http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/blogArt.cfm?artid=16035 
In the famous novel
To Kill a Mockingbird, it was said that it was wrong to commit that eponymous act because Mockingbirds cause people no harm, only providing music for us to enjoy. Such entities are not merely confined to the pages of Harper Lee's work or the world of ornithology, however. Indeed, I would submit that the work of this very website is its own breed of Mockingbird.
Nintendo World Report is the product of people giving of themselves, simply because of their passion for Nintendo and video games generally. Nobody earns a living from NWR; we do not praise or decry games for financial gain, there are no backroom deals with publishers for exclusives, no plastering of the site in Kane & Lynch promotional material or other such dubious practices. NWR exists only for the love of the game, if you'll forgive the expression. Having been a reader of the site all the way back to its PlanetN2000 days before joining the staff last year, I have long appreciated this fact along with recognising the outstanding quality of the staff's work over the years.
This is not to say that, due to NWR's nature, the opinions and reasoning of our staff members are somehow unimpeachable - far from it. We do not proclaim our reviews to be definitive or absolute. Passionate disagreement and debate are to be welcomed and indeed celebrated, and we are no strangers to these things as a staff either. We only aim to provide criticism and analysis that is sufficiently thorough, considered, and well-articulated that our readers can glean their own insights from our work, whether they agree with us or not. Consequently, the diverse feedback from the vast majority of our forum-goers who participate in commentary and debate regarding our work is a large part of what makes contributing to NWR so rewarding.
However, this also leads us to those who qualify as NWR's would-be assassins in this literary analogy: the furious few that seem to take our attempts to provide honest analysis as some sort of unacceptable personal attack in those instances where their views diverge from those expressed by NWR staff. Seeking to right such grievous wrongs, they take to their keyboards (with fingertips aflame and Caps Lock already enabled) and proceed to spew a mix of zealous assertions and puerile insults that serve no purpose other than to assuage their apparently volcanic displeasure at discovering that someone has the temerity to disagree with them.
I believe that such unprovoked and unreasonable attacks are, in their own small and pathetic way, analogous to killing one of Harper Lee's Mockingbirds. This is not (I'm happy to say) because any of our staff are sufficiently thin-skinned to be dealt a mortal blow by such ingeniously fashioned barbs as "you're just plain dumb with a small poo brain". The sadness here lies in the fact that some people are apparently so incapable of respectful disagreement that they do not simply refuse NWR's unconditional offerings, but instead are compelled to belittle those that work to provide them without thought of personal gain.
Though hardly a phenomenon unique to NWR or the video gaming media in general, its existence here is all the more incomprehensible given the fact that our work at NWR (regardless of whether a review is glowing, scathing, or anywhere in the vast, nuanced space in-between) is only ever in the service of our readers. The true folly of such intolerance is that we are always exclusively on your side, whether you agree with us on specific issues or not, and to behave otherwise is to your detriment, not ours.
Topic: How Talkback Flame Wars Kill Mockingbirds (Read 18924 times)
