“

I manned the Dragon Fantasy demo unit for a couple of minutes, doing my best to make the game look good.

“Hey — hey. Want to play my game?”

The guy sitting on the stool by the Dragon Fantasy demo table was trying to push his phone on me.

“I can, uhh, play it later.”

“You got a game? I’ll buy your game if you buy mine.”

“I, uhh–”

Here I was, wondering, “Is this worth a sale?”

The Modern Business Schools call this “cross-promotion”. One hand washes the other, one gorilla scratches the other gorilla’s back. In this case, maybe one of us was a chimpanzee, or an orangutan. God, it was probably me — I was probably either one of those less interesting sorts of apes. I wanted to be a gorilla.

That we put a word on this is creepy. I imagine a business scientist in a labcoat, his eyes shocking open with cocaine surprise: “Eureka!” Here it is: people like stuff that’s good. People tell other people about stuff they like. If someone likes a person, they will like what that person likes.

“So,” quoth the hypothetical professor, accepting the Nobel Prize For Assholes, “all we have to do is professionally pretend to like things.”

”

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