Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-6533159-20150930152159/@comment-9464517-20151003203939

LiveandSound wrote: It is regular, but it isn't part of most people's "normal lives" since they don't experience it constantly. That's why when publicly revealed they gather such controversy.

Similarly, most people go on with their lives without experiencing a murder attempt, much less someone being killed. Some people don't even meet criminals for all their lives luckily enough. Because of that, when they do, they are astonished.

People build an entire bubble with their normality, their "usual". And when something that is not part of that usual comes into their lives in one way or another, the bubble is shattered, because they can't believe it happened, because it wasn't part of their usual, their normal.

They are not used to this sort of thing, even though it has happened backdoors for so long. Which is why there's controversy when it's revealed.

If anything, among people that do know such bullshit happens, it would be the extent or gravity of it, of the methods used for the bribery, what catches their attention.

A woman paying someone to get a high score for her game, is one thing, for example. A woman sleeping with multiple reviewers, from different companies, plus cheating on her boyfriend, to get them to say that her game is "amazing" when it's actually shit and boring, now that is much more controversial than there being bribery in the first place.

Many people hand dollars and credits to get what they want, and it's something very common, believe it or not. Not many go further than that however, maybe because even corruption has standards. If this was so normal that people would focus on specific or trivial details rather than the act itself, then why in the example that I gave, did all the film critics react so strongly? Surely they would be the ones most inured to the "moral corruption" you speak of? To act in the manner that they did, to break away from the group and form a rival conglomerate, potentially alienating themselves from friends and colleagues, is surely what you'd expect of someone who was shocked at the very notion of bribery rather than someone merely annoyed by "methods", or "the extent or gravity of it".

And please don't perpetuate that shit about Zoe Quinn. She had an affair with one journalist who never reviewed any of her games. Whether she cheated on her boyfriend or not had absolutely no impact on the way in which her games were publicised in online media.