From the silly and almost defiant (or is that plaintive), where the post title comes from, to the far more serious (Larisa struck a nerve with this one), from the individual to the cultural, I’m struck on occasion by the human element of these online games.
Who knows what private pains people deal with in life? (Ardol speaks eloquently to Larisa’s comments thataway.) Games can be ways to escape trouble just as easily as they can be ways to find trouble. They might be a meeting place for people who might not otherwise have the chance to be friends in any other venue. (Big Bear Butt has a heart to match his largish ursine physique.) They might be the last thing that makes someone happy. (The game mattered to Ezra, though interestingly, mostly to spend time with his distant father.) Games matter, sometimes in the most curious ways. (Wolfshead’s tribute to Red Shirt Guy.) The community matters.
People are sometimes the worst part of online gaming, but are most often the best part.
Those are people out there. Not rejects, not NPCs or henchmen, not morons or slackers. People who deserve common courtesy and might just be in pain of one sort or another. Call me a bleeding heart conservative, but please remember that even in the most fantastic and fictional of games, people are still people.
Treat them well.
Tish Tosh Tesh 
Great Great post Tesh. I am at work now so I can only glance over the links but I intend to explore them further when I get home.
For some time now I have been troubled by sites like Elitist Jerks and Gevlon’s Greedy Goblin blog. These sites promote a success at all costs philosophy which conveniently dismisses the fact that the players they dismiss as “losers” or “morons and slackers” are humans too with all of the rich complexity that implies. This philosophy is deeply objectionable but because their methods work (in the narrow sense of achieving certain in game goals) it is tempting to fall into the trap of believing that the philosophy must be right.
Your post is a welcome rebuttal of that philosophy and everything it stands for.
“bleeding heart conservative” That one I’ve never heard. Liberal, yes, but never conservative. Maybe you’re secretly a socialist.
More seriously, I agree. It’s strange that we may be quick to reject the physical objectification of people, but too often we do the exact same process with pieces of a mind.
*chuckle*
I wondered who might catch that, Klep. Just my little tweak to the language. Conservatives aren’t all big business corporatocrat goblins, just like liberals aren’t all dope smoking useful idiots (as Yuri Bezmenov might say).
It really is easy to treat other people as NPCs sometimes, and I think that’s a sorry state of affairs. I am saddened by Gevlon’s attitudes, whether or not they are fabricated. Not only do gamers catch a lot of flak from nongamers, but even from our supposed peers. Not that I want a Soviet-like bloc of lemming flavored solidarity, but we could stand to be far less judgmental.
Thanks for the comments, guys. Sometimes it’s amazing how far a little kindness and common courtesy can go.
Tangentially relevant article:
http://www.designersnotebook.com/Columns/104_Selling_Hate/104_selling_hate.htm
I try to think about this as I encounter people in the game who might appear annoying. I think of a story that I read in some classic self-improvment book. Hm… Might have been Dale Carnegie actually, I’m not sure. Anyway. The story was about someone who sat on a bus and was annoyed at a father who just let his children roam about, disturbing the passangers, not keeping them under supervision. He complained about it to the man, who answered that, yes, of course he should look after them better, but at the same time told the story that his wife – their mother – had just died at the hospital and he reckoned that he as well as he kids were at loss how to deal with it. That changed the perspective.
It’s a story that has stuck with me. Things aren’t always what you think and there might be circumstances around the people in the game that would explain their behaviour if you knew.
[…] off is a plain and brief post by Tesh over at Tish Tosh Tesh. He’s reminding us that people are well, people. Sounds simple, right? He might be preaching to the choir when he says that we should all remember […]
Thanks, Larisa. Sometimes it’s amazing what a little perspective can lend to a situation… and how often we ignore it. Thanks again for writing that article as well. It’s a necessary aspect of these games, I think, to play well with others and to care about them.
I think these games relying on “Oh, you’ll just bump into people and because your playing the game, you’ll become friends” isn’t great (and is probably a nerd phalacy). I think mmorpgs would do well to start introducing somehow people who have similar real life interests. Instead of pug like slamming people together who have no, or are aware of no common ground between them and so they lose human understanding.
Hope that wasn’t a combative sounding post.
@Callan S: I can see the reason for your suggestion but at the same time I’m not sure I support it. One of the amazing things about mmo:s is that you can meet and become friends with people of different ages and from a different cultural context, people I’d never dream of speaking to in real ilfe since we’re leading so different lives. And that makes my life so much richer! If I only met people who were like me, one of the big benefits of playing the game would get lost to me.
At the same time, Spinks noted recently that it might be good to have queues for dungeoneering based on interest or intent (which can change); the hardcore “gogogo” crowd, the “smell the roses” crowd, the “completionist” crowd and the “social” crowd run dungeons for different reasons. Letting players self-select by interest could smooth over some of the PUG nightmares.
It’s interesting; do we want to meet and befriend people who have shared real life interests or shared in-game interests? Maybe both? Maybe intentionally mix it up with people that are different? I think there’s room for all of the above, but not necessarily the tools to make those happen.
@Tesh: Oh, yeah, I think such a system for LFD might be good too, and I think I’ve even blogged about it before. But that’s something different from putting together people who share real life interests. I think that kind of actions takes away a bit of the charm with WoW. It’s a part of the same mindset as RealID/Facebook integration. WoW as a social platform. I don’t deny that there are social sides of WoW and I enjoy them a lot. But when you make it into some kind of dating site for people with similar real life background/interests, I think you’re missing the point with an MMORPG
Larísa, I really speak from a game first priority, socialising second mindset. I’m interested in playing the game in question, rather than it being something I just do as merely a means to the end of meeting new people or socialising. I’m inclined to think your ‘meet anyone from anywhere’ is merely an accidental by product/edge case. It’s not what the activity is about. Or perhaps I’m wrong on that for certain mmorpgs, it’d be good if mmorpg devs clarified that (but hey, if they leave it ambiguous and pretend to be all things to all players, they make more dosh, so they wont clarify).
I will say that when I played wow, there was no LFG tool. What’s there today is as a dramatic a change to social management as much a dramatic change as if wow changed to first person twitch gaming. There was a massive change to human resource management, instead of the laze fair whatever happens, happens method which existed when I played.
Tesh, I think a slider between gogogo and smell the roses, for example, would be better. It lines you up with people at a similar position on the slider. As either extreme seems not what I’d go for. Otherwise it seems an effective method of aligning people so they end up enjoying play rather than clashing with how others enjoy play. Though not really aligned at a personal level of any sort.
No, this confuses me – it’s making it a social platform/dating site to align people of similar interest, but to make sure this ‘make friends with people I just wouldn’t talk to in real life’ isn’t at all a social platform/dating thing? I think they both are, as much as each other.
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