The internet – Community & Communication – Blogs and other social mediums (Facebook – Myspace)

I’ve been bitten by the blogging bug since February of 2010. It was reading Grognardia that inspired me to start up Grevious Injury. (It should have been Grievous Injury from the start, but that’s water under the bridge.) After poking around there I found many other blogs both in the OSR community and beyond that I followed thanks to the fun folks at Google. 

Blogging remind me a lot of chat rooms except you can never be sure who your audience is, or even if you have one.  Yeah you can track visitors to your site, but in the end you may put a lot of effort into your work that no one reads or appreciates. I guess that raises the question that Tenkar recently talked about, why does one blog? Why does one read blogs?

I read blogs because I seek what others have to say, what their experience is, what’s going on in their game/life and what they may have to share about things in general. For the most part it is a combination of entertainment and information that I seek. It is a time dependent reality for me. Summer is slower, had the recent attack on a fellow blogger happened during Lent or Easter I would probably have missed it or just glanced at a few of the postings or comments without having much time to reflect upon it.

Why do I blog? I guess it gives me a chance to babble about things that I normally don’t chat about in my daily conversations.  To be honest I don’t think I have a whole lot to say on blogs other than to indulge my ADD thinking patterns.  I don’t invest the level of dedication, talent and creativity I see in a number of the OSR blogs and on the some of the other blogs that I frequent.  I admire those who do invest their time and efforts to share with others.  I get irritated in verbal conversations when someone makes an asinine comment about others “having too much time on their hands.”    I can’t help but thinking I have found another swine to whom I will not throw the pearls. I try not to knock creativity even if I don’t completely get it or feel drawn to a particular expression.  

Finally, I think there is a real disconnect between what people think of as “anonymous” and its potential backlash in real life. The various Facebook-Myspace-Twitter dramas show a profound lack of good judgment regarding the nature of a social medium.  If you can’t stand behind your words, better to never put them into print. If you don’t want the world looking at your picture/post/comment, don’t post it.

The internet – Community & Communication - MMORPG and other games

Warcraft II & Age of Empires

With both of these games I was playing with people I either knew in person or had met over the internet and talked with over the phone to get a more personal dimension to the relationship. No real risk involved there since I played with no unknown factors. The games were fun, if a bit tedious. Rapid resource utilization and massive body waves really seemed to be the way to win. Whoever did it quickest probably won.

MMORPGS

Evercrack, Rubies of Eventide, Horizons, City of Heroes and Aion were all played over their last 11 years with about 5 years of no playing scattered throughout those 11 years.  In all of these games there was a greater degree of community because of things like guilds and the fact that you rarely played the game in a solo manner. Don’t we have console & PC games for that? I met some really interesting people and few imbalanced people to make me more than hesitant about the health of internet communities. I think Chicagowiz’s quote of Raggi’s general advice is pretty apropos about the nature of community, conversation and comments. They are rough words, but honest ones. Sometimes the truth of human nature is hard to ignore. Trent B over on A Pack of Gnolls comments mentioned something along the same lines about a place where one can be a dick.  I appreciated his analogy. I don’t visit sites where free-range jerks are a plenty. Piranha infested waters are dumb places to swim.

 Games go even farther in creating a false sense of familiarity.  Until you meet someone outside of the internet medium it still is not a friendship. I guess something like Teamspeak or Vent can help cement those relationships, but even then the lack of a face-to-face relationship can FUBAR things quickly. On a few occasions my inner jerk escaped during some of the drama of MMORPG communities and added to the grief. They are not moments I delight in remembering or hope to repeat. Typos can total screw up things too, one absent word can totally change the meaning of a sentence and do substantial damage to further conversations.

Well, this is longer babbling than it needs to be. MMORPG like all hobbies depend upon enjoyment, when it ceases the game is over and it’s time to move on. Just be mindful of the good will and ill intent that playing with others can bring into your life.  Be mindful of the fact that the lack of face-to-face interaction makes the jerks more brazen but does not lessen the sting of their words if they hit a soft spot.  On the flip side, be thankful for all the great people you meet through a small window of interaction who seem pretty cool and you wouldn’t mind meeting in real life.

The Internet - Community & Communication - Chat Rooms

I have been on the internet since 2/29/96. At least that’s what my AOL account tells me.  Hard to believe it’s been fifteen years of poking around on the web and experiencing the joys and woes of internet communication. Given the latest episode of disruption with an internet troll I thought I would share my experience of the internet with whoever might read this post. Don’t expect this post to be insightful or change the way you think about things. I just share my experience and what I have tried to learn from it.

Chapter 1 Chat Rooms

One of the first things that wowed me about AOL was e-mails and chat rooms. While e-mail was cool back in 96 for being able to send things easily to other people, it was chat rooms that were really amazing to me. To get a spontaneous group of people together to chat about whatever from around the globe was nothing short of miraculous to me.  On AOL I tried the various rooms for Catholic chat, named after the 3 Archangels and also went to a room called the Front Porch which was for more philosophical and general talk. My main screenname then was REVTCM –Rev. Thomas C. Miller. Incidentally try a google search for that, my name is soooo vanilla you will find out that we are almost legion.  Anyway, I tried to be up front about being a priest and let people know that in chat rooms.  It’s hard to gauge how people reacted to that, for all they knew I could be some punk kid making up an identity or some weirdo with the missing milk carton kids tucked away in a freezer.  To be honest, my skepticism about people on the internet was something that really got to me in the early days because I was so suspicious of the seemingly anonymous nature of the internet.

What I discovered early on was that the anonymous nature of the internet did not bring out the best in many people, it did just the opposite. I have never been attacked verbally in person like I have in a chat room.  The Catholic chat rooms tended to be the worst. Even before the scandal unfolded in 2002, I had the well adjusted people of AOL chat making comments about being a pedophile and unloading their frustrations with the church or clergy. Things were said that no one has ever said to me in person, because I would be tempted to punch them in the mouth or rip into them myself.  Lesson #1 was anonymity = cowardly irresponsibility. Not everyone, but too many were malicious, irresponsible and just plain gutless.  Far too many were spiteful, and I let a number of the jerks get to me. Against my better nature I got drawn into arguments that were a colossal waste of time and emotion.  The other thing I found was that the semi-instant nature of chatting seems to have made more people, including myself, into impatient argumentative pricks. While I would like to think that my dance as a self-actualized prick was infrequent, I fear that it was much more than it should have been as a decent human being let alone a priest. Mind you, I don’t believe in pedestals for anyone living. Praise the dead, their chance to totally mess up their lives is past, but the rest of us are still a work in progress. I have no illusions about thinking I am “better” because of my life; in fact I fear just the opposite that I am giving the Boss the green light to cook my goose for being such a lousy servant. Anyway, being cursed as a smart-ass was not a benefit to chat room conversations. After a two year flirtation with chat rooms, they lost their charm. While in many ways they allowed me to meet some wonderful people, in the end they tended to be pretty impersonal. Seeing insults and personal attack in print did not help me as an individual.  While I would tell myself that the words of some unknown jerk should not bother me, for whatever reason they often did. Chalk it up to my own insecurities or personal defects, but on a bad day a chat room could really take the joy out of my life. On a good day I thought they were pretty amazing.  I guess I am thankful that I only had time in the evening for chat rooms. If the world had become a global village, does that mean we only get to encounter more village idiots? And how do I know that I have not morphed into one myself?  I know neither of the questions are true, but back then I asked them often enough to remember them now.  Next . . . MMORPG’s Evercrack – Horizons – City of Heroes.