“…We’ve reduced…[problems] by 92 percent from Day 1.”
Who said this?
a)
Detroit’s new Emergency Manager.
b)
Kwami Kilpatrick’s “I’m sorry” PR manager.
c)
Lucy Bradshaw
The answer is C: The other two people don’t exist.
Lucy Bradshaw is the general manager for Maxis, a division
of Electronic Arts video games. If you’ve played video games for more than ten
years, you’ll recognize Maxis as the maker of Sim City, the most popular
open-ended video game ever made.
Until last weekend.
Last week, reviewers who praised their tester copy began
backpedaling. Polygon.com, who loved the game enough to rate it 9.5/10, now
posts Sim City with a flop 4/10.
What happened?
Let me repeat Lucy Bradshaw’s quote, “We’ve reduced game
crashes by 92 percent from Day 1.” Any time you have that much room for
improvement, there are going to be a few haters along the way.
“The doctor says I’m 92 percent herpes free!”
Not quite the same thing, but you get the idea. It’s a PR
nightmare. Those of us who live anywhere
near Detroit know exactly what Maxis is going through. We tried to build a city too, and we
too failed miserably.
We didn’t even have to overcome Maxis sized Sim City
adversities like roaming monsters and alien attacks. We just needed to overcome
ourselves. We couldn’t do it. Even the governor said enough is enough. He’s now
picking an emergency manager to clean things up.
What’s an emergency manager? You would be like an emergency
manager if you reloaded your Sim Detroit to find that your little brother had
hacked your game and run your city into the ground before saving over all your
old games. Your job as the emergency manager would be to bring the city back to
its former glory.
Sim City players found last week that they were more like
Detroit emergency managers than they realized. They couldn’t access their games
because Maxis’ servers were overloaded with players. Some players couldn’t access their cities for days. They
were the lucky ones. Other players found their cities were never saved at
all.
Detroit knows how they feel. We’ve got a city council that’s blocking every connection
from an emergency manager. The council would just as soon let your little
brother continue to play for you, thanks for logging in anyway.
“We’ve reduced city spending by 92 percent. We’ll just live
without luxuries like police departments, fire departments, street lights, and
street paving.”
That’s funny, that’s just what your little brother did.
What’s next? Alien invasion?
“Maybe you haven’t been keeping up on current events, but we
just got our asses kicked.”
Different aliens. Maxis doesn’t have trademark rights to
those aliens. Neither does Detroit. Our aliens were played by Kwame Kilpatrick.
He’s all ours. Or is it the other
way around? If you haven’t been
keeping up with current events, Kwame Kilpatrick is the ex-mayor of Detroit. Have you seen the new Sim City ads with
the Sim mayor sitting on the desk in his underwear talking about what he’s done
with his city, because it’s his? That’s
Kwame, except Kwame wore pants.
Today a federal jury convicted Kwame of 24 out of 30 counts,
which included racketeering, corruption, fraud, and extortion. The federal government only got 80
percent. Not as good as Maxis. I’m just saying…
It’s still enough to put away Kwame for a bit, and put any
city in a little brother-sized hole. Detroit’s current council is intent on
throwing a rug over that hole and pretends nothing ever happened.
“What hole, mom?”
And here we are: Maxis, Kwame, Detroit, all looking to put
in some serious time to correct mistakes made in the past. Only Maxis admits
that there ever were mistakes made in the first place.
Me, I just wish there were a way to reboot the city and
start from scratch.
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