WhyGamesMatter

I wrote a while back about how I am supporting the Ouya, a new console based on the Andriod OS, in a KickStarter campaign.  I suppose it was inevitable that people would come out of the woodwork claiming that it is a scam.  Ever since the ridiculous Kickstarter scam that was discovered earlier this year, reporters have been salivating for an inkling of a chance to expose another scam in progress.

One of the things that I actually appreciated about Penn & Teller’s “Bullshit” was that they went out of their way to use an expletive rather than call someone a “scammer” or a “fraud.”  I liked this because they left room for the possibility that the people peddling the BS don’t know that it’s BS, and that they are true believers.  Strangely, this seems like a much more objective way of doing it.

I don’t remember where I first heard the statement “words mean things,” but I think it is completely applicable here.  If someone gives an endeavor a genuine, honest try and fails, it is not a scam.  It is a failure.

With that in mind, I’ve seen nothing that indicates that the Ouya team is going to to anything except try their hardest to follow-through with their product.  They see the trust we’ve placed in their ideas (with our money), and they strive to get people on-board with the project that would not benefit financially at all from a scam.  They might fail, buy they don’t appear to be scamming.

By the way, you may wonder why I have an image of a child climbing a wall.  I use this image to represent someone giving a genuine attempt, an honest effort, “the ol’ college try,” etc.  I hope nobody sees this and thinks that he’s attempting to scam them if he doesn’t make it to the top of the wall, even if he set that out as his goal.