Are we, as a wider community, nasty?

[Neonchameleon]

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.

Whether elephants are big depends on what you are comparing them to. The normal implicit comparison is to humans, on which scale they are big. But if you were to try discussing elephants in the context of megafauna such as the diplodocus, no. No they aren't.

You've asked if we as a community are nasty - a question that is meaningless without a baseline for scale. I see three possible baselines.

• An idealised community that's never nasty. By this standard all real human communities are nasty so the question is meaningless.
• A narrower gaming community - for instance yours. Now I don't know your local gaming community so can't use this on this board.
• Other comparable online communities. To me this is the baseline for nice or nasty that makes the most sense. And by those standards we are probably near the bottom of the nicest echelon where the nicest echelon is:
  • Hobbyist, in it for the love rather than money
  • Team rather than individual meaning that other people enrich our experiences
  • Cooperative hobby rather than competitive - we don't want to "Smash their bastard, make him want to change his name"
  • Creating rather than consuming, with the ability to tell canon/the ref to stuff it in the event of a retcon or rules change or just a decision we don't like
  • Skills that we need to develop and where everyone started out at rock bottom
    • Effectively inexhaustible amounts of creation possible
    • No major commercial competition
  • No major teams to support
  • No major real world impact to get upset about. It isn't a matter of livelihoods or social change.

We're only just in the nicest echelon on most counts - we flirt with competition and consumerism, and didn't start from rock bottom. I'd expect the horticulturalists to be nicer than we are. But compared to just about any fandom, never mind any social change movement then yes we are nice.

 

[Morrus]

Whether elephants are big depends on what you are comparing them to. The normal implicit comparison is to humans, on which scale they are big. But if you were to try discussing elephants in the context of megafauna such as the diplodocus, no. No they aren't.

Fair enough. You've just largely dismissed the validity of adjectives in favour of relativism. I'm not particularly interested in a discussion about the relative nature of all objects in the universe, though, so I'll drop this branch of the conversation - not my line of subject matter! But I'm sure plenty of folks here will find that's something they'd like to debate.

 

[Cadence]

Weird stuff, watching an argument I just saw spread across G+, Twitter, and Facebook. Sometimes I think the "nastiness" exhibited by RPG fans is a sign of a damaged community. I've seen it for 15 years, and been on the receiving end of it dozens of times. Then I think that perhaps the awesome part of us that lets us not grow up and enjoy escapism and gaming and pretending to be elves is the exactly same part as the really nasty part of us that lets us not grow up and be as cruel as children are to each other.

Then I remember that football fans stab each other, so there's that perspective, at least. We're actually not that bad, relatively speaking.

And I guess you did already address the relative part back in the very first post! (Maybe I fell victim to that skimming thing @Zhaleskra mentioned and focused more on the title of the thread.)

I guess two problems with niceness are that it can often take a conscious act of will and that it doesn't always give the same immediate feeling of satisfaction. Are two things that help ENWorld the mods with the former and the long term interaction with the same community for the later?

 

[Umbran]

You've asked if we as a community are nasty - a question that is meaningless without a baseline for scale.

But, each person comes with their own thoughts on what the baseline is. With a group EN World's size (n the hundreds or thousands) we would expect those individual baselines to cluster around some average - we can implicitly use that average without knowing what it is explicitly.

In this manner, certain bits of information can become apparent. If, for example, there was significant agreement that we, collectively, are nasty, then we don't really need to know what the baseline is - if everyone feels we are on one side of the scale, that's more than sufficient for some purposes.

 

[Neonchameleon]

But, each person comes with their own thoughts on what the baseline is. With a group EN World's size (n the hundreds or thousands) we would expect those individual baselines to cluster around some average - we can implicitly use that average without knowing what it is explicitly.

In this manner, certain bits of information can become apparent. If, for example, there was significant agreement that we, collectively, are nasty, then we don't really need to know what the baseline is - if everyone feels we are on one side of the scale, that's more than sufficient for some purposes.

Oh, indeed. If there was actual consensus on this thread that we as a community were nasty we wouldn't need to bother teasing things out. However there isn't. There isn't consensus either way on this thread. Which means that we need to work out what's meant by nasty.

 

[Umbran]

Which means that we need to work out what's meant by nasty.

Well, as a proponent of relativism, surely you recognize that needs are only defined relative to stated goals. Whether we need to or not depends on what purpose, if any, was intended in the original question.

 

[Guest 85555]

Whether elephants are big depends on what you are comparing them to. The normal implicit comparison is to humans, on which scale they are big. But if you were to try discussing elephants in the context of megafauna such as the diplodocus, no. No they aren'ce.

I am not sure îf this line of reasoning is particularly useful. I mean compared compared toH.S. thomson and Norman Mailer, Harlan Ellison is a meek and reticent wallflower, but compared the broader community, he's a pretty spicy and opinionated guy. Compared to the sun, an atom bomb is a tiny pop. We could take extreme examples to make anything thought of as large, mean, happy, sad, etc and paint them as their opposites. Personally i think as hobby communities go, RPG folk are about average, but it can get pretty nasty at times when people from different camps and styles come to blows. I think it is a fine line though, because passion for a sugject is good. It just occassionally gets cranked to 11 when it really ought to be a 6.

 

[tomBitonti]

A: Does the community feel nasty to you, B?
B: Yes, it certainly does, A. Does the community feel nasty to you?
A: I dare say no. Curious.
B: But I still say yes. Curious indeed.

Could different people have different views on whether a community is nasty? If so, what would make for the difference? Different notions of what is nasty? Different experiences? Something else?

Thx!

TomB

 

[evilbob]

Weird stuff, watching an argument I just saw spread across G+, Twitter, and Facebook. Sometimes I think the "nastiness" exhibited by RPG fans is a sign of a damaged community. I've seen it for 15 years, and been on the receiving end of it dozens of times. Then I think that perhaps the awesome part of us that lets us not grow up and enjoy escapism and gaming and pretending to be elves is the exactly same part as the really nasty part of us that lets us not grow up and be as cruel as children are to each other.

Then I remember that football fans stab each other, so there's that perspective, at least. We're actually not that bad, relatively speaking.

Gaming's key demographic across nearly the entire hobby are younger males. Younger males tend to be a little more nasty than the general population, gamers or football fans or whoever. Probably something about maturity level and emotional intelligence and hormones and blah blah blah.

Then you have the idea that many gamers tend to come to this hobby because it gives power and feelings of power in ways they may not otherwise get - the super stereotype being the non-physically competing intellectual - and you have people who are given power over others (or who have their power challenged) for relatively the first time. This can make people defensive. They also may not have experience dealing with challenges to their abilities.

And you have the idea that gaming - certainly not all gaming, but especially single-player gaming or non-team competitive gaming - tends to be a very self-focused hobby. You spend a lot of time and effort and energy increasing your own abilities and your own achievements; there is a correlation between that type of behavior and general selfishness (although it's hard to say whether selfish people are drawn to self-focused hobbies or if self-focused hobbies make people more selfish).

Toss in the generally HORRIBLE communication medium of the internet - both with the lack of social cues and social taboos - and you get a pretty awesome storm (maybe not perfect) of bad behavior by people who tend to behave badly.

But the real key is the additional component of numbers. Maybe the same percentage of people are jerks, but when you have more people, your total number of jerks go up. Like, if you go to a convention and there are 1000 people there, if 10 people are jerks they just get ostracized and the problem can be contained. But if there are 50000 people and 500 are jerks, it's a lot harder to avoid all contact. Then other people see jerk behavior and think it's ok to be a jerk, too. It's like a virus, and the loud, few examples get more attention than the 49000 people who are just having a good time.

So, yeah: lots of reasons. And as long as we continue to tolerate bad behavior amongst ourselves, it will continue. These boards are actually a GREAT example (in my opinion, anyway) of how you CAN keep a lid on things if you try hard enough and continue to be vigilant. Something like the WoW forums are a great example of how things can get horrid if you don't keep on top of them.

 

[Jhaelen]

Well, of course everything's relative.

Well, as I already mentioned, imho, every online community has its share of nastiness. However, compared to other online communities, ENWorld is definitely one of the nicest (although admittedly I have quite a few users on my ignore list, so the degree of nastiness is potentially higher than I am aware of).