Everyone from solo bloggers (ahem!) to massive multinational corporations (Proctor & Gamble, for instance) wants to use social media for self-promotion. But like any pioneering media, a bunch of wide-spread misconceptions about social media have become common.

All you have to do is leak it. – Not these days! The top influencers in social news sites have thousands of campaigns clamoring for their attention every day. The most popular people on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter have millions of followers. Leak it at five or six key points, and it might stick… or it might get stomped on by the next story coming in one minute that’s leaking from ten key points.

Anyone can be an expert. – And everyone claims to be. Seriously, do a Google for “social media guru,” “internet marketing,” “buzz marketing experts.” Everybody says they’re these salty, veteran experts – when the entire concept didn;t even exist only a few years ago. Everybody reading this who’s old enough to drink can call themselves a social media expert, because you all are.

It’s easy. – It was easy the first ten minutes that IRC was running. Now the whole world is screaming for attention, and so of course you have to be heard over the whole wide world.

All you have to do is buy votes. – That, too, worked for about the first ten minutes. I’d say The Blair Witch Project was the last time people fell for that. Now astroturf is bleeding obvious. After 100,000 people in a row come along copy-pasting the same positive review of your product, it’s kind of telling that something’s up. Don’t have people lie, because once anybody even asks “Is this a viral marketing campaign?”, the jig is up.

It’s all one company. – Not even close! There are marketing firms that register all those accounts on Reddit and astroturf the globe for you. It takes hours of work for teams of people.

Social media is free!!! – Maybe posting an anonymous message on an image board is free, but that’s not gonna stick for more than about a minute. Most of the rest of the cheaper forms of social media marketing are called “spam.” When you get into the really advanced advertising campaigns, guess what, they all cost just as much as any other form of marketing.

All you have to be is good. – Ha ha ha ha! Hey, look at webcomics. Look at all the beautiful, smart, funny, witty webcomics there are out there, and they’re doomed to obscurity. Now think of the two most popular: XKCD (stick figures making lukewarm geek jokes) and the Oatmeal (blob figures making childish dumb jokes). They bought social media and you didn’t. You could wipe your butt and post the wad of toilet paper to a social media campaign and have the whole world worshiping it next week.

High traffic equals high sales. – Bzzzt! The most famous example that will go down in all of history is Proctor & Gamble’s Old Spice crap-fest. They spammed the Earth with that, it broke the record for the most deep-cover shills even employed on a buzz campaign. YouTube went down under demand to view the commercial. Then Old Spice sales went down 7%. Fail campaign is fail.

Popularity: 1% [?]

As MMORPGs continue to spread in popularity and just about everybody now is either playing a mini version of Facebook, joining a clan online, or buying the big games and playing them on the PC, the cliches that go along with this genre are just so ingrained that if you got rid of even a few of them, people would hardly recognize the game anymore.

Now, a lot of cliches are necessary. Buying equipment in town and fighting in the woods is one example; you can’t have monsters harassing you while you’re picking out a new sword and it certainly wouldn’t do to have shopkeepers out there in the battlefield dodging fireballs. So that’s a necessary cliche.

Instead, here are a bunch of unnecessary Role-Playing-Game cliches which are just the product of lazy thinking and copying other games. Be the first to break these when you design the next game, and you very well could be on your way to being the next SquareSoft!

Note that we will be counting the character-based RPGs (Rogue, Moria, Nethack, Angband, Dwarf Fortress) as separate most of the time. They avert most cliches simply by not having graphics at all, but they actually count as more their own genre anyway.

Females in skimpy outfits – Why does my hell-knight need 180-pound polished titanium armor but my sorceress can go into battle wearing a bikini and take less damage? Yes, I know, it’s for the sex appeal. Hey, wait a minute. How about I just surf the web for porn if I want to see sexy women (or God forbid, get to know a real life one) and keep the inch-high, 1200-pixel sprite dressed like any normal warrior would dress?

Sewers. – What, does every damn game have a level being fought in a sewer? Jesus, enough with the sewer mazes already! Let’s fight in a circus, a corral, a bakery, anyplace but a sewer!

Fire and ice magic. – Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know. You kill the ice monster with fireballs and you kill the fire monster with ice balls. Like 653,918 games just like this one. Yawn! When can we get new magic trees that have evidence that somebody, oh, I don’t know, used some imagination? Have ether magic, with Will-O-th’-Wisp, ectopasma attacks, and ghost elementals. How about a sorceress whose magic is based on music and casts different spells by singing different songs or playing different music instruments? What about instead of a plain vanilla wizard, we have an alchemist instead, whose magic effects are limited to potions and transmutation? See how easy this is?

24-hour stores – Every NPC is open round-the-clock to sell you healing potions and armor. You know, you could be daringly original here and have shop-keepers go to bed, not be open on Sunday, only come out at night, etc. Seiken Densetsu 3 and later “X of Mana” series notably proved this can work.

No basic body functions. – I realize that it would be too tacky to have Port-a-Johns scattered throughout the dungeon, but still you could have mandatory rest stops. And why not have characters regularly need to eat and drink? Nethack is the only one so far that does this.

Treasure chests everywhere – Geez, can’t you just have stuff laying on the ground? Or put away in a stash? Or in boxes in a keep? Why do the little old lady in town and the dragon down on level 50 have the exact same treasure chest? Why do they all either unlock for anybody or all require identical keys? Why do all keys disappear after one use? I mean, it’s been decades now, isn’t anybody ever going to think of any other way to give me stuff?

Creatures never use their dropped items. – This one makes so much sense, and yet the only one that approached it is Nethack. A creature that drops class 18 armor should have been harder to kill. Worms have no business hauling human-body-shaped armor. A wizard who was packing a wand of fireballs should by damned have cast a fireball or two before we killed him. And so on.

Popularity: 1% [?]

I always like to come back to the vintage arcade games in the summer. The Mame system emulator for arcade games is something I got hooked on way back during the vintage gaming series – be sure to check it out, because it was a classic series that got a lot of buzz way back when.

Downloading ROMs for original arcade games is becoming less of a gray area every year and more of something almost completely legal. With each passing year, copyrights on arcade machine ROMs expire, companies that own the intellectual property rights fold up, and fewer and fewer people frankly care. Media conglomerates have enough headache making sure nobody pirates the latest film to worry about a 25-year-old arcade game that only about 100 people know how to run anyway. Go to ROM Hustler, have fun!

But there’s a lot of hazards to having a Mame machine hobby anyway, such as:

Interface screw – This is when the controls to a game just don’t map well to a keyboard because there are too many widgets. This is a very common problem. Remember that arcade machines were free to have dual joysticks, trackballs, paddles, dials, and any other wacky interface gizmos they could gin up. These games are virtually unplayable without the original case. Notable offenders: Major Havoc, Tron.

Computers don’t have gas pedals – This is a problem with driving games, which have their own interface screw problem. Gas and brake pedals, gear shifts, steering wheels, and then some, just don’t handle naturally on a keyboard and mouse. Even though it’s possible, very few games are playable this way. Notable offenders: Road Blasters, Hard Drivin’.

Diskless wonder – Laserdisk technology has gone the way of carbon paper copies, and with it the visually stunning games from this brief period in the ’80s. This is a damn dirty shame, because those games were sweet. Notable offenders: Dragon’s Lair, Space Ace.

My finger is falling off. – Some of the easiest games to translate to the desktop computer experience are shooters. The vertical scrolling shooter, starting with Xevious on forward, involved nothing more than firing and dodging. The trouble with some of these, is that they require continuous fire, and on an arcade cabinet there was just the one button you could slap with your whole hand, but on the keyboard you’re pretty much limited to rapidly hitting Control with your left ring finger until it turns purple. Note that this did not happen with those that allowed autofire. Notable offenders: Lethal Thunder, Scramble.

Sushi Fugi Yamaguchi – Games that kept their Japanese name and never got an American translation – and even if you know a little Japanese, they’re still impenetrable. After all, the very concept of video games was practically born in Japan and most of the video game companies continue to be Japanese, so what do you expect? But this hampers you if you’re going through ROM archives looking for something to play and you have no idea what this game is about. It’s also frustrating when you’re trying to find some game you used to play but you can’t remember the name, only that it was Japanese. Notable offenders: Shisenshou Joshiryou-Hen, Keroro-Gunsou Pekopon Shinryaku Shirei … de Arimasu.

99 words for Breakout – Bounce the ball off a paddle, beat up bricks at the top of the screen. There are thousands and thousands of these, they’re all exactly the same, and they all came out with clever names to make you think they were something else until you download them and have a play. Notable offenders: Bal Cube, Bomb Bee.

Popularity: 1% [?]