Our initial writing on Monday's strip was wide-ranging, and had a couple lines I couldn't leave well enough alone. So, one brief exhumation later…
I was sorta explaining how the awards show went to Brenna, who - reasonably - thought that perhaps Mike and I were just doing what we always do. She'd be in a position to know. One time we were "writing" in another room and when she came in, she saw that our "process" involved eating cookies and rolling around giggling. She'd seen enough; she left wordlessly. This wasn't even our job yet! It's just something grown adults were doing on the floor, and somehow - somehow, dear reader - a .jpeg would result. But no; it's actually like what we said.
Geoff Keighley is whatever. In the parlance of the youth, "not worth." I got bigger fish to fry.
I wanted to talk for a second about the layoffs at Wizards of the Coast. I talked about them yesterday on tweeter, because I'd heard things. Not because I'm particularly cool, or anything - I've just been around long enough to know people who started on tip lines and before anyone could stop them they had achieved elevated status. Or the contractor that ends up getting the "blue badge" and gets plugged into the big machine. Or the operator of a subsidiary made redundant, who ends up taking that team out into the fucking tundra with them and making something great. I know everyfuckingbody. And that means I know a lot of people at Wizards of the Coast.
In some cases, after yesterday, that's past-tense. I said as much, in a "tweet," based on information I had from the real world via living human beings - that in the hideous wisdom of the Markets they serve, Hasbro was in the process of lobotomizing their golden goose. People had read other things that made it ambiguous, that nothing of note was coming to Wizards and said so confidently, when I was literally getting texts and mails from people affected. They live here. I live here. You don't know.
They fired the kind of people you don't fire when you have the upcoming slate they do. That's the part that really gets down to it for me. It would be like trying to remove parts of an engine based on some dim intuition, or the twitchings of a dowsing rod: The people who transform creative work into products. Designers. A thirty-year vet. People who ensure that their brands arrive in one piece when they make projects with partners, the people who maintain communion with the player. There's people I know are gone that haven't even said so. I won't speculate on it; it's fucked enough without me trying to crazywall this madness. Because it was so fast, and because there was no warning or mode of succession, it's created a pressure chamber environment where you might not have a boss anymore or a project manager but everything else is the same - the timelines are the same, with fewer people and no operational structure. Monstrous. Wicked. I grieve for them. I grieve for them, and the beautiful work unmade.
(CW)TB out.
