Loxbourne wrote
this effort post over on SA
This is the single most hilarious piece of Star Citizen drama you are likely to read...at least until we see the CIG/RSI response to the CryTek lawsuit. That's going to be a lolapocalypse of Biblical proportions
In his hour of triumph, I'd like to devote an effortpost to Derek Smart himself. A dangerous past-time, perhaps, but an important question to ask. I'm here for the laughs like most of the thread but I also want to see CIG pulled apart and picked over. I want to read Coutts' debtor reports, see the forensic accountants go over the books, get as many backers out as are willing to be saved. Taking CIG apart properly means doing ballistic analysis of the huge great burning trail blasted through it by one man.
So who IS that masked warlord? More to the point, why did one guy with a twitter account end up a furious lightning-rod for the hatred of hundreds of backers, single-handedly attracting the ire of a massive community that should (and once did) have had more than enough to amuse itself with throughout Star Citizen's development.
It's been pointed out, more than once, that there wouldn't be a cult without Derek. That the existence of an active hate figure to strive against was what was needed to push a mildly toxic fandom into a full-blown horror where people compete to throw all their worldly goods as fast as possible into the gaping maw of CIG. I don't actually agree with this sentiment. For one thing the fandom was toxic from the start, but I think even without Derek we'd still see a cult of some form. The cult is a side-effect of CIG's marketing techniques. They needed to milk their whales, to find people who will spend large sums of money and keep spending those sums without complaint as the game gets delayed again and again. That's not to say Derek hasn't left a massive mark on Star Citizen, of course. But he stepped into a role that was ready and waiting. If Derek did not exist it would have been necessary for the Citizens to create him.
I'm going to adopt some terminology here because it's crucial we (as obviously disinterested goons of Science :v:) keep two concepts separate. One of them is Derek Smart, human being with a twitter account. The other is
THE SMART. Great Beast Who Is Called Warlord. Avatar of Big Publishing. The terrible being with eyes of fire and tongues of flame who rose from Internet Hell to destroy Dreams, who travels in a shrieking cloud of circling bats accompanied by the wails of the goons and dramatic choirs chanting in Latin.
That entity doesn't exist anywhere outside the Citizens' collective nightmares (and this thread's half-serious injokes), but
it was already there long before Derek typed his first blog. He just put a name and a face to it.
THE SMART is, of course, the personification of backer nervousness. Their fear the game genuinely is impossible to make, that Chris is overpromising, that the funding won't hold up. The entirely rational fears it is quite normal to hold even if one has plenty of faith in the project. It might not work out, and if it doesn't...well, there goes their dream and their money too. A lot of their money. Life-changing, farm-mortgaging, marriage-ending amounts.
I'd bet that same money that the first thing many citizens said to themselves when Derek first crossed their radar was
"Of course...". Of course there would be an Anti-Crobbler. Of course someone would rise to fight the glorious promise of Star Citizen. Of course there would be someone that evil, that diabolical, that beholden to dark powers, to try and take away their Dreams. He fits the worldview of a frustrated, aging nerd all too well.
The reason I don't have nice things is because The Man keeps me down, and here he is right now tryin' to stop this Glorious Thing.
The real dark whisper of
THE SMART (
choirs) is that Star Citizen is never coming out. Your money has bought you nothing except a terrible tech demo and Chris's instagram gallery. You're not Han Solo, Captain Kirk, OR Mal Reynolds, you're still whoever you were before you bought your first ship.
That's
bad. For some citizens - the saddest ones, the ones most in need of help - that's
terrible. Hateful.
Evil. It's also tremendously painful.
But it's also an entirely natural thing to think, just with basic human critical faculties. The ones CIG and one's fellow cultists spend so much time and energy suppressing. Cultists aren't (all) dumb, they're just caught in a system designed to switch their critical thinking off.
So
THE SMART (
choirs)'s real purpose, his real utility in the minds of Citizens, is as something to sublimate their misgivings onto. When CIG rides high, the Citizens are dismissive. When CIG hits trouble, they go fight Derek. When the crazier backers disappear from the fandom during a marketing fuckup, some of them go off and spout hate at Derek for a bit thinking that this would drive back
THE SMART and make Star Citizen good again. I've talked about how Elite and Line of Defence are where the citizens project problems with the game; Derek is where they put their problems with
themselves. A classic scapegoat. When a Citizen triumphs against Derek, he triumphs against the part of his brain that is saying "hold on, why are we spending so much cash here?"
Now, the man behind the mask didn't have to be Derek Smart. It was well on the way to being Beer4thebeergod for a while. The role would have fit any charismatic backer who pulled out early or any outsider who spoke out too loudly. David Braben would have fit (he's basically the current understudy). If nobody stepped forward to take the role, sooner or later it would have been Big Publishing or someone like Bobby Kotick. The cult would be much the same externally, spite pledges and all.
Derek proved an excellent candidate for the mantle. It requires a certain level of independence and thick skin just to sustain the requirements of the post. Someone with a day job would be at risk from being harassed so hard they actually stopped warlording (witness the Escapist and their poor journalist who was just too early). Derek has time and an independent income and a very thick skin indeed; he's pretty much immune to any weapon in the backer arsenal and that makes him a perfect Dark Lord.
Derek also knows his lines. He can sneer, he can mock, he fits the role of playground bully and he can be baited. He spouts heresies (leaks! ex-CIG employees saying nasty things!), he attracts followers (goons!), he plays the role of a cartoon villain excellently. Citizens naturally want to fight him to exorcise the cognitive dissonance, and as it happens Derek's up for the fight. The key is to remember that the Citizens already wanted someone to fight. They wanted to go find
someone to dump their fears onto and vent their anger at. Derek was in the right place at the wrong time.
He doesn't fight fair though. He doesn't meet them on the field at dawn wearing black armour and carrying a sword of crying souls, then battle them for a day and night under a burning sky. Or at least he doesn't stop tweeting when a Citizen sends him what all his fellow Citizens assure him are SICK OWNS. The Citizenry resent that (then tell themselves that it's just proof of his treachery). The
SMART role (
choirs) includes striving to defeat CIG and all their works - but it doesn't include
actually undermining CIG and their works or making the citizens ask themselves awkward existential questions. That's when they really, really loathe him.
And so Derek Smart the person is given an absurd level of power by citizens, elevated into a dark figure whose very existence harms Star Citizen...while at the same time, that harm is used to explain why Star Citizen isn't living up to their dreams yet. The Man, keeping them down. Remember, the key to the spite pledge is that
proving THE SMART (choirs) wrong makes Star Citizen itself better. Because it makes the voices in the individual backers' heads shut up.
Of course
THE SMART cannot be truly defeated until the Great Day of Release when Chris descends from Heaven etc etc - which is to say, it would come on the day Chris finally disproves the backers' misgivings by releasing the game - but surely He should have been forced into retreat by the same arguments the citizens use to reassure each other. That apocalyptic rhetoric was telling.
Now the game is facing an
actual apocalypse we're not seeing any of this cartoon stuff anymore . We're seeing resentment and rage and threats of Internet Violence. Attempts to claim power over the situation with weird legal terminology and "affidavits". In other words, the standard reactions of obsessed, angry nerds when their worldview starts to falter. This is no longer a situation
THE SMART (
choirs) can help backers mentally come to terms with. It'll be interesting to see if they try to build a new one to encompass Skadden and Crytek.
If Derek really wanted the Citizens to love him forever, all he needs to do is don spiky black armour, wear a skull mask, then ride into CIG HQ by shattering the Space Door and carry off Sandi on a dark steed with glowing eyes. Citizens would pledge their entire worldly goods on the spot to form a Space Posse to go after him. If he then finished the storyline in their heads and shook his fist in defiance from the bridge of an exploding skull-faced Vanduul supercarrier (no doubt begging his dark EA masters for mercy as the ship burned around him), then he'd claim a world record for the most human beings simultaneously brought to orgasm in a 24-hour period and could single-handedly fund Star Citizen's development until 2025.
Choirs.Annoyingly however the Derek Smart who actually exists doesn't live in that world. He is a flawed Internet Satan. He lives over in reality, where the average citizen is that 43-year-old wages clerk in Idaho. He may be a single-minded old cuss who sustains himself on the rage of others (and he appears to be just fine with that), but his greatest sin is not playing along. Not actually being a
proper scapegoat. Derek might actually win, and that's not in the Great Book of Crobblers at all.
