Some people game online. Some sit around tables and game
with their friends. Some people do both. Why? What the hell is going on with
the hobby that it has to happen online?
Well, first, I have a theory. it's an unfounded theory, but
one I have developed over the years from first hand observation and an
underlying pattern that seems to repeat itself over and over. This is the part where I piss off a few
people. Hate me, please do, because I know some of you will anyway.
First, there's about, oh, 3 kinds of players out there. I
mean, there's a LOT of ways to classify people and stick them into niches and
be all prejudiced about personality, we could break this down into a million
little microcosms but I haven't got the time or the patience for that kind of
stupidity, I'm not a psychologist and I don't make money for this.
1. The average player. By average I don't mean good or bad
or the person who never has an issue, just, this person is not out to take a
great big steaming shit on the game for their own self edification. They just
want to play. A good 90% of the players
out there fall into this category, they’re well adjusted, and they occasionally
get upset but they have far more fun than they let the game irritate them or
set out to irritate others. Yeah yeah
yeah, if you read my blog you know I’ve said before that like 99% of the
players online are ass hats, that’s really not true – but the few problem children
out there REALLY have an impact greater than they should because they drive off
good players, monopolize the storyteller’s time, and wind up creating an impact
disproportionate with what they should be able to affect.
2. The ass hole. This player is purely out there to screw up
the game for anyone and everyone. Maybe it's selfish, maybe it's an impulse,
maybe they really do get their jollies that way, maybe mommy and daddy just
didn't give them enough attention as kids, maybe nothing lives up to their own
inner ideas of cool, but this prick is out to ruin the game as much as
possible, period. This is the kind of douche that would actually do something
bad enough to get arrested for breaking a cyber-bullying law, as stupid as
THOSE are. Avoid them, they’ll get themselves
run off from any good game site in short order.
3. The head case. This player, ohhhh friends and neighbors, this
player really is the cream of the fucked up crop. They are out there, with
self-loathing and esteem issues and Oedipal complexes and an utter disregard
for common sense and decorum and truly troglodyte thoughts. This player gets
banned from every chat they TRY to get into until they find a repugnant, poorly
run site somewhere that lets them stay and play because they suck the admin's
e-peen. Other sites just kick them out, over and over and over. These players
are able to pare down a healthy chat in a matter of days through sheer force of
emo. (Luke! Use the Emo!)
The problems with online games come around because admins
come from those same three groups of people.
So you have admins - the people who run chat sites (and who
are usually the people skilled enough in writing code in the various languages
that are needed to run a site) that are your everyday people, who are utter ass
holes, and who are as crazy as Charles Manson eating froot loops on your front
porch. Sometimes all three in one chat! What this means is that chats are
transient places that can and do change with the blowing of the wind. Not ALL chat’s, but enough of them that the
average online player is usually leery of any new chat for a few days if not
weeks until they figure out which way the internet wind blows. The net result is most chats have a shelf
life of about 3 years. This is kind of
odd, except, it turns out that online that's about how long it takes people to
lose it and start shrieking like banshee's at people they couldn't stand from
day one but tolerated for some stupid fucked up reason until they lost it and
the game fell apart because the admin was a complete douche, the staff was
corrupt, or in some cases the staff just got tired of being constantly trolled
and hassled by fuck-tards with nothing better to do than bitch and moan that
the chat was not perfect by their particular standards.
So players - of all kinds - move. They migrate to and from
sites as the old chats crash and burn and new ones emerge with the goal of
being better somehow.
And let’s not forget those bastions of decorum and
self-righteous egotistical narcissism!
The review forum!
These have taken on many forms over the years:
IconsInTheFoyer.com, TheGrandNexus.com, and the current cesspool RPGSoapBox.net
– which I will lovingly refer to as RPGShitBox.
Because it’s a big box of shit.
Why do I say that?
Well, even if I didn’t get into the jaded, sordid love
trapezoids and dodecahedrons that apparently shaped this lovely site on the
interwebs, even if I didn’t delve into the lack of any guidance and the corrupt
antics of the site, even if I didn’t go into the background antics that shaped
this troll’s den (because frankly allllll of those things are important too,
but pale in comparison to one very important fact about this place anyway) –
even if we ignore all of that there’s one very important part about this site
that belies the uselessness and angst-ridden inappropriateness of it: the
people reviewing ON RPGShitBox. The
reason I bring this up is simple: no one died and elected these douche bags the
authority on what a good game is. In
fact 99% of the people posting on RPGShitBox:
1. Don’t play in the games they talk smack about because
they are such bad players they’ve been ejected or every other player ignored
them until they got bored and left
2. Have a self-righteous sense of entitlement: by god, they
know what a game should be like! And
yet, every time they start to run one they commit worse acts of corruption than
the sites they denigrate and wind up fired quick, fast, and in a hurry.
3. Aren’t at all subjective – we’re talking about people here
who have huge personal axes to grind.
There’s no paid help whose job is to go out and review chat sites with a
*neutral* basis. Seriously, if Consumer
Reports just solicited negative feedback from people who had products from the
various car manufacturers out there and didn’t have anyone neutral drive a
single vehicle, then we’d believe that no car produced anywhere by any
manufacturer was anything but utter automotive SHIT.
Think about it: how the hell could a site that let’s anyone
post and paint things in ANY light they wanted be a neutral review site? There’s been study after study about this
very topic done and the reality is that happy customers don’t gush nearly as
often as unhappy customers pontificate: and all RPGShitBOx and its predecessor
sites do is give players who got their asses spanked a place to go and spout
off bullshit. So: to you, my fledgling
player, I urge you… ignore RPGShitBox like it doesn’t exist. I tell you this openly because RPGShitBox is
a far bigger detriment and blight on our online hobby than it could ever be a
benefit – the sole positive use for it is to know where games *are*
occurring. In fact, if you want to
benchmark a game site based on RPGShitBox?
Watch to see who has the highest NEGATIVE traffic – it invariably means
the staff is pretty good and weeding out the players who will piss you off in a
hurry and thus, they’re bitching up a blue streak.
Fuck those fucking fucks.
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