RE: [HOE] [OT] RIP John Wick - Hoax

["Darrin Bright" <darrin@neobright.net>]

> OK, just who the heck is John Wick anyway? I don't travel much in the
> online rpg circles, so I've never heard of him. Just curious.

John Wick is a game designer/writer. He's well known for writing several
award-winning RPGs, most notably the original Legend of the Five Rings and
7th Seas. Two years ago he got a little disgruntled with other people making
money off of his blood sweat & tears and designed his own self-published RPG
called Orkworld (and wrote a column about the experience on Gaming Outpost).
I think he barely broke even on the endeavor...

He's also well-known for having a very abrasive online personality (a little
like Dennis Leary but not as funny with heavy overtones of Self-Absorbed
Misunderstood Artistic Genius complex). He  tends to advocate a very
heavy-handed GM style and whine about things like Story-Driven Themes,
Character Development, and the usual sort of nonsense that gets the panties
of die-hard munchkins like myself all twisted up. Except when he starts
talking about characters he'd like to play, which invariably sound like a
munchkin's wet dream. He has sort of a nasty love-hate codependency thing
with some of the online forums like Gaming Outpost and RPG.Net.

For example, just before Orkworld was finished, Wick went onto Gaming
Outpost with the accusation that someone had sent him a virus that had
trashed any file on his hard drive that had "ork" in it anywhere, destroying
9 months of work. He made several posts, the most memorable of which he
threatened dire consequences and swore that he would find the perpetrator
and administer to him the "Black Dildo of Justice".

However, he never really explained: Viruses for Macs are extremely rare, and
the odds of someone knowing how to design one to specifically target him
seems extremely unlikely unless he'd been unfortunate enough to poop in
Steve Jobs cornflakes. The virus apparently trashed his backups as well...
so either it was running in the background on his system for at least 9
months, or he was careless enough to try and restore from his backups BEFORE
cleaning the virus off his system, nevermind being careless enough to not
run a virus scan for 9 months. When the online RPG community asked Wick to
explain some of the details, he disappeared and stopped posting (under the
pretense of avoiding further virus attacks), but leading many people to
believe that the virus was either a hoax or some self-inflicted problem with
faulty hardware.

I have no idea why this might encourage someone to engineer a hoax about his
death... but the RPG community has some very... *unique* people in it.