I think this person created something they love, and then completely overestimated its importance. I remember first encountering the ending poem and thinking "Well that seems like a totally random thing to put here, but I suppose it's nice." The game was made & sold millions of copies without it, and I think it's possible that only a single digit # of copies, or maybe a few dozen, were sold as a result of it-- friends & family and a few fans of the author who would not have otherwise been exposed to the game.
This seems consistent with the level of egotism on display in the post. The author repeatedly includes himself as a core member of "we" for the group that created the game, but what this author calls the ending appears to have very much been an afterthought.
Nuggets of egotism are spread throughout in a variety of ways:
>perhaps the largest copyright offence of all time
I'd take that as hyperbole except the tone of the rest of the article supports an interpretation where the author believes this.
>If I had trouble paying for my kid’s clothes and shoes, that was on me
This in the context of his marriage breaking down, so, really? None of the responsibility was on his wife? All of the importance in that situation is on him? I wouldn't think so.
>Friendship
This seems a very Facebook-era definition of friendship. He met Persson once and then a little time later they wrote some emails back and forth. This is inflated into a friendship wherein the Gough feels he was an integral part of that creative team behind the game.
>1,700 MS Legal Affairs people
I'm sure this thing will catch the attention of someone in MS legal, but I suspect it's barely a blip on their radar, much less something that will garner the focus of the entirety of Microsoft's legal juggernaut.
At least Gough's egotism isn't large enough that he doesn't, on some level, realize that he's blowing things out of proportion. Throughout the piece there's a bit of a conflicting tone where he seems to understand that his contribution really wasn't of the magnitude he makes it out to be. Reading this though, that just introduced a bit of cognitive dissonance with a strange mixture of self-aggrandizement and self-aware/self-deprecation, e.g., "A lot of people didn’t want to read nine minutes of narrative scrolling up the screen, no matter how good it was; they didn’t give a shit. They just wanted to go and play the game again."*
This seems consistent with the level of egotism on display in the post. The author repeatedly includes himself as a core member of "we" for the group that created the game, but what this author calls the ending appears to have very much been an afterthought.
Nuggets of egotism are spread throughout in a variety of ways:
>perhaps the largest copyright offence of all time
I'd take that as hyperbole except the tone of the rest of the article supports an interpretation where the author believes this.
>If I had trouble paying for my kid’s clothes and shoes, that was on me
This in the context of his marriage breaking down, so, really? None of the responsibility was on his wife? All of the importance in that situation is on him? I wouldn't think so.
>Friendship
This seems a very Facebook-era definition of friendship. He met Persson once and then a little time later they wrote some emails back and forth. This is inflated into a friendship wherein the Gough feels he was an integral part of that creative team behind the game.
>1,700 MS Legal Affairs people
I'm sure this thing will catch the attention of someone in MS legal, but I suspect it's barely a blip on their radar, much less something that will garner the focus of the entirety of Microsoft's legal juggernaut.
At least Gough's egotism isn't large enough that he doesn't, on some level, realize that he's blowing things out of proportion. Throughout the piece there's a bit of a conflicting tone where he seems to understand that his contribution really wasn't of the magnitude he makes it out to be. Reading this though, that just introduced a bit of cognitive dissonance with a strange mixture of self-aggrandizement and self-aware/self-deprecation, e.g., "A lot of people didn’t want to read nine minutes of narrative scrolling up the screen, no matter how good it was; they didn’t give a shit. They just wanted to go and play the game again."*