Lord British Knows Controversy Gets Attention

He has his Kickstarter campaign.

He has made his initial goal.

But success now is really measured in how far he can exceed his million dollar line in the sand.  How can he explain that he already had pets and weather as part of the design if you won’t give him money for these stretch goals?

So what is the stand-by Lord British plan?

Go to the press!

The gaming press falls over itself when he offers up an interview despite the fact he is using them to pursue his own goals.  Remember his “great fondness for EA” press campaign?  Suddenly he loved EA when he wanted to get his Ultima IP back.  Pity he didn’t actually speak to them directly.

Of course, when they gave him the big “up yours” he suddenly remembered some bad bits about EA.  Funny that.

And he sure had nice things to say about Zynga when he was looking to get into bed with Mark Pincus.

You’re right, these helmets are great Mark!

And not an ounce of irony showed from his previous scolding of the industry for not following Zynga… over a cliff, as it turns out.  Bad game design I bet.

To be fair though, he does always give the press something they want.  He delivers up a good quote or two that they can run with to draw in readers.  Lord British guarantees page views.

And today he has delivered.  The headline for the interview over at PC Gamer includes the quote:

most game designers really just suck

He hits it out of the park!

#winning

Of course, what he really said was:

But other than a few exceptions, like Chris Roberts, I’ve met virtually no one in our industry who I think is close to as good a game designer as I am. I’m not saying that because I think I’m so brilliant. What I’m saying is, I think most game designers really just suck, and I think there’s a reason why.  It’s really hard to go to school to be a good designer”

Which I guess mitigates the statement a bit.  It isn’t easy to become a game designer.  That is why you suck.  Oh, and you aren’t a good artist or a decent programmer, so what else can you do besides menial work like QA or community management?  So you end up in game design.

Still, just to make sure things are clear… and generate controversy… he puts the boot in a couple more times.  The article is a mine of inflammatory quotes, which he hands out with a knowing wink.

And every designer that I work with… I think, frankly, is lazy.

Boy, I sure hope you didn’t have a Game Designer entry on your resume for a Lord British project, you lazy bastard!

But he got plenty of attention.  And while there is such a thing as bad publicity… ask the SimCity 5 general manager about that one… tripping over your own lies is never good… controversy often works if it doesn’t inherently taint your own product.  Lord British said other people suck.

And PC Gamer threw him his bone, mentioning and linking to his project at the end of the article… if you got that far.

Now, how much of a bump on Kickstarter will this interview give one of the industries least lazy game designers?

Meanwhile, what happened to that quote about being stupid if you’re not making an MMO?  You remember, the one from right before Tabula Rasa.