I’ve ranted about rumors before, but today I want to take a much more narrow look at a very specific kind of rumor.  I’m going to take a look a the type of rumor I call, an Indisputable Rumor.  I want to analyze how it’s crafted, look at some reasons why it might be crafted, and how to have some fun by making up my own rumor!

Your ordinary garden variety rumors are fairly easy to dispel.  They’re typically something like “Mr. X said <insert what he said>” which leaves the possibility of walking up to Mr. X and asking him point blank “Did you say that?”  At that point the rumor is immediately turned into fact, or fiction (unless Mr. X works for the PR department, in which case he’d likely say, “We neither confirm nor deny rumors.” followed by a canned pitch for their products.)

Indisputable rumors don’t have such a cut and dry confirmation/debunking process.  These are the rumors that people could yell from the rooftops and frankly, all you could do would be to yell back because, even though they haven’t proved they’re right, you’re completely unable to prove they’re wrong.

Read on for an example of an indisputable rumor and learn how to make up your own!

An example of this type of rumor would be: “Metal Gear Solid 4 is coming to Xbox 360 12-14 months after release on the PS3.”  If you look at the wealth of actual information on the topic, it can’t be proven, or disproven. 

The group of people who are sure the rumor was false, will quickly point out that Konami has said they are not working on MGS4 for the 360 and Kojima himself said he isn’t working on a 360 version. 

Those sure that the rumor was true point out that they may not be working on it yet or that they may in fact have a completely different team working on it.  When you add in the fact that this rumor can’t be proven wrong until up to 14 months after MGS4 is released, you start to see how rumors can be crafted in such a way that they’ll linger around for a very long time. 

So we can better identify indisputable rumors, I’ll attempt to outline some of the characteristics I’ve identified.

• While not entirely necessary, the “good” rumors, always have a tidbit of truth or something people strongly desire.

• Specific people are likely not named or if they are named, they’re not as integral to the validity of the rumor, as it may first appear .

• They are almost always grand in scale, (be it a large software title or something to do with an actual hardware platform) but rarely do they pertain to unimportant stuff people wouldn’t care about.

• Rumors have a long time frame so that whether they are ultimately proven true, or false, people will no longer care, or remember in the first place. 

• They sometimes contain, what could be considered unbelievable specs and/or revolutionary features that may “never see the light of day.”

• They may focus on partnerships or licensing deals that multiple companies are involved in, complicating the ability to ever see any freely available information on the topic. 

Keeping all of this in mind, I’ll make up one right now with absolutely minimal effort on my part. I assure you, this is as “off the cuff” as it gets.

  “Samsung and Microsoft have formed a partnership to bring an extremely powerful portable gaming and multimedia device to market but the project is indefinitely on hold due to licensing issues between Samsung and Motorola.“

You cannot definitively disprove that.  Sure, there are individuals who know whether or not that’s true, but they don’t have the means, or likely the authority, to speak out and undeniably disprove that rumor.  If enough people catch on to a rumor like this and start spreading it, before you know it, you’re likely to find it popping up in a lot of unexpected places.

Your assignment is to craft your own indisputable rumor and to post it to at least three different online communities.  Work out a couple rough drafts on your own before posting (and don’t give away your secret plan!)  Make sure your final draft gets posted in the Sarcastic Gamer News forum thread for this article and I’ll dig something special out of the Sarcastic Gamer “goodie-bag” for the best rumor produced.