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

[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.