Over the weekend the internet’s own Phil Fish canceled the follow up to his smash hit indie game Fez. In a statement on the Polytron web page that reads:

FEZ II is cancelled. i am done. i take the money and i run. this is as much as i can stomach. this is isn’t the result of any one thing, but the end of a long, bloody campaign. you win.

The news strikes me as kind of sad and sadly inevitable. The inevitability that eventually the internet would publicly break someone and we as a society would lose something.

In a seemingly divine twist of fate, Indie Game: The Movie, the film that featured Mr. Fish, released a downloadable content pack (in 2013 the world is such an awesome place) which dealt with internet trollsmanship and how it affected Team Meat. Edmund McMillen, the designer and artist of Super Meat Boy, got so stressed out by internet hate that he basically went Amish and stopped reading about himself and his games. Tommy Refenes the game's programmer and Senior Lady Mac’er, stopped work and had to close down the free “Meat World” service that allowed user created levels for their infamously difficult and addictive million selling Super Meat Boy because of an internet troll.

Imagine that. Two grown men, successful in a field they love, had to abandon something they were passionate about because of the toll it took on their souls. That is chilling. It is so hard to make a dream come true in its self. There is nothing about programming a video game that prepares you for people trying to hurt you.

Phil Fish makes games and has opinions. Disagree or agree and move on. If you feel very strongly, disagree with the point publicly or in person but stay on topic. Disagree without being disagreeable to borrow a hackneyed expression. That bit of advice applies to life and is not exclusive to Phil Fish or game developers. You will never be objective if you think you are arguing with Satan. Then again I am applying rational thinking to irrational people. In those special cases I use a powerful tool I call “Fuck’em.”

What makes the Phil Fish episode so strange to me is that this time the disparaging remarks came from a “professional.” I put the quotes around professional because Im not sure of his profession. It doesn’t appear to be journalism the way he called out two prominent developers for being ‘hipsters’ and ‘toss pots’ (very classy move on the latter sir.) Now we may lose Fez 2 as a community. I dont love or hate Phil Fish, Ive never met the man, but it is a shame that we lose a work of art and passion.

Part of me hopes Phil backs down and finishes the game. Part of me wants him to hold to the cancellation. There would be some tragic poetry in that. Ultimately I wish people would be more opinionated but more human. I know. I am a hopeless dreamer.