OK, at the risk of killing off any remaining chuckles, I need to say a couple of things.
First of all, I'm happy that I got to participate in a couple of soon-to-be-legendary threads. Drinky Crow just pulled off some performance art of the highest order, and it's one of those things which actually gets funnier the more you think about it. The appearance of the "FRIDAYTON" thead was simply genius -- I haven't laughed that hard in weeks.
Reading over the "THURSDAYTON" thread again, you can see that Drinky didn't lie about anything -- he just said little, implied a lot, and the rest of the gang did all the work. Before Drinky even started his thread, there was a four-pager discussing rumors of a Thursday event about Revolution...that (along with the reactions to the Nintendo pre-show conference) was all the ammo he needed.
So why did I get involved? I don't have any particular beef with Nintendo fans -- hell, I own a GBA SP and enjoy it a lot -- but I DO have a problem with fanboyism in all of its ugly forms. (If I could think of a way to mock all the people arguing over the Xbox 360 and PS3 technical specifications and what is or is not "realtime," I would already be doing it.) I'm also not a fan of conspiracy theories or cognitive dissonance, and when you mix all of those factors, I couldn't believe what was unfolding.
Drinky's thread SHOULD have died on the first page -- could it be any more obvious that it was a joke? Along those lines, my first comment in the "THURSDAYTON" thread was a complete joke, but when the thread started to gain momentum, I decided to play along. I tried to follow Drinky's lead and make vague or ambiguous statements to stoke the fires; the only thing I posted which wasn't literally factual was that Nintendo is reading this board. (It's still a pretty reasonable guess -- obviously I don't have any proof, but I'd be STUNNED if a major corporation wasn't scanning these types of boards for intelligence.) Again, my participation should have been another major red flag to anyone paying attention -- I'm the short definition of a casual gamer, have zero connections to the "industry" outside of GAF, and barely hang out on the Gaming Forum as it is.
When I checked the forum last night before going to bed, I noticed that the thread had COMPLETELY blown up -- as in, "rapidly approaching 1000 posts." Reading over the various pages, it seemed that there were three major groups forming:
1) People who "got it," and were playing along with the joke. Early on, most of the people posting in the thread were in this group, and there was some genuinely funny stuff. I think you are all being too hard on Raoul Duke, by the way -- he was being a bit over the top since I think he assumed that NO ONE could possibly take this seriously enough to be fooled. He was FAR more elegant than the people posting obviously fake "news."
2) People who were completely fooled. I mean, there are no words, right?
3) People who suspected it was a joke, but still halfway expected it to be true. Not to be overly harsh, but it REALLY bothers me that this group seems to be the largest of the three. Even when your rational mind was telling you that this whole thing was BS, you were still trying to rationalize that it MIGHT be true. At the risk of being pedantic, it's that same kind of mental tightrope that justifies a lot of nonsense: "She hasn't returned any of my last five calls asking for a date, but she's probably just busy." "There's no evidence for WMDs in Iraq, but Hussein is a threat anyway." You get the point.
But again, this nonsense has been going on all week. I mean, what the hell was that Aries bullshit? Some random guy makes a bunch of predictions, some of them seem to be true, and now he's all-knowing about Nintendo? Please. (The same thing applies to Johnny Nighttrain, I suppose.) A classic technique used by investment advisors is to make a prediction about a certain stock going up to half of his clients...and make a prediction about the same stock going DOWN to the other half. When the stock actually moves, he apologizes to the "wrong" half...and pulls the same trick on the "correct" half. By the time he's made 4-5 predictions, he has a small group of clients who will believe him forever since he was SO right before.
So, like I said -- this was performance art of the highest order, and a case study in cognitive dissonance and wish fulfillment. You derived 1500+ posts out of two words from Drinky Crow, despite all factual evidence and logic to the contrary. If you think this was just a troll or a practical joke, then you're really missing the point -- I mean, it didn't just happen on GAF, right?
As for the people calling for Drinky to be banned, you seriously need to get a life. If you're honestly angry about all this, then you must be irony impaired or something, since this is one of the funniest -- and yet most insightful -- threads in GAF history. Whether he stays or goes isn't going to do a damn thing to disprove his point.
