Thinking Outside the Box:
The TOBYs

By Paul "Villam" Steed

Anything I say comes from me and represents my personal opinions, views and subtle plans for influencing society. Read, ruminate over and remember at your own risk. If I teach you something and it helps, teach someone else.

s I mentioned in last week’s TOTB, I want to recognize some individuals and groups of individuals recognizable in the community from 1998 that think both outside and inside the box. Since Hollywood has catchy names for their awards like 'Oscars' and 'Emmys', I'd like to call these awards 'Totbys' and 'Titbys' respectively. Effective but not too terribly creative I agree.

First, let's start with those out-of-the-box types - the Totbys. The nominees in the Single Person category of this probably never prestigious award were:

loonyboi
Mynx
John Carmack
Melanie Cambron
Misanthropic Bitch

And the winner is....

Mynx

loonyboi is just plain maniacal so he doesn't really know the difference between a box or a sphere. John is really quite indefinable so I think the judges were only trying to score points with him. Melanie is quite valid a nominee since she gave a name to this column. MB is very tenable as a paragon of out-of-box-thinking (read her site sometimes), but really...Mynx is the hands-down winner. Her column not only predates TOTB, her words of gritty wisdom and elocutionary acumen help inspire TOTB and makes her the First Lady of thinkers outside the box everywhere. Heed her, kids. She knows what she is talking about.

The nominations for a group of people that thinks outside the box were:

id Software
PC Gamer UK
Valve
Epic
PC Powerplay

The winner is...

PC Powerplay wins because they simply rock. They report gaming news and gaming 'stuff' with an opinion. The fact they're an Australian gaming magazine may help but then again that's why PC Gamer UK was nominated - gaming magazines originating outside the US are better reads. As far as the other nominees go, unfortunately id had to be disqualified due to a lack of judging impartiality. Valve has enough sunshine currently being blown up their collective behinds, and Epic was just thrown in for the hell of it.

So. On to those myopic, enclosed types. The nominees for individuals who deserve a Titby for their actions in 1998 were hard to pick since there seemed to be so many. But the following few have distinguished themselves by making it to the top of the list unlike cream rising and more like oil floating:

Andrew Smith
Todd Porter
Kevin Murphy
Johnny Wilson
Kenneth Starr

And the supreme loser is...

Andrew Smith

I mean do I need to expound on why Andy is the best example a single person could give for thinking within a box? I'd even wager he looks square, has a square head and lives in a square house. This guy was an amazing poster child for box-underside thinkers across the globe. Wanker.

Todd Porter is more of a self-centered, self-delusional than a thinker within a box but hey, it fits. Kevin Murphy, the editor of the Mushroom deserves my ire because I'm of Hawaiian decent and he's not funny. Johnny Wilson's Titby nomination was covered in-depth last week, and Kenneth Starr is just plain stupidly boxed in by his own ambition and amply documented hypocrisy.

Finally the group that deserves a Titby for thinking within the box is Digimation. I threw out the other nominees because this entire award ceremony was created just for them. Digimation sucks. Period. They care only about one thing: money. They say that an employee will cop the same attitude as his boss and that corporate identity is flavored and shaped by the employees. Well guess what, Dave? You've trained and coached your people well.

If you ever had the urge to follow the blind request of some obscure internet personality that for some inexplicable reason was given his own column, then please do the following: Never Buy Another Product From Digimation, Inc. They so thoroughly demonstrate as a company the inability to think outside a box that I am amazed they have any customer base. Inane. Insipid. Incredibly unbelievable, Digimation is about nothing but the bottom line and that line is nowhere near their customers.

So, kids, thanks for tuning in and I wish you nothing but the best of luck in this eve of the millennium. I've got a feeling it's going to be a great year (I just wish I could get all that Nostradamus crap out of my head).

Take care and please open your eyes to the world and life around you on a regular basis.

ps

- Paul Steed is an incredibly opinionated 3D modeller for id Software. We begged him to switch to decaf. Honest