Beer battering Fish

[davidn]

[Title stolen from Twitter and I’m sorry]

There’s some sort of war between a Beer and a Fish going on just now and I know little about either one of them so I can’t comment on who is the greater-proportioned of the two arses in this argument, but the whole thing brings to mind just the… ridiculous immaturity of the Internet.

The trouble is, on the whole... gamers are idiots. I’m sorry, but they are. I’ve spent a lot of my life doing what I can to disprove the “gamers are shut-ins with no idea how to interact socially" stereotype, and it feels like most of the Internet is going a long way to justify it. This is a world in which you can adjust the weapon reload times in a popular game by a tenth of a second and you get death threats! Even after releasing a low-key game for people to enjoy I got a few emails from people who could neither spell nor type that simply alluded to how bad my graphics were or that $5 was an outrageous capitalist price to pay for a game.

Even outside abuse that creators suffer, I saw an article a few days ago about someone logging into his wife’s PS3 account by accident and playing on that, and the article and especially the comments were… enlightening, to say the least. There’s a thread down there somewhere that predictably says “But EVERYONE gets talked to like this, it’s your thin skin, that’s how gamers work" (in much cruder ways than I’ve just paraphrased it). First of all, that’s untrue, I’ve never seen anything like the instant abuse that women get for daring to be part of this hobby - and second, why does that justify it! Why do people in these communities regard comments like “go and kill yourself" to be par for the course instead of completely unacceptable and borderline psychotic?

I suppose - like a lot of the community now seems to be - I’m just sick of people saying whatever the hell vitriol they like about anyone on the Internet and expecting it to be okay. And for them always blaming the people who want them to be civil to one another for taking some sort of moral high ground (an interesting phrase, that - it’s used exclusively to shame people when they’re right).

As for Fez II’s revival - I give it a week.

Comments

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

If someone isn't able to use grammer well, then they likely aren't worth listening to. .

[premchaia_pre4]

Your rainbow is suspicious. Friend Computer thinks you are trying to confuse the matter of your security clearance.

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

Isn't that what I should be doing??

[davidn]

Unfortunately I would tend to agree with that.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

It was "beer battered fish" ;) Like the food!

Yeah, the weird thing in this story is that they were both gross and horrible to each other.... but if it gets people talking about the problem in more general terms, then great!

"You could benefit from having a thicker skin about these things" is fairly reasonable advice for one person to give to another who's being bullied....... but the idea that bullies would say that about dealing with their own behaviour...... what kind of weird compulsion is this, that they can't see anything strange about that idea?

It's definitely made me think very carefully about being an 'auteur'..... I'll never stop making stuff, and the idea of making something without sharing it has always driven me crazy.... but there might be something to be said for publishing art anonymously after all. (Or at least, through an alias.) Or at least, not socializing in the same place that you do your work!

I dunno. Have things always been this bad and the internet has just made the problem more visible? Is this a product of some societies and/or subcultures more than others, or is it just human nature? Can something be done to mitigate it, either at the source, or before it reaches its target?

Blah, just thinking out loud, sorry. :)

[premchaia_pre4]

Never underestimate the psychological attack multiplier of doing someone harm and then attributing it to someone else, or them, or no one at all, or rationalizing away that if you hadn't, someone else would have. “You're just not adapting to the environment [by not giving in].” “Oh well, that's life.” “It wouldn't have happened if you'd just kept your mouth shut.” “Now look what you made me do to you.”

That said, disallowing “you seem to be overreacting” entirely allows the opposite bogosity where any critical opinion can be immediately silenced, in the general case (albeit that's not necessarily applicable in this case).

These are partly tied to the fragility of agency in the inherently-coercive physical world in general.

There's another element where many-to-one non-peer-visibility communication channels create a non-self-regulating funnel with nonlinear effects: a million sources can independently decide that their individual piece of hate mail is small enough that the target should be able to handle it. Certainly peer visibility is at least very incomplete over channels like Twitter.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

The funnel thing is definitely a problem, but the inverse is also true-- in a comments thread where you can see tons of people piling hate onto someone, adding a little more venom might seem like a harmless drop in the bucket to someone looking to blow off some steam.

[premchaia_pre4]

Yes, or you get the mob effect, which is the opposite-mode source of the same thing.

[davidn]

Blaming the victim for having feelings is one of the most damaging things that people can do... though it's impossible to tell where to draw the line, what's unreasonable to be upset about and what isn't. My own Internet life got a lot easier, it's sad to say, when I just told myself that everyone I didn't know is very, very stupid by default. (Experience backs this up - I've spent at least ten years on the Internet meeting thousands of people and about twelve of them aren't idiots.)

To let them stop you from creating and releasing things is to let the culture of hideousness win, though. I've never even thought about stopping - you have to concentrate on the good comments, even though getting a single bad comment feels like the most damning and awful thing ever. I really want people to know who I am, as well as what I make.

I think the problem is particularly apparent in communities - like furries and gamers - that attract... people who are sometimes rejected by real-life society for what are occasionally actually really justifiable reasons.