For those of you who play online games, you know the scenario- you are playing with your friends, and you guys are doing the right thing in all of the right situations-you're dominating the other team, on killing sprees, taking down towers, capturing points, etc. But then that asshole pug on your team is feeding and throwing caution and logic to the wayside in favor of dicking over you and your friends. I play League of Legends, and before this played basically every MMO, the main one being Guild Wars. But regardless of what game, the vent/skype/teamspeak convo always went something like this:
"Okay I'm going in for a gank. Push up."
"Alright I'm gonna stun him."
"For fuck's sake, what the fuck is this god damn fucking kid doing? He's not pushing up with us...dude he's running away! I fucking pinged to hit him and he didn't help us at all! Now I'm dead. God this kid is a macaroni artist."
We all do this, myself included. Obviously, the kid who was not part of our group was drooling over his keyboard and struggling to tie his shoes to his hands while he was playing League of Legends...no other explanation right? Sadly as much as I'd love to say this is true (because it would make things a lot easier for us to always have a skapegoat) the truth is that these people may not be as retarded we accuse them of.
When gaming, it seems that you and your friends generally have some kind of sacred pact between each other. When one of you does something wrong, it's "Oh that's okay, he's usually pretty good. He just made a mistake". Or when your friend gets zero kills in a game and dies nineteen times, you get slightly frustrated but you'll tell them "Don't worry about it man, everyone has a bad game." Flip that to the other side though, and you see that if your friend was playing on an account that you didn't recognize the name of and weren't in a call with them that you would be raging THE SHIT out of that kid. Why? Because you don't know him, so naturally you assume the worst.
This doesn't even change if you're on a call with someone you just met from the game before. For those unfamiliar, this is how online gaming friends are generally made. You go into a game, and if you win, then all those guys are probably good guys- the types of guys you could have a beer with. Some of these guys might have done exceptionally well, others might have been saying funny things in the chat. Either way these guys, even if they did feed a bit...you give them the benefit of the doubt that they're decent people at the end of the day. This is what leads to you adding them to your friends list, and playing future games with them. Now these relationships are like real relationships in that some people are more open to socializing with new people than others, and some people prefer to stick with their same group of friends that they play with every day.
With that in mind, you obviously don't really know this person you just played a game with. But let's say you go into the next game with this person, and invite them to a skype call (or your vent, or whatever). As soon as you get in, this person starts playing like an epileptic penguin at anime convention. Most likely, we maintain the decency to not say anything...we even try to reason with ourselves that this person is just having an off game, and try to give them the benefit of the doubt.
This type of thing happens to everyone in online gaming, and gets even dicier when you start bringing them around your other online friends. Your other friends might not feel the same way you do about this person because they didn't see that game where they went 20/2 on Lux (a League of Legends character). If your existing friend is a true friend, he will be honest and tell you that kid sucks cock and to never let him in your vent server again. But sometimes that existing friend will still give that new person a chance to "prove themselves" to the rest of the pack.
There are several elements at play here. The first is the sunken cost fallacy- this states that after we have invested resources (in this case, a friend request and time playing the game and talking together) into something that we try to justify our decisions even when clearly it's a lost cause. Think of it like this- you buy a new ipod. The mac genius or whatever they're called at the store tries to tell you that you should get the warranty with it for another $80. You figure you've already spent $300 on the thing, so what's another $80? Before you know it, you've sunk an extra $200 into shit you didn't need in the first place...all on the grounds that because you already put money into it, so you "might as well" keep going.
The other thing that comes into play is the fundamental desire for approval and praise. When you show your friends a new toy/friend/girl/whatever you want them to tell you "Oh, what a fine find you have there! You really have an eye for these things!" So we try to build up the person we found as some gift from God himself in neckbeard form and call him the Messiah. When in reality, that game you saw him go 20/2 Lux he might have just been playing against some Brazilian in a grass hut on his Compaq from 1998.
So the real point I'm trying to make is that it's funny how just because you have communication means with someone and even a very brief history that you give the person even the slightest chance at not being a piece of shit. Just think about this the next time you see some random make a noob mistake and your friend...if it weren't for friend lists and skyping that that kid would be the bane to your existence for 30 minutes.
No comments:
Post a Comment