I started this post about a year ago today and set it aside when I thought perhaps that I was being a bit harsh on the pranks people pull on website readers during the wonderful time that was April Fool’s Day. Used to be many, many years ago (or so the great and powerful sages in the Wikipedia tell me) April Fool’s was for young whippersnappers to play pranks on their neighbors and their elders to their heart’s delight. The key, though, was fact that these were practical jokes. Practical as in meaning that they were actual pranks and jokes played by using the surroundings and actual means to conduct these shenanigans.
Perhaps it’s my inner curmudgeon speaking, but you really cannot call the latest incarnation of early spring malfeasance “practical joking”. Most of it comes on the internet, through legitimate internet sites devoted to news and updates of a particular subject (news, sports, game updates etc. etc.) running a false story that is just convincing enough to be real to the eyes of the unwary. Now, some folks do this convincingly enough or are clever enough for these infractions to be overlooked. Blizzard Entertainment, for example, has a long history of posting April Fool’s day shenanigans that is both fun and clever. This time around, at least on the Starcraft II front, it was a base that transforms into an ultimate unit laden with Transformers references. All in good fun right? I would tend to agree. Along the same vein but take a look at Starcraft Legacy. Clearly you can get the sense that I am jonesing for some information about Blizzards upcoming Starcraft II, which is fine, I have no shame in admitting that I am a gamer-nerd. For the last two weeks SCL has been running a pair of countdown timers set about a week apart. The first expired at the end of last week and revealed a rather disappointing thing. The Legacy was apparently gearing up for a large update of their website format. Fine. Countdown timer seems a little overboard, but whatever. Then we (those people that read this site) find out that the folks at SCL can’t actually deliver on their promise to have the next version of their website up and running after they have built up a certain sense of anticipation amongst their viewers. Lame.
Then we have the second timer which the community surrounding Starcraft Legacy was a bit more excited about as they had figured out what the first timer was in relation to. Buzz abounded. Was it an announcement of the long awaited Starcraft II beta? An in depth look at the campaign? Then Wednesday came and went. The announcement? A contest to possibly get a SC2 beta key. Sure it wasn’t as exciting as an announcement of a beta starting or anything quite that sexy, but it was Starcraft II news surely. Then the bombshell. It was all an elaborate, and might I add rather lame, April Fool’s prank. Not only was there no beta, but the lame contest that they dreamt up was also a misdirect. Perhaps the website administration felt they were being clever and subtle, aping the way that Blizzard typically does big game announcements with rotating title screens and countdown timers, but every once and a great while the boys at Blue actually have something to show for their cocktease.
April Fool’s Day in a relatively minor segment of even the gamer internet not good enough for you? Fine how about a “reputable” print media source? Take this article which originally ran in the online edition of the Wisconsin State Journal: Wisconsin to Forfeit Victory against Cal-Poly for Illegal Goalposts. Given the misadventures of Wisconsin football in the last decade, one can be forgiven for taking the sports section of a major local newspaper at their word. My mistake. Reading it for a second time, I can see where it turns from a logical story of a sports team gone wrong into a comedy of errors that anyone with half of a brain should be able to spot from miles away, but the major problem with that was; this is a newspaper. I want to get the news from this item, nothing more nothing less. I still am mostly against the idea of having opinion columns in papers; just the facts ma’am.
So we climb the internet tree from the gamer-nerd to the sports-nerd, to the guy who just wants to know what is going on in his neighborhood. It is a shame that one cannot trust the output of many fine sites during the early part of April, because it just puts another nail in the coffin of getting serious information from these people. Even if the topic is genial, like a video game, the information should be as accurate as possible. There are enough hysterias in the would wrongly created by misinformation, why help.
So please join with me next year and avoid publishing or distributing lame rumors about games, sports, public figures, etc. unless that is your business plan. Let’s put an end to Internet Jackass Day once and for all.
