It was Sunday morning, and while I typically try to spend my weekend away from games, since I work with games all week long, on this particular day, I was inspired to write a new feature for TheKartel.com. Here I was thinking that it was going to be a fun way to drum up some chatter on a particular game design challenge I was faced with, little did I know it was going get me banned from NeoGAF, and set on fire by the gaming community.

The whole thing started because I wrote a rather controversial piece about how I think more games need to take lessons from Borderlands. I intended the piece to stir up some heated debate, especially since I used the headline “Why all games from now on MUST be like Borderlands”. Now, to be clear, I actually do believe “most” games could learn a thing or two from Borderlands, though stating that ALL games need to follow these rules was clearly designed to grab your attention. Anytime you start off that way, it’s bound to get people riled up enough to share their opinion.

Soon after I finished posting, I did my usual follow up and pinged various people to let them know I wrote another story. I recently started to post up stuff on Digg, on N4G, and even on my Facebook profile, as a way to get some more exposure for my stories. I usually do this with more original pieces I write as way to see what interest there is from people out there.

Within 2 hours, the site was bombarded with traffic. While I should have been jubilant at all the attention the story was generating, the reality was, things started to take a wrong turn. And it all started on NeoGAF.

For those not familiar with NeoGAF, it is highly popular video game forum that pulls in a very hardcore following that has a holds-no-bar attitude towards saying anything on their mind. It can be a very scary place to participate in, simply because GAFfers can be a highly volatile group. One minute they may hold a deep and insightful conversation with you, the next it turns ugly with people acting in very nasty fashion, or jumping to conclusions and spreading rampant rumors. Quite frankly, it’s because of this sort of behavior that so people want to look in, and read what’s posted. Over the years, I post on NeoGAF to see what opinions people may have on certain issues. Despite some over the top behavior at times, it can be a very informative experience as well.

But this time, while posting my story up on GAF, and replying to various comments, the thread was suddenly locked.  And then my account was banned. In addition, it appeared my IP was banned for a while, because I couldn’t access the site.

To be fair, NeoGAF does have a very straightforward policy on what constitutes getting banned. If you link to certain sites, you can get banned. If you mention certain words, you can get banned. While the banning policy appears to be harsh, and entirely arbitrary, it is their site, so they can do what they want. If I had broken a rule, then I have no one to blame but myself.

But in this case, I was banned for viral marketing. The problem with this whole situation is: I don’t work for Gearbox, or 2K Games. I have no affiliations with them. Never even been in contact with them. Yet somehow I was banned for viral marketing. I can be accused of being an overzealous fan. But that’s all I am. And last I checked, NeoGAF was made of overzealous fans who have very strong opinions.

Reading through the thread is absolutely fascinating and scary at the same time. A moderator has changed the headline of my post  to “Why all games MUST be like Borderlands (because I'm a viral marketer for Borderlands)” It appears they are bent on branding me and shaming me in public. This clearly works, because many posters are pissed and ready to cut off the head of the viral marketing monster. They clearly want blood for what they see as a deceitful marketing practice. Some people go as far as saying they are canceling their pre-order because of such blatant viral marketing. I feel bad for Gearbox who is getting the brunt of the flaming, despite early reviews showing that the game is quite good.

With such a statement, people are starting to jump into wilder conclusions. I wasn’t sure if this particular post was serious or not: “Or maybe he was hired by Sony/Microsoft to give Nintendo a bad name by making people think he's hired by Nintendo who is trying to make people not want to buy Borderlands?”

So how did NeoGAF arrive at this conclusion? It’s easy to trace the steps, simply because I wasn’t trying to hide who I was. My profile on GAF is John Master Lee. The same I use online in games. The same one I use in my postings here at TheKartel.com. The same one I use for my company profile, Bardo Entertainment. It’s clear someone followed this trail to my company’s website. It’s a company I founded a few years ago to tackle the new frontier of gaming and social media. My company basically designs games, and various community related projects with gaming elements in them. It's was a passion of mine to move back into game development after being on the publishing side in gaming for many years. It appears that someone read through the website, picked up on some key words that cemented in their heads that I was a viral marketer. In reality, there is no mention of viral marketing anywhere on the site, simply because that’s not what Bardo does. There's also no metion of Take 2 in there, the publisher of the game. Although I will note that I did update the content on our company site to clarify what we do, since I seemed to have stirred up a hornets nest.

On top of that, because someone saw my post on N4G, a site that aggregates news for gamers, GAFfers assumed that my job was to spread the word everywhere that “You must buy Borderlands”. They assumed that there was a pattern to my behavior, and it translated into being a shill. They clearly didn’t get too far in their investigative work because had they clicked over to TheKartel.com they would have seen I have written a number of stories that range from fun silly pieces, to reviews, to news items. If there is a pattern in there somewhere that I was shilling Borderlands, I don’t see it. This was my only story on Borderlands. From there, other GAFfers started to dig up my older posts, and claimed that because I made a few posts about various multiplayer games, like Sacred 2, and New Super Mario Bros for Wii, that somehow it solidified their their assumption that I was paid to hype Borderlands.

Soon, other sites from IGN to Shacknews, MaxConsole, and even the official Borderlands boards picked up on the initial headline, believing that a viral marketer had been outed. They assumed that since NeoGAF had supposedly caught a viral marketer, that this was accurate. It seemed some of these posters didn't read through the whole forum thread on NeoGAF, otherwise they would have realized that by the time they got to the end, it seemed that the whole issue wasn't entirely accurate, nor was Gearbox or Take 2 games involved  in any viral marketing scam. In less than 24 hours, it seemed well over 100,000 people had already followed the story, based on traffic patterns we see on TheKartel.com.

So to clarify, no I’m not a viral marketer. And as many people who pointed out, if I was, I am pretty crappy at it. After all, you can see my trail of actions. I use my own profile name across all platforms, so I don’t disguise myself. Now I have no problem with viral marketing per se. I do have a problem of being accused of doing viral marketing, and not getting paid for it!

Through this experience I decided to look up other people who have been banned as well to see what the reasons were. I read through a couple of online posts, as well as contact a few people as well. What I turned up was even more fascinating.

It seems that when people do get banned, it's for one of the rather more unusual rules that NeoGAF has, ie. no posting anything from VGChartz. What's even more amusing is that though they were banned, several people admitted that, they still wanted to be part of the “club”, so they found a way to reregister. There also seems to be some strong negative sentiment from other forums on the whole NeoGAF community. Some quotes I got include,

   "GAF has always been too pretentious for their own good."
   "As a forum, (GAF) is a snakes' nest."
   "The moderators at NeoGAF ban people like it's a bodily function."

After reaching out to a couple of people and hearing their accounts of being banned, I realized that being banned was only part of the problem. The big issue I had was that there’s no way to contact a moderator to clear up the matter. So I basically have to sit back and watch the moderators flame the hate in my direction. In this case, Tyler Malka, who goes by the avatar of Evilore, seemed to prefer to prevent others from doing more investigative work to get to the bottom of thigns, by making this post "No need to go wild on the detective work. He's exposed and banned already." I'm still not quite sure why he believes that he has outed an infiltrator, and requests that others not verify the account. As it appeared, I was branded the monster in a witch hunt.

To be fair, I haven’t been able to contact Tyler Malka, the owner of NeoGAF, so I can’t supply a counter argument. So how about NeoGAF? Since I came clean, how you doing the same? Perhaps you were wrong? If you would like to share your point of view, I'd be happy to post it up.

What I did find interesting was that when given the chance to explain myself, which I was able to do with some GAF members over at N4G, it seemed like they were willing to get to the bottom of the issue, and find out what was for real. Some people that reached out to me via private message wanted to hear what I had to say. And after some clarification, they understood what the whole issue was, and things calmed down. It seems once engaged in this sort of discussion, it’s possible to clear things up.

In this particular case, this whole experience has left a bad taste in my mouth since I was accused of doing something I didn’t do. While the only real damage is that my account was banned, it does feel like a major slight. I had been on GAF for years now. Over the years, I made clear who I was, and often times helped answer questions about projects I was working on at the time. Or I would get some good advice on gaming questions I had. I met some good people on the site. But it seems that GAF has changed over the years, and those that control the forums are promoting a rather hostile environment by manipulating who is banned and how they are banned.

So through the whole situation, which was played out over 12 hours (and it's still going), I sit here trying to see the the glass half full, and marvel at how many people clicked over to this site. It seems like controversy really does create attention. I’m not sure I want to be thrown in mud day in and day out just to get a traffic bump on my postings. Maybe I'll stick with pics of sexy girls.

For now, I'll continue to reach out to NeoGAF and see if they are interested in rectifyig the matter. Despite how ugly things got, I do wish I could get my NeoGAF account back. Even if I hate myself for admitting it.