Whilst I was busy earlier this week forgetting I had a blog, the Quest-Online-Plagiarising-BioWare kerfuffle culminated in Derek Smart pointing his finger at his hired PR, the hired PR proofreading her apology as well as she proofread the initial press release, and Derek Smart then pointing his other finger at BioWare for stealing the quote from John Smedley in the first place. (Oh, someone else did it first? That's ok then!)
John Smedley of SOE, actually uttered those same words in his New
Orleans Fan Fair 2004 keynote speech which predates Ray Muzyka's own
commentary in the 2008 press release for Bioware's upcoming Star Wars :
The Old Republic MMO. John said "Traditionally,
massively multiplier [sic] online games have been about three basic gameplay
elements - combat, exploration and character progression. In Everquest
2, we've added a fourth element to the equation; a story"
This is a convenient thing to say when Google, which is pretty well known for finding words on the internets, fails to return any relelvant search results for the Smedley quote apart from pages that have reported on the kerfuffle this week.
In fact, it appears as though the origin of that quote - misspelling of "multiplayer", incorrect capitilisation of "EverQuest", and all - came from the Kill Ten Rats comment thread in which Derek Smart later replied. Can't get enough of that Copy and Paste.
But what do we know? 2004 was a long time ago; a scary, strange place where video cameras and laptops were not yet invented in order to transcribe the 2004 New Orleans Fan Faire keynote.
So I asked John Smedley.
Um. I've never been to New Orleans. That was the one year I missed it
for family reasons ;)
I have no idea of [sic] I ever said that. But given that he's attributing it
to me in new orleans I doubt it. Maybe I said it some other year.
Or maybe not. With other Fan Faires being as well transcribed as the 2004 one (i.e. not), it is almost impossible to verify if Smed said this quote, or anything remotely like it. But surely that's not an issue we have to worry about. I mean, surely Derek Smart wouldn't just pick up a quote on, in his words, a "little known blog site" without sourcing it, right?
And yes, those were John’s words at that 2004 fair in New Orleans.
Everyone is quick to point the finger, but when push comes to shove,
nobody wants to do the actualy work of sourcing corrections. Nice.
I'm still not seeing your source there. Nice.
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