I know your intentions are good, but I would be careful about condemning steretyping by replacing one stereotype with another, and then making a profession sound like a disability!
I'm seeing hostility bouncing around when it sounds like the
Fundamental Attribution Error is just doing its thing for everyone. Game developers come in all sorts, just like anybody else; some shy, some outgoing, some cheerful, some cynical, some habitually rude, others habitually polite. Look at the volume of posts about Dwarf Fortress compared to the volume of posts about Liberal Crime Squad, and you can see Toady could never interact as closely I do with players, simply because there are
too many players. He still makes a great effort at PR, giving status updates, answering questions, doing interviews, appearing on podcasts, but ultimately he has to actually make the game, so he's a lot less likely to respond to you in any depth.
I think most game developers
worth paying attention to have this problem -- too many people who want to pay attention to them to give meaningful individual attention. That's a tough balance dealt with by a lot of famous people, and you get all sorts of solutions to the problem, from people who love being approached by fans on the street to people who try to completely block out any intrusion into their life by strangers. Game developers have it easy; unlike actors, musicians, and other types, game developers can usually just hide behind a brand name and make great games, giving an interview or two. Other professions put their personalities out there and deal with people all the time, making it all worse. Eminem's song "Stan" is all about an emotionally unstable fan being driven to murder-suicide by a couple of unintentional sleights!
I know enough game developers to know that many are actually very outgoing, and that some really are assholes and many certainly aren't. But developers' actual personality is rarely conveyed well to players. It's really a matter of resource allocation, focusing time and energy. I wouldn't be quick to assume they're genuinely introverted or assholes, even if they act like it; intimacy is an intentional act, and most developers will probably decide keep players at arm's length for their own sanity, even if they're actually really nice and outgoing. But on the flip side, if most of your interactions with game developers make them look like assholes, you're likely to form the opinion that they are, regardless of whether you're predisposed to form positive or negative opinions about other people. All of this is really an effect of circumstances.
So I would say, don't be too quick to judge game developers for how they deal with the public, and don't be too quick judge someone's personality based on one or two forum posts. Of course, if a poster is being habitually rude, maybe that's just them. But I rarely see that from people in this forum; even when people do fight, it's often just otherwise very polite people getting offended or having an intractable difference of opinion.
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Topic: How do you increase your seduction skill when its at 0 (Read 3021 times)