Are we, as a wider community, nasty?

[Zhaleskra]

I think there is a lot of skimming, rather the reading on the Internet as a whole. People latch on to one thing that caught their eye, and ignore the rest, even when what they tell the original poster was in their original post. And after they do that, they project.

I'm not saying people don't actually read posts, it's just that skimming seems a lot more common. This is nothing special about gamers: the Internet itself seems to foster shorter attention spans.

 

[Alzrius]

I think there is a lot of skimming, rather the reading on the Internet as a whole.

This caught my eye, and I wanted to mention that I don't think it's true.

 

[Lwaxy]

Ha, we didn't railroad any more in the 90s than we did before, and for me, at least, D&D was always about storytelling.

Now we could go into a nasty argument over each others' experience but I doubt we'd find that in any way helpful as it would just re-state our personal facts

 

[trancejeremy]

I think it's partly a by-product of how RPGs have been sold over the years. Not simply that this RPG was different, but usually that this RPG was objectively better. And later this expanded not just for different RPGs, but different editions of the same RPG.

Yeah, a lot of the editorials by EGG back in the early days of Dragon are cringe-worthy. But at the same time, he had a 1st hand motive - he was trying to keep people buying D&D and TSR products, as opposed to the many other products popping up. And not mentioned are the editorials in those products that were attacking D&D/TSR and him. Different sides had different fanzines/magazines/etc.

And I don't think that's really any different than today, only instead of fanzines, you have message boards and blogs.

 

[Neonchameleon]

OK. That is nasty -- no argument there.

On the other hand if that's what's being held up as nasty in the RPG community it means that we are one of the nicest communities on the internet that's large enough to have schisms that I'm aware of. That article had no threats involved (as there are in some of the other communities I post in - the only suggestion I recall reading that someone be mutilated over RPGs was The RPG Pundit talking about Monte Cook) - death threats have been made in the video game community over increasing the reload time of a sniper rifle or over making facebook games. And that's only about games. As far as I know no one has been doxxed over RPGs and there's no one suggesting that anyone be fired from their jobs over their comments about RPGs unless it's to do with the fact they are RPG designers doing a bad job.

Admittedly some of the other communities I'm part of are lightning rods for nasty arguments. But from everything I've seen we're nicer than most non-face-to-face communities up to and including fans of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. (OK, so I chose that example because their fandom is notorious). But to call us, as a community, nasty is in my experience insular.

 

[Morrus]

That article had no threats involved (as there are in some of the other communities I post in - the only suggestion I recall reading that someone be mutilated over RPGs was The RPG Pundit talking about Monte Cook) - death threats have been made in the video game community over increasing the reload time of a sniper rifle or over making facebook games.

You lost me a bit there. Are you saying that only death threats are nasty? The existence of other things doesn't reduce a thing; neither does the existence of worse things. Any thing you can think of, somebody can probably point to an example of something worse; does that mean there's only one nasty thing? Is there only one big thing? One small thing?

Nobody's saying we're the nastiest. We'd have to Godwin the thread to point to the nastiest. That's not the frame we're using.

 

[Neonchameleon]

You lost me a bit there. Are you saying that only death threats are nasty? The existence of other things doesn't reduce a thing; neither does the existence of worse things. Any thing you can think of, somebody can probably point to an example of something worse; does that mean there's only one nasty thing? Is there only one big thing? One small thing?

Nobody's saying we're the nastiest. We'd have to Godwin the thread to point to the nastiest. That's not the frame we're using.

I'm saying that by the standards of most large online communities no we aren't nasty. We're tooth-rottingly nice. That such nastiness as we have is trivial and never goes beyond passionate disagreement about elfgames - and that we all ultimately know they are elfgames and WotC aren't going to send round a team of ninjas to steal our old books. That I can think of very few people in the hobby who'd register as more than slightly irritating in most other wide scale open access communities (although a couple of game designers would be laughed out of most other places).

Such nastiness as there is in the RPG community feels as bad as it does precisely because we are generally so nice. Now calling the RPG community creepy is a whole different story.

 

[Morrus]

I'm saying that by the standards of most large online communities no we aren't nasty. We're tooth-rottingly nice. That such nastiness as we have is trivial and never goes beyond passionate disagreement about elfgames - and that we all ultimately know they are elfgames and WotC aren't going to send round a team of ninjas to steal our old books. That I can think of very few people in the hobby who'd register as more than slightly irritating in most other wide scale open access communities (although a couple of game designers would be laughed out of most other places).

So yes, then?

I disagree. A already mentioned, the existence of worse things doesn't make something nice.

I mean - is an elephant big? Blue whales exist, so elephants are small, right? But redwood trees exist, so blue whales are small. I don't think one could argue that an elephant is not big without looking silly.

 

[Cadence]

I don't think one could argue that an elephant is not big without looking silly.

At some point it's context though, isn't it? Is a horse big? A college basketball player? A great dane? A wharf rat? A palmetto bug?

If almost all human groups are nasty, then does nasty have any meaning? Are nasty and nice the only choices? Maybe "Are we, as a wider community just as unpleasant as most other communities?"

 

[Morrus]

At some point it's context though, isn't it? Is a horse big? A college basketball player? A great dane? A wharf rat? A palmetto bug?

If almost all human groups are nasty, then does nasty have any meaning? Are nasty and nice the only choices? Maybe "Are we, as a wider community just as unpleasant as most other communities?"

Well, of course everything's relative. I'm not sure that pointing out the obvious relativism of the universe adds much to the conversation - it's rather a given in any sentence which contains an adjective! At that point we're basically saying adjectives don't exist, because any adjective you can think of to describe something has a more extreme example elsewhere.

Once we're discussing that, we're just discussing language, not the topic at hand. Which is, sure, an interesting discussion in its own right if you're a philosophy or language buff.