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Aug 3, 2012 -- 7:49AM, willpell wrote:

Aug 2, 2012 -- 12:55PM, chronego wrote:

Why are you assuming he'll just say no without giving a reason or hearing you out?

I don't know what would happen if I actually got to talk to him, since others in the company would certainly make sure I never got that far; that's how hierarchy in a corporate environment works.  But I'm fairly sure that if I did actually get face-to-face with him, I probably wouldn't be able to convince him to abandon many of the principles he's espoused in this column, such as "If you fight human nature, you will lose".

I think you're over-estimating Mark's degree of distancing himself from the public.  He attends some number of large Magic events every year (more often in the Seattle area), you could just go to one of those and talk to him.  It is probably true that you couldn't convince him of many things that he currently thinks are wrong - you'd have to provide him better evidence in favor of them than he already has against them.

I'm somewhat doubtful of your ability to do that in the case of views like this one:

I am vaguely curious what sort of "no" he could come up with for my previously-stated belief that Magic is not an intellectual property which should be treated as a business to make money, but rather that it is a cultural heritage which should be handled with the utmost reverence, and that design's priority should always be to do what is best for the Magic multiverse as an ideological construct, whether or not it is of benefit to the players or to the bottom line. Somehow, though, I doubt I would get a terribly constructive response.

That seems like a very bizarre view.  If something is of benefit neither to the players nor to the bottom line, why exactly are you doing it?  To benefit other people who most likely aren't even aware of the game?  To benefit no one at all (except maybe yourself) by making it "better" in some abstract sense which is somehow not consistent with the concrete sense of providing benefits to people?

I was stating that for the sake of argument in this case, not for practical reasons but simply to ensure that the obvious, merciless, unpopular truths did not go unspoken.  I am offended by too positive an attitude, and so feel compelled to point out the harsh facts of the world as they are when ungentled by self-congratulation, which render good-natured conventional wisdom into hollow hypocrisy.  This is the perspective of one who, if you labeled him "Evil", would point out that it is not a "Good" act to judge people in such a fashion, and would in fact rally other "Evil" individuals into a crusade to exterminate the very concept of "Good", and regard all the casualties of that war as entirely the fault of the one who first slapped a derisive label on him rather than having to listen to his logic.

Such a crusade, and such a regard for casualties, would certainly qualify as "Evil" by my definition.  So at least it's internally consistent.

Aug 3, 2012 -- 2:19PM, chronego wrote:

If Magic doesn't make money, it ceases to exist. Where would your "cultural heritage" be then?

Until recently, absolutely no-one ever even acknowledged the idea that governments could run out of money.  It was accepted without question that people paid their taxes to society in exchange for the creation of roads, schools, and other civic functions.  My concept would treat a society's cultural heritage as being one of those civic functions, and Magic as a part of America's cultural heritage, to be treated with all the reverence that the French dedicate to the Louvre or the Italians to Roman architecture.  The multiverse shouldn't be a slipshod pile of tacked-on fluff that's used to sell product; it should be a vast archive of knowledge that is protected and referenced like the Library of Congress, so that the saga of the planeswalkers is unimpeachably believable and as internally-consistent as reality itself.

See, I don't think it's rude to avoid a situation that hurts you. If you're being rude or unkind to him, then he has every right to ignore you or do his best to avoid you. It goes both ways: If you want respect, willpell, you have to offer it.

Politeness and respect are very different things.  If someone's rudeness "hurts" you, you are attaching too much importance to their opinion of you.  People do not matter as much as they think they do in the grand scheme of things; they should maintain a level of ideological detachment from themselves.  If someone says something uncomplimentary to them, they should not fixate on the bruising of their emotions or ego; they should listen to the meaning of the message, not its tone.

Aug 3, 2012 -- 2:22PM, fractal wrote:

That seems like a very bizarre view.  If something is of benefit neither to the players nor to the bottom line, why exactly are you doing it?  To benefit other people who most likely aren't even aware of the game?  To benefit no one at all (except maybe yourself) by making it "better" in some abstract sense which is somehow not consistent with the concrete sense of providing benefits to people?

To benefit the small percentage of players who care the most about Magic, instead of the large numbers to whom it is a trifling amusement worth wasting a large quantity of money on because they have more than they know what to do with.