Eltism in the development scene.
The first thing at hand is to deal with your doubts that it exists in the first place and trust me its there. I won’t use names because then I’ll be insulting some scene’s and praising others before I tear them down to so I’m not going to name names, but there are websites that carry reputations. On more professional websites they’ve even been used as insults “Man tell that guy to go back to XXXXX”, “At YYYYY we expect high quality stuff, if your posting this you’d be best of at ZZZZZ”, or even “----ing AAAAA n00bs”. I’ve seen these in chats rooms and I’ve seen them in forum posts. There’s a general attitude that’s reached by those with skill that they don’t have time for those without and I’m here to call everyone one of you out and say shove it up your ---.
The great John Gabriel’s internet equation goes that
Normal People + Anonymity + an Audience = Total retard
However, this fails to take into account one major factor that modders love to swing around, their E-Rooster (k, follow? puns trying to keep it family friendly). With their E-Rooster at stake every person likes to prove how totally frigging awesome his Rooster is and this leads to an on going competition with no end in sight and no real score board to brag with. With no clear top dog there develops cliques of those who by measure of their rooster are better than everyone else, and thus starts the problem. Those who consider themselves better have 2 ways of dealing with it
1 – By building people up, offering help and advice to get the people where they need to be so that the entire community as a whole profits from better developed mods and extra content.
2 – Ridiculing those who don’t match you standards and directing them to the clique you think they belong to and relegating them there while constantly pointing out which clique you’re in.
So what do these Cliques resolve to in our modern world? Mainly it ends up being the websites I mentioned earlier. Being a part of a website or a community sets you inside that Clique of people and all the expectations thereof.
Now to a degree this is human nature, people love to be in charge and on top, but there are the 2 ways I mentioned to do that, the type 1’s and the type 2’s. What this blog is, is nothing more than a challenge to every single last 2’s who care about their rooster like it’s the only thing, to try being 1’s who build their community. Now people will argue it’s always been that way and it won’t ever change and I bring you to a lesson of history.
Anyone who did modding back in the days of things like GoldSource knew websites for prefabs/models, friends who would do them favors, mutual content swapping, and availability was rampant, this was a community of 1’s, people that shared their skill and advice and made it available for all. Nowadays most content websites are dead or cost you money, there’s no longer that willingness to share and there’s a desperate cling to your content and your content alone to deny others form having it because it’s your content. This no longer sounds like 1’s, it’s nothing but 2’s with the dream of breaking into the industry while viewing everyone as competition rather than an ally.
We all have things to share and learn, all I want to say is those so desperate to prove how much better they are than everyone need to stop and help others else they ruin it for everyone else, people should not be ridiculed or put down because they aren’t as good as you, instead you should show them what your doing that makes your work better so they can make better work too, that’s a far better example than a screenshot that looks like it should be from a professional studio.
