FISCHER: This story is developing

By Travis Fischer, tkfischer@charlescitypress.com

Last week at the Napoli Comicon in Italy, game industry veteran Yuji Horii was in a fairly typical panel discussion, aided by an interpreter to translate his Japanese into Italian.

At some point during the panel Horii, through his interpreter, seemed to have inadvertently let loose a shocking announcement. Namely, Horii appeared to accidentally confirm that Square Enix was working on a remake of “Chrono Trigger,” one of the most seminal JRPGs ever developed.

Now, I’m going to spoil the ending to this story. There is no “Chrono Trigger” remake in the works. Or at least none that has been publicly announced. The apparent slip-up was a misunderstanding between Horii and his translator and nothing more.

But nobody else in the room knew that at the time.

Instead, within seconds of the so-called reveal word of the seemingly huge scoop started to spread across the globe. I myself, sitting half a world away, happened upon a Reddit post somebody made while the panel was still going on. Ground floor of what would become the biggest breaking news in gaming of the day.

Within minutes, independent reports from others watching the panel started to crop up, each adding a weight of legitimacy to the story. It didn’t take long after that for the gaming news sites to catch wind, struggling to separate the facts they could independently verify from those coming from a unanimous guy on the internet.

A few hours later video of the panel had been released to the masses and it was quickly confirmed that the so-called announcement was a false alarm.

Still, those few hours offered a rare real-time glimpse of how information spreads, how news develops out of it, and how people react to changing narratives.

Some were skeptical, immediately dismissing the validity of the announcement due to the un-established source. After all, a random guy on the internet can say anything for any reason. There should be a hesitancy in taking things at face value.

Others were all too ready to jump on board the hype train. While nobody in the moment could independently verify the claim, it was easy to confirm that Horii was scheduled for that panel at that time so that portion of it was believable enough. And, to be fair, with the way the industry is, a “Chrono Trigger” remake in some form or another does feel more like a “when” than an “if.”

Over the course of those couple of hours it looked like the skeptics would have to eat crow, only to eventually be validated for reasons they themselves never anticipated.

What I find interesting, though, is that both the skeptics and the believers were wrong.

Contrary to the skeptic’s suspicions, the random anonymous Reddit user post breaking news was both honest and accurate. The translator did say it and it was perfectly reasonable for somebody to take that at face value and race to the internet to post the biggest breaking gaming news of the week.

On the other hand, the random anonymous Reddit user didn’t know what he didn’t know. Which, in this case, was enough Japanese to catch the difference between what Horii said and what his translator put out. So as plausible at it seemed at the time, the ultimate truth ended up being something very different.

The only people who were right about the whole thing were the ones who opted to simply wait and see how it all shook out before making a judgment.

It seems to be a little known secret these days that you can say to yourself, “I do not have enough information to develop an opinion on this topic,” and then just wait for a developing story to finishing developing.

Things like this are why I like working for a twice-weekly paper.

It’s hard enough to sort out what you know, what you know you don’t know, and what you don’t know you don’t know without trying to put out all possible information as it’s happening.

Our collective impatience demands it, but 99% of the time there’s little actual value in breaking news. It may be exciting and spectacular, but when it comes to informing people, up-to-the-second updates on the big breaking news of the day can be counter-productive.

Imagine a world where everybody in that Italian conference room waited for the end of that panel and had an opportunity to double-check what that translator had said. None of this drama would have happened and I’d have to come up with something else to write about.

I guess there are pros and cons.

– Travis Fischer is a news writer for the Charles City Press and doesn’t have the knees for jumping to conclusions.