Bill Jahnel, Senior Editor There’s been a heat wave hitting across the country. If you haven’t noticed it, I don’t refer specifically to the blistering summer sun that has threatened to boil the dirt right off of my 1992 Oldsmobile here in Houston, Texas, but the uproar surrounding the publishing of Anne Feld’s now-infamous GameSpot article, MacWorld Exposé (http://www.gamespot.com/features/macworld/index.html). The fur is flying among a number of folks I respect, admire, and in many cases had my first opportunity to meet in person at MacWorld New York 99. Considering this, the wisest thing would to keep my yap shut and pontificate instead on something safe, like the effect the Littleton shootings had on the gaming community. Fortunately, I have never suffered from a profound excess of wisdom, so instead I think that looking at the GameSpot article, the reaction to it, and the lessons for the press and the Mac gaming community is worthy of examination. Reading Anne’s article, you cannot help but get the underlying notion she’s not happy with the current state of Apple’s support for the gaming community. Further, her thesis suggests that not only has Apple apparently promoted design over functionality, but that as a result a widespread discontentment exists among developers to abandon or reconsider the Mac platform. This is indeed potent stuff, and the supporting quotations from a number of companies suggests this is the case. The electrons were barely dry on the screen at GameSpot when outraged reactions came from some of those quoted developers. Lane Roathe and Andrew Meggs have a rather direct and brutal response to the Exposé article at MonkeyByte’s Soapbox; Westlake’s Mark and Suellen Adams have their no less concerned, if somewhat more Southern gentrified response at MacCentral’s Adams’ Apple article. Feld's article itself had a direct refutation link from Bungie that an anonymous quote attributed to one of their managers does not in fact reflect any of their manager’s feelings or policies. Based on this minor avalanche of protest, what happened? A miscommunication? Was Anne Feld setting out to deliberately trash Apple gaming? Did she misinterpret the mood of the developers? Did the people making the quotations have a "morning-after" regret? Flame On! Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And where there’s internet flaming going on, it is worth separating the hyperbole from the facts. The facts, as best put forth, remain that Apple falls behind the Windows world in getting top PC titles. Some we get late, some we don’t get at all. However, the growing push that exists among the developer and publisher market to bring titles to the Mac, in some cases in simultaneous release (except for Bungie whose record of simultaneous release remains), suggests that there is more than base sentimentality there. Quite frankly, none of these companies would be producing or porting titles to the Mac if they didn’t feel that there was money to be made in doing so. Feld raises some fair concerns, such as the iBook having a high processing speed but a somewhat less than robust RAM allotment, leading to it not being the best gaming machine in the world. In this regards, I have to lean more with Lane Roathe’s observation: Hardcore gamers playing the latest 3D games don’t buy the cheapass systems as their primary machine. No one is going to try and run a serious game machine with an emachine label on it or a low-end Intel or clone processor. I find personally that 32 megabytes of RAM in the iBook is stingy by today’s system’s expectations, but one should not expect the iBook to try and compete with a blue and white G3 or an AlienWare Area 51 Wintel gaming machine. They aren’t the same market segment. The Morning After So what happened? Not having had the pleasure to meet Anne Feld personally and not yet being blessed with a sense of telepathic powers that allow me a look into her mind, I can but guess. I know some of Feld’s body of work and found it impressive. She was named one of our Senior Editors from the beginning and wrote the excellent Gaming Geisha column for MacReactor. However, I don’t stand as her apologist (nor, would I suspect, she be interested in me doing so), but I suspect a series of rumours I picked up from the show floor may be suggestive. Apparently, Halo had not been the only gaming title that was originally suggested that might appear at the keynote speech. After-keynote rumbles suggested there had been plans for a big gaming blowout that would highlight the Mac as a game machine and these plans were scrapped at the last minute. Rumors that a videotaped keynote plug for Mac games by John Madden (re: Madden Football, a moderately strong rumor) or Tom Clancy (re: Rainbow Six, a very suspect rumor) had been lined up and similarly evaporated before the show were circulating in the rumor mill as well. Couple these rumors with one other (and remember, these are only rumors, so take them as spuriously as you wish.) When someone told me after the keynote that they had seen Anne Feld at the show, they had mentioned that she was unhappy because it had appeared that Apple had drawn her to the show to cover a big gaming extravaganza at the keynote and all she got was Halo. And while Halo is sweetness itself, it alone does not make for a wholesale showing that Mac is going to dominate gaming (especially since the Windows platform will have Halo as well.) So, if these factors were true (and again, this is only supposition), then the scenario becomes suddenly clear: Anne had been promised the moon and left feel more than a little gypped. After Apple’s long and rocky history with the gaming community, it would be quite natural for Feld to be angry and want to write an opinion piece poking holes at Apple’s gaming strategy. She’d be doing what we, as professional blabbermouths, get (under)paid for doing. The problem comes, however, when an editorial writer or journalist takes their opinion and lets it color their perception of other people’s opinions. It’s All Too Easy And that, I fear, is probably what happened to "MacWorld Exposé." It can be devilishly easy to sneak up on you. A single phrase said in the midst of a conversation could make you vigorously nod your head in agreement and think, "Good golly, they nailed it right on the head on that issue!" The subtle and creeping danger comes when your focus dwells too long on the single phrase and misses the context. It becomes something akin to gross myopia used in Biblical literalism to further a specific personal prejudice or agenda, the same kind that attaches supreme authority to phrases such as "Slaves, obey thy masters" or "Women should keep silence in church; for they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law says." Journalistic myopia sneaks in more insidiously and unintentionally, sometimes allowing us to see in others’ comments opinions that more closely mirror our own than theirs. If I were a braver man than I am, I would write to Anne Feld and ask her directly if that is what happened. I probably should. But Anne’s caught enough heat and light on this issue. If she wishes to speak about it (or to let her work speak for itself) I will allow her the sanctity of her own space to say it within rather than try to turn her situation into more grist for my column. The cause right now is of less importance to me than the effect, and the lesson that gamers and journalists should draw from it. There is nothing wrong with being pissed at Apple. Most of us who won computers, regardless of operating system, have a love / hate affair with our OS manufacturer that in Apple’s case sometimes borders on mania. We are self-described and proclaimed enthusiasts, addicts, and evangelists; and as such, we demand much from Apple and can be both her most fervent defenders while also being her harshest critic. But in the sweep of our own concerns, we must always be careful to attribute the garrumphing to the proper source. Journalism as the fourth estate suffers from enough credibility issues at large that we need not enhance our rather slipshod reputation by imputing concepts into the mouths of others. The dangers are multifold. To the journalist, you can lose the trust and support of developers and publishers. This relationship already resembles an intricate, convoluted courtship dance. Companies wish to woo us to promote their products. They appreciate our insights and finding venues for their products. For a magazine, the schizophrenia is threefold. In any given month one hand might be courting advertising from the company’s publicity department even as the second hand seeks an interview or choice leak of news from a developer and the third hand has just finished writing a review that trashed another product that company just made. The only way you can keep in balance with companies as a journalist is to build a reputation as being decidedly fair. I’ve had to write reviews of something awful before. It’s never pleasant, as much as our wry sarcasms might seem clever, to know that somewhere when we trash a title that people who worked months if not years of their lives on "their baby" are going to take it as a gut-punch. Once I had to communicate to my PR contact at a major software house that the review I was writing was about to be published, cringing inwardly as I knew that I had decimated that software in my review. I had felt that release of their software was premature, bug-ridden, and downright dangerous (it had ingloriously trashed my hard drive when I reviewing the software and set me back a week’s worth of work). Later, that same PR person (whom I had been sure was going to burn me in effigy in her offices) instead wrote me later saying off the record that not only had the software deserved that review, but she’d found the review funny and had saved a copy. The lesson: a long-developed relationship of integrity and honesty in this business can survive the occasional painful truth about someone that needs to be printed. The Ripple Effect The danger is not only for us, the journalists, but also for those whom we quote. If Apple feels that it has been very supportive of the game industry and then is led to believe its increased attempt at helping developers has led to nothing but grumbles, it might decide its resources can be better spent elsewhere. Attributing a particular thought or idea to someone inappropriately could lead to friction between the developer and Apple, a relations concern that could affect timely support for an upcoming product. When a developer or publisher feels burned by the press, they are less likely to be forthcoming to journalists in the future. That can hurt both developer / publisher (in helping them build early supporters and buzz for a product) and the magazines (who lose early noises in the wind of upcoming products). Saddest of all is that Feld sparked off internecine warfare among the Mac gaming community when we all are on the same side. What I can but assume was meant to be her wake-up call to Apple to try and get support to developers and publishers could have had the opposite effect. I think we’ve all profited from seeing that we, as journalists, need be more cautious in who and how we attribute our ideas and frustrations. Thomas a Becket, speaking the words given to him by T.S. Eliot in Murder in the Cathederal, plaintively cried that "The last temptation is the greatest treason: / To do the right deed for the wrong reason." Equally as dangerous is its inverse: to do the wrong thing, but for the right reason.