"It won't work."

"It will work." Garrett Wyland was one of a scarce few game company CEOs who was equally credible in either cargo shorts and a tank top or a $3000 suit. At the moment, he was impeccably outfitted in the latter, as he was due to make a presentation to a room full of investment bankers within the hour. Running alongside was a surprisingly un-burnt-out developer from the user interface team. His job was to create on-screen controls players could use to configure Fairly Unusual's games.

"You can't give that many options to the players! They'll get confused."

Garrett turned the corner, walking swiftly along the carpeted corridor towards the gleaming glass-enclosed conference room where he was due to make his presentation. He had authorized a ridiculous lease for the crappy building his exploding company previously occupied, but Wyland and his accountants learned their lesson quickly. If your bank balance is worldwide news, it's tough to negotiate reasonable costs for basics. So Wyland did one of his trademark hype for value deals and scored one of the most prestigious office complexes in the Los Angeles area. From the south side of the building, the Santa Monica beaches divided some of the most expensive restaurants in the world from the sparkling blue Pacific. The inviting waters stretched to the horizon.

"Players thrive on too many options. Not only will they understand them, they'll take the time to meticulously try each one and compare it to all the others. Then they'll write a 20,000 word blog post to tell everyone else about it. Half the stuff we know about these games we learn from the players three months after release."

"They'll need help."

"They'll write their own. How do you think we make these games profitable in the first place? Any money we don't spend writing rules we can spend on TV commercials." Wyland handed the user interface production notes back to the developer and swerved into the conference room. As he made his way to the head of the table, he passed more than sixty people, including investors, vendor representatives and most of his own senior staff.

"Ladies and gentlemen, today's subject is this." He picked up a dry erase marker and wrote the word "ambition" on the board. "We're not going to follow market wisdom. Not with what we've got riding on this project."

"Contributors won't be happy," Brody Gray replied as he poured yet another soda over ice in an expensive water glass. "Future stockholders won't be happy. By all indications, they're looking forward to a traditional massively multiplayer experience."

"Contributors are never happy," Wyland replied. "The first rule of crowdfunding is this: The only real appeal is in sending in money so you have a ticket to complain for 18 months. Stockholders don't care about anything as long as their shares go up. Half of each side will gripe no matter what we produce. Let's just presume that's the cost of doing business going into the backstretch."

"It's going to present us with some publicity issues," Janice Powell added. "The last thing we need is the entire Internet complaining about how much our game sucks."

"After what we've endured over the last two weeks, that publicity would be like sitting poolside at the Miss America pageant hotel." Nobody was entirely sure who said that, but more than a few heads nodded wearily.

Wyland raised his voice a bit so everyone could hear. "Folks, one thing I am going to cultivate with an almost obsessive consistency in this project is controversy. I want the Internet to complain from the moment this game is released until our players are all admitted to senior living communities. I want them complaining about this game side by side in their adjustable convalescent beds during applesauce hour. When one of them dies, I want their 99-year-old best friend to be sitting front row during the service muttering about their unresolved arguments on character balance. Understand? I want this game to piss off the world, because pissed-off people are mounted knights in the kingdom of word of mouth."