What happened to Peter Pears’s reviews on IFDB? I haven’t been active here lately so I don’t know how long they haven’t been there, but they aren’t there now.
-Wade
His ‘Ranting Outlet’ site has gone, too.
-Wade
Ragequit, I assume. With some effort they can still be retrieved from the database dumps: ifarchive.org/indexes/if-arc … Xifdb.html
I never heard that word. But he didn’t seem super rageful to me. Still, it appears to be some kind of departure for reasons unknown to me.
-Wade
Hmmm… sad to see him go. He wrote a very nice review of one of my games and now it’s gone (though with a bit of luck I can hopefully retrieve it).
Anyone know why he ragequit? Was there some big blow up I missed?
My guess is that Brothers thread. I didn’t read it fully but there seemed to be a “kerfuffle” of sorts.
[url]Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons]
edited to add link.
Ah. I started off reading that thread but it was discussing a game I hadn’t played so I stopped reading there - spoilers and whatnot. I didn’t realise it ended in a massive flamewar like that.
Still not sure why Peter deleted all his reviews, though. Seems a little extreme for what was basically a heated discussion on a forum unrelated to the reviews.
I don’t think he deleted the reviews specifically. He seems to have removed his entire account both here and on IFDB, and presumably that removed his content there too.
Ouch. I knew he was unhappy with what happened there, and his last post in the Brothers thread was certainly sad, but I didn’t realise that it was that bad. Otherwise I’d have said something to him. He’ll be missed.
I read some of it a while back. At the time, it seemed like he was taking quite a lot of abuse over failing to see Brothers as sexist – something I too failed/fail to see. I don’t know if this was isolated here, but it seemed to coincide with similar things happening elsewhere – Twitter, etc. I got the impression he was really blindsided by it. I hope he comes back.
I don’t think the thread even ended up being about Brothers so much - more that in defence of Brothers he kept doubling down, probably without realising that this was what he was doing.
The whole GamersGate mess was making me, at least, a good deal less willing to put up with things in my own back yard.
Yes. Me too.
Oh, that ugliness had already started? I wasn’t aware of it until weeks later.
There must be circumstances beyond the Brothers thread because Peter is better than this. He handled the very juvenile criticism from the CYS forum with considerable poise. If not, then I’m disappointed that he would abandon the community of his passion over a little criticism.
On that note, I am continually baffled by the amount of pride some people have over taking criticism. I don’t know whether it’s a symptom of entitlement or privilege, or just the “everyone gets a trophy” childhoods catching up with us, but people need to start learning some disappointment management. Not everyone’s going to agree with you, and if you refuse to adapt to new ideas you can at least ignore it and move on. Please leave the tantrums to toddlers.
Pete has always been very verbal. He can go on with a subject forever, even arriving at the point where he says: “I understand, I’m wrong”, which is SUPER. I dunno how many are able to do the same. Anyway, shutting him up is very hard.
And wrong, one must consider.
That said, he was bashed very directly for ages. He could have surrendered way before, but you know how it goes: in the end it’s just you vs. the world and you don’t wanna go down even if you know you’re wrong. Given he was, wrong, I mean.
So the ragequit. Which happens, at a certain level of pain.
On the internet (and, why not, in RL) people get bashed. They finally surrender. They quit. Then, after their departure (read this as you want: it may be a metaphor), we all go “Oh, I’m sorry: hope they come back”. I’m not saying this is right/wrong/half-right/half-wrong/whatever. I’m just saying this is how life goes.
And I don’t know why I’m pointing this out, to be honest.
Ps: Maga and Merk, I quoted you two – This is not aimed at you. I mean: don’t ragequit.
Would it be possible that Peter Pears didn’t ragequit but that someone hacked his accounts and deleted them?
Anything is possible, I guess. I emailed him a few days ago and haven’t gotten a reply.
Being admin and knowing what’s involved for removing a user, I can say that no hacking was involved; here, at least.
Hmm. Eron Gjoni’s post appeared on 8/16. The thread ended on 8/13. These are close, but they’re not related. So I think the Brothers topic was independent of the Zoe Quinn mess. Not that it makes the issues in the topic any less relevant.
It’s disappointing that things escalated. And while I tended to sympathize against Peter in the argument, not having played Brothers, I remember being on the wrong side of an argument and how I’d really like some time to think things over, but people wanted me to admit they were right, right now. And it felt awful. And I imagine that’s how Peter felt. Plus it all seemed like arguing for the sake of arguing near the end, and I don’t blame anyone for throwing their hat in after that, no matter which side they’re on. I hope it doesn’t happen again, even if I did learn some useful things from the discussion.
I never talked much with him, and we had a nice discussion of bugs I wanted/needed to fix, and how some of my comp games were taking longer than expected to release. I was about to send him a PM to reply belatetly to his earlier poke, but then I noticed the message from him was from an unregistered user. So I can’t say thanks now.
I don’t think it’s just about me, though. We just don’t have enough of that, of people saying “Hey, fix this game” who can poke others to get it done. And we’ve lost a person like that, at least for the moment. Most of us are here because we want to write games, and that makes a bit of a to-pheavy community as I see it. Peter was someone who wanted to play them & helped balance that.
So I guess all we can do is encourage our contemporaries going forward to pay attention, or keep up with games when we have our own writer’s block. Maybe pour a review out on the curb in Peter’s memory, and stuff. Or something.