Monday, May 8, 2017

Modern Corporate Culture Lacks Accountability

The modern corporation in the United States is an institution designed to shift responsibility away from itself and stifle competition in the process.  They are entities created so that individuals cannot be held accountable for their criminal deeds while providing tax breaks.

Recently, I’ve been going back and forth with Bethesda Tech Support.  When I modded Skyrim Special Edition, I would frequently encounter a bug where all save games would be marked as corrupt, dialogue options would go missing, and text in books and menus would not be displayed.  It didn’t matter what I did, what mods I removed or reinstalled, the result was always the same.

After consulting other players on the Nexus Mods forum and seeing that this was a common problem for many players, I contacted Bethesda’s tech support.  What I wanted to hear from them is that they are aware of the issue and that they are working on a fix for it.

Instead, I got what was probably an automated response that basically said mods are supported by them and that I should play without mods.  Never mind that their game allows you to add mods in game, that they have done so intentionally, and that they encourage players to mod their games.

Now, I don’t expect Bethesda to support player mods.  But I expect them to support the mechanism that allow mods to be added into the game.  And this bug I was experiencing was clearly not mod related but game engine related.

Try telling that to the minimum wage employees who make up Bethesda Tech Support.  All I was asking was that they pass on this information to the development teams and let them know that there is a serious bug in their game engine which needs further investigation.

That’s the reasonable, responsible approach to this issue as far as I’m concerned.  I had hoped that I got a response along the lines of we’re looking into it, be patient.  Instead I get blamed for breaking a game using the very features they’ve developed.

This is the larger attitude of modern corporate culture.  Don’t take responsibility for your failings, blame others, and never, under any circumstances, allow the customer to be right in any way, shape, or form.  Customers are merely resources to be exploited in order to fill the pockets of the C-level executives and doling out less than satisfactory salaries and wages to their underlings.

I know that this appears to be anti-free market, but it’s not.  It is anti-Corporatism where the corporations, mostly the banking sector, own just about everything, including your elected officials.  Anything you have an outstanding debt on, including your home and car, is actually owned by a corporation somewhere, which they’ve made into an investment scheme and subsequently buy and sell on.

This is a culture that needs to be overridden with a more sensible one.  Unfortunately, my game is still broken, though I found a workaround on my own that works to my satisfaction, and greater corporate still operates from a stance of hostilities for its consuming assets.