Hey, I'm the guy who made that Reddit post you read about Sinfest so it was kind of a surprise to see it here. Anyway, I just wanted to say that you shouldn't worry about the idea that you're like Tatsuya Ishida, or Notch, or whatever other person you worry that you're going to be seen as. As far as this part of what you said goes:
"That post describes how Sinfest's creator - Tatsuya Ishida - initially interacted with his community, but his content began to upset them, they took that frustration out on him, and he - like the coward he was!! - reacted to it by shutting down his forums and making a smaller one only for the spineless arse-kissers who agreed with him. He should have toughed it out in the battledome LIKE A MAN!! Or bent over to do everything the fans wanted, as if they're all in agreement anyway!"
I know that I described everything he did in a kind of sarcastic, mocking way, but there's genuinely nothing wrong with not wanting to engage with fans of your work. I didn't mean to imply that there was, or that creators need to interact constantly with their fans. The point of that part of the post was to set up what happened with Ishida later on, when he wrote critics into the comic as antagonists, became transphobic and homophobic, etcetera, etcetera.
And as for "ended up with a tiny group of hardcore supporters through his increasingly transparent contempt for his audience", I only phrased it in that (rather awkward) way so that I could describe him and Dave Sim, a guy with a kind-of-similar fall from grace, with the same sentence. In both cases, "contempt for his audience" doesn't mean just not interacting with them or refusing to bow down to their demands, it means that Ishida wrote characters into his comic representing specific fans he didn't like and Sim converted to his own religion, then put long walls of text in his comic calling his readers mind-controlled heretics and talking about how women don't have souls.
What Ishida did wrong wasn't his refusal to interact with his fans--in fact, if you're a creator of any form of media I'd recommend avoiding getting too close to your audience--it was all the stuff afterwards, where he started acting genuinely awful. And, well, you're not an awful person, Tobias. You're a good guy. Mardek was one of my favorite games as a kid and I still love it, and beyond the talent that went into it, that was because it felt honest and personal in a way that video games generally don't. You put a lot of yourself into those games and they stuck with me.
Anyway, I just wanted to stop by since it was so bizarre to see a link to my post on this blog--though I guess it's nice to see that people are still reading that post a year after I wrote it. (I actually did have someone I know IRL read one of my posts on her phone while we were talking, so I guess they still get linked to around the internet.) I didn't want you to think that what I said was targeted at you, or that your introversion and lack of public presence made you like Ishida. Thanks for all the memories of Mardek, and I'm looking forward to Atonal Dreams and whatever else you decide to make.
3
Tobias 1104~2Y
Oh wow, bizarre indeed! I've linked to Reddit a few times on this blog, but there's never been this kind of overlap before! Small world, eh?
I thought your post was well-written, by the way, which is why I linked to it! My own mocking 'interpretation' was mostly a frustrated recounting of the kinds of things people actually did used to say to me, Back In The Day. I recall more than one time, telling someone that their brutal criticisms hurt, requesting they stop, only to be essentially told I should stop being a wimp and just grin and bear it. It's difficult dealing with a large volume of not exactly compassionate people (and any large group of people is statistically going to include a number of literal psychopaths).
I'm also personally very prone to guilt, though, and acknowledge that a lot of my community management during my younger years left a lot to be desired. I was basically tyrannical as an admin, adding all these rules and judgement systems - in the hope of encouraging us all to be the best people we could be - that people had good reason to get upset about! So I feel there are genuine mistakes people could bring up were I to try and get out there again, and which I still personally feel embarrassed about.
It sounds like I'm probably blowing things out of proportion though based on what you've said about the Sinfest and Cerebus guys! I only know the latter in passing from related TVTropes pages (most notably 'Cerebus Syndrome'), years ago; I've never read Cerebus. And I always got the impression Ishida was distant and lonely as his text updates were rare and brief, and his self insert character was never shown with other people. I never checked any Sinfest forums and generally don't engage with 'The Community' around anything (largely due to experiences with my own). And I barely know anything about Notch really!
Thanks for commenting, especially in a positive, reassuring way; it's valuable to hear that from someone who knows more about those other creators' downfalls and has at least some familiarity with me. Hopefully when I do try getting out there to promote Atonal Dreams etc, it won't go as badly as my past trauma might have me fearing.
2
360K11~2Y
Dave Sim is a weird case; if you're only familiar with him through the term "Cerebus Syndrome" and the fact that he's not particularly fondly remembered, it's easy to think that he ruined his reputation by making his work Too Serious rather than the lighthearted stuff his audience wanted. I know that in your case, the Mardek remakes weren't very successful and part of that was because they were less goofy and more philosophical than the originals, and so it might seem like your own work (and reputation) is kind of similar to Sim's.
The truth is, Cerebus actually became much more popular as it grew more serious. Sure, Dave Sim drove away some of his original fans by changing his style, but he also gained way more new ones and the fact that he's remembered at all is because of the more mature, better-written stuff he put out. What ruined his reputation was writing stuff like this: [LINK]
If you don't feel like reading the whole thing, it's a long screed--originally published word-for-word and without images in what was supposedly a comic book--about how women are destroying the "Male Light" upon which civilization depends. If someone put a gun to my head and told me to write the most misogynistic thing in the world I would tell them to just go ahead and shoot me because Cerebus #186 already exists. I know that sounds like hyperbole, but it isn't. Dave Sim really, really hated women and it didn't get any better over the next hundred or so issues of his comic.
It's impossible to please everyone, of course, and there are always people who just want to get a reaction online, but in most cases where someone's reputation is ruined to this extent it's because they did or said something genuinely horrible. (This is the main thing Notch is infamous for: [LINK] )
I'm not just saying this to go "look at these weirdos", I'm also saying that you aren't going to have that level of infamy unless you're acting like that. I mean, maybe you've said stuff I don't know about, maybe you were serious about sexually assaulting puppies. But I kind of doubt it. I think that most people don't really have any opinion of you as a public figure, and those who do just love the games you put out twelve years ago. And being able to start from what is essentially a clean slate, with a small but devoted fanbase on top of that, is a good place to be.
2
Tobias 1104~2Y
Oh, wow; that certainly puts some things into perspective! And it's so strange, too, because the stuff he's ranting about - male logic vs female emotion - is literally the opposite of the main conflict I had with my own community in the past.
I understood it in terms of the Myers-Briggs personality types back then, but since getting my psychology degree I see it in terms of one of the 'big five' personality traits that academics have identified (agreeableness). It's also a part of the mechanics of my newer games; the T/F rune difference, specifically.
Agreeableness is about valuing subjective feelings over objective fact, and typically females are more agreeable while males are less agreeable... but 'typically' doesn't mean 'always'. I'm male and I'm more agreeable - I'm a sensitive, arty pacifist - but I attracted a 90+% male audience, the majority of which were, well, more typically male in their temperaments. A lot of the clashes came from that, and I wrote a lot about this back then in the hope that people would understand I wasn't exactly as comfortable with conflict - or 'debates' - as they might have been.
My own 'feeling' nature is also what makes me especially prone to guilt, especially about failing to please people, as was the case back then.
I did actually incorporate this personality clash into some of my work, though I went in the direction of trying to stress the idea that 'we don't all respond to the same things in the same way, and it's important to consider the other's nature when interacting with them if we want to see positive results'. Atonal Dreams' mechanics revolve around this. And a character in Taming Dreams - my other ill-fated MARDEK revision - who was meant to represent the whole 'Thinking' approach was (I hope) depicted sympathetically.
Speaking of that game, I don't really even consider anything post-MARDEK as meaningful creative output at all! With Flash games like MARDEK, all you had to do was upload the files to a portal site, and the views rolled in with zero effort on your part because the barrier to entry was pretty much nonexistent. With games on mobiles or Steam or whatever - Taming Dreams was the former, and Atonal Dreams will be the latter - you have to do the promotion yourself, which I didn't understand back then, so I did none of it and the games failed primarily for that reason.
I'll have to do a lot of promotion for Atonal Dreams if I want to have any hope of it making any money, which means drawing a lot of eyes to me, which might be critical. Hence my recent fears about all this, and of my attempts drawing out comments like "Tobias Cornwall? Isn't he that guy who banged all those puppies?" or whatever that'd taint all further discussion!
Sorry about the maybe-irrelevant rambling, but actually talking about all this - rather than just stewing privately on the thoughts - has put some of those fears at least partly to rest, so thanks for your input!
2
360K11~2Y
Don't worry about rambling, I like talking about this stuff. I'm not really familiar with the Big Five beyond, y'know, a Wikipedia-summary sort of general knowledge. I'm definitely more of a thinking rather than feeling person, so it's an interesting way of thinking through that aspect of my own personality.
You talked in one of your other comments about seeing these sorts of things in political vs. psychological terms. I'd say that is mostly why I wrote those long Reddit posts about Cerebus and Sinfest; I had no knowledge of Sinfest before seeing someone else on that subreddit talk about it, and I only knew of Cerebus because I got curious about the term "Cerebus Syndrome". So I didn't have any sort of specific personal anger at them the way a fan of their previous work might, and while they're both pretty awful people, the internet is full of awful people if that was what I was looking for.
It was more about a question of "why would they do this" than "how dare they do this", more psychological than political like you said. Why would someone like Dave Sim, a genuinely talented creator whose work was widely seen as some of the best comics writing in history, suddenly turn into a borderline self-parody with no awareness of what he was talking about? Why did Tatsuya Ishida, whose comics were generally vaguely left-leaning but not really political at all, turn into a pretty far-right political cartoonist with no interest in his own characters except as political vehicles to attack LGBT people with? I don't really care about or "hate" either of them as individuals, I've never met them, but I hoped that by reading about them and writing through it myself I could better understand why they (and other people) act like they did rather than just dismissing them as "crazy" without further thought.
At the same time, it's important to remember that both of these people explicitly support policies that would hurt people I know and care about in real life, and that the only reason they fall into the category of "interesting" rather than "dangerous" is that they have no real influence or power. It's a weird position to be in, in that I just see them as "artists" in a weird unintentional way because I can understand other people better through their example. But if either of them actually had the sort of power they'd clearly like to have and used it in the way they very explicitly want to, then the world would be a much, much worse place and I probably would hate them personally.
"That post describes how Sinfest's creator - Tatsuya Ishida - initially interacted with his community, but his content began to upset them, they took that frustration out on him, and he - like the coward he was!! - reacted to it by shutting down his forums and making a smaller one only for the spineless arse-kissers who agreed with him. He should have toughed it out in the battledome LIKE A MAN!! Or bent over to do everything the fans wanted, as if they're all in agreement anyway!"
I know that I described everything he did in a kind of sarcastic, mocking way, but there's genuinely nothing wrong with not wanting to engage with fans of your work. I didn't mean to imply that there was, or that creators need to interact constantly with their fans. The point of that part of the post was to set up what happened with Ishida later on, when he wrote critics into the comic as antagonists, became transphobic and homophobic, etcetera, etcetera.
And as for "ended up with a tiny group of hardcore supporters through his increasingly transparent contempt for his audience", I only phrased it in that (rather awkward) way so that I could describe him and Dave Sim, a guy with a kind-of-similar fall from grace, with the same sentence. In both cases, "contempt for his audience" doesn't mean just not interacting with them or refusing to bow down to their demands, it means that Ishida wrote characters into his comic representing specific fans he didn't like and Sim converted to his own religion, then put long walls of text in his comic calling his readers mind-controlled heretics and talking about how women don't have souls.
What Ishida did wrong wasn't his refusal to interact with his fans--in fact, if you're a creator of any form of media I'd recommend avoiding getting too close to your audience--it was all the stuff afterwards, where he started acting genuinely awful. And, well, you're not an awful person, Tobias. You're a good guy. Mardek was one of my favorite games as a kid and I still love it, and beyond the talent that went into it, that was because it felt honest and personal in a way that video games generally don't. You put a lot of yourself into those games and they stuck with me.
Anyway, I just wanted to stop by since it was so bizarre to see a link to my post on this blog--though I guess it's nice to see that people are still reading that post a year after I wrote it. (I actually did have someone I know IRL read one of my posts on her phone while we were talking, so I guess they still get linked to around the internet.) I didn't want you to think that what I said was targeted at you, or that your introversion and lack of public presence made you like Ishida. Thanks for all the memories of Mardek, and I'm looking forward to Atonal Dreams and whatever else you decide to make.
I thought your post was well-written, by the way, which is why I linked to it! My own mocking 'interpretation' was mostly a frustrated recounting of the kinds of things people actually did used to say to me, Back In The Day. I recall more than one time, telling someone that their brutal criticisms hurt, requesting they stop, only to be essentially told I should stop being a wimp and just grin and bear it. It's difficult dealing with a large volume of not exactly compassionate people (and any large group of people is statistically going to include a number of literal psychopaths).
I'm also personally very prone to guilt, though, and acknowledge that a lot of my community management during my younger years left a lot to be desired. I was basically tyrannical as an admin, adding all these rules and judgement systems - in the hope of encouraging us all to be the best people we could be - that people had good reason to get upset about! So I feel there are genuine mistakes people could bring up were I to try and get out there again, and which I still personally feel embarrassed about.
It sounds like I'm probably blowing things out of proportion though based on what you've said about the Sinfest and Cerebus guys! I only know the latter in passing from related TVTropes pages (most notably 'Cerebus Syndrome'), years ago; I've never read Cerebus. And I always got the impression Ishida was distant and lonely as his text updates were rare and brief, and his self insert character was never shown with other people. I never checked any Sinfest forums and generally don't engage with 'The Community' around anything (largely due to experiences with my own). And I barely know anything about Notch really!
Thanks for commenting, especially in a positive, reassuring way; it's valuable to hear that from someone who knows more about those other creators' downfalls and has at least some familiarity with me. Hopefully when I do try getting out there to promote Atonal Dreams etc, it won't go as badly as my past trauma might have me fearing.
The truth is, Cerebus actually became much more popular as it grew more serious. Sure, Dave Sim drove away some of his original fans by changing his style, but he also gained way more new ones and the fact that he's remembered at all is because of the more mature, better-written stuff he put out. What ruined his reputation was writing stuff like this: [LINK]
If you don't feel like reading the whole thing, it's a long screed--originally published word-for-word and without images in what was supposedly a comic book--about how women are destroying the "Male Light" upon which civilization depends. If someone put a gun to my head and told me to write the most misogynistic thing in the world I would tell them to just go ahead and shoot me because Cerebus #186 already exists. I know that sounds like hyperbole, but it isn't. Dave Sim really, really hated women and it didn't get any better over the next hundred or so issues of his comic.
It's impossible to please everyone, of course, and there are always people who just want to get a reaction online, but in most cases where someone's reputation is ruined to this extent it's because they did or said something genuinely horrible. (This is the main thing Notch is infamous for: [LINK] )
I'm not just saying this to go "look at these weirdos", I'm also saying that you aren't going to have that level of infamy unless you're acting like that. I mean, maybe you've said stuff I don't know about, maybe you were serious about sexually assaulting puppies. But I kind of doubt it. I think that most people don't really have any opinion of you as a public figure, and those who do just love the games you put out twelve years ago. And being able to start from what is essentially a clean slate, with a small but devoted fanbase on top of that, is a good place to be.
I understood it in terms of the Myers-Briggs personality types back then, but since getting my psychology degree I see it in terms of one of the 'big five' personality traits that academics have identified (agreeableness). It's also a part of the mechanics of my newer games; the T/F rune difference, specifically.
Agreeableness is about valuing subjective feelings over objective fact, and typically females are more agreeable while males are less agreeable... but 'typically' doesn't mean 'always'. I'm male and I'm more agreeable - I'm a sensitive, arty pacifist - but I attracted a 90+% male audience, the majority of which were, well, more typically male in their temperaments. A lot of the clashes came from that, and I wrote a lot about this back then in the hope that people would understand I wasn't exactly as comfortable with conflict - or 'debates' - as they might have been.
My own 'feeling' nature is also what makes me especially prone to guilt, especially about failing to please people, as was the case back then.
I did actually incorporate this personality clash into some of my work, though I went in the direction of trying to stress the idea that 'we don't all respond to the same things in the same way, and it's important to consider the other's nature when interacting with them if we want to see positive results'. Atonal Dreams' mechanics revolve around this. And a character in Taming Dreams - my other ill-fated MARDEK revision - who was meant to represent the whole 'Thinking' approach was (I hope) depicted sympathetically.
Speaking of that game, I don't really even consider anything post-MARDEK as meaningful creative output at all! With Flash games like MARDEK, all you had to do was upload the files to a portal site, and the views rolled in with zero effort on your part because the barrier to entry was pretty much nonexistent. With games on mobiles or Steam or whatever - Taming Dreams was the former, and Atonal Dreams will be the latter - you have to do the promotion yourself, which I didn't understand back then, so I did none of it and the games failed primarily for that reason.
I'll have to do a lot of promotion for Atonal Dreams if I want to have any hope of it making any money, which means drawing a lot of eyes to me, which might be critical. Hence my recent fears about all this, and of my attempts drawing out comments like "Tobias Cornwall? Isn't he that guy who banged all those puppies?" or whatever that'd taint all further discussion!
Sorry about the maybe-irrelevant rambling, but actually talking about all this - rather than just stewing privately on the thoughts - has put some of those fears at least partly to rest, so thanks for your input!
You talked in one of your other comments about seeing these sorts of things in political vs. psychological terms. I'd say that is mostly why I wrote those long Reddit posts about Cerebus and Sinfest; I had no knowledge of Sinfest before seeing someone else on that subreddit talk about it, and I only knew of Cerebus because I got curious about the term "Cerebus Syndrome". So I didn't have any sort of specific personal anger at them the way a fan of their previous work might, and while they're both pretty awful people, the internet is full of awful people if that was what I was looking for.
It was more about a question of "why would they do this" than "how dare they do this", more psychological than political like you said. Why would someone like Dave Sim, a genuinely talented creator whose work was widely seen as some of the best comics writing in history, suddenly turn into a borderline self-parody with no awareness of what he was talking about? Why did Tatsuya Ishida, whose comics were generally vaguely left-leaning but not really political at all, turn into a pretty far-right political cartoonist with no interest in his own characters except as political vehicles to attack LGBT people with? I don't really care about or "hate" either of them as individuals, I've never met them, but I hoped that by reading about them and writing through it myself I could better understand why they (and other people) act like they did rather than just dismissing them as "crazy" without further thought.
At the same time, it's important to remember that both of these people explicitly support policies that would hurt people I know and care about in real life, and that the only reason they fall into the category of "interesting" rather than "dangerous" is that they have no real influence or power. It's a weird position to be in, in that I just see them as "artists" in a weird unintentional way because I can understand other people better through their example. But if either of them actually had the sort of power they'd clearly like to have and used it in the way they very explicitly want to, then the world would be a much, much worse place and I probably would hate them personally.