Research but no conclusions

[stepnix]

For the past few days I've been tracing a few threads of recurring TTRPG discourse to their source. kind of. I'm still not really closer to finding out how these conversations got started, but I have put names and usernames to the figures who were the most vocal (and, from my perspective, did the most damage) and gained a new awareness of how... avoidable it was?

For clarity this isn't about like, racism in big names TTRPGs, that would be much easier, it's a relatively esoteric design priority debate. Extra tricky to talk about because I don't actually want to restart the arguments in question, so just, keep that in mind.

I'm seeing now how ideas that I previously thought of as just ambient Popular Discourse Topics were really extending outwards from a relatively stable core group of theorists. People weren't independently coming to similar conclusions, they actively knew each other and worked with each other and developed this shared understanding between themselves. And now that the center of that is gone (or at least off of Twitter), the arguments are just... fighting shadows, echoes of the originals.

There's a couple games that I thought of pretty highly, that I'll think about a little differently now. I see other "wires" too, more connections between ideas that have hopped from blog to blog or tweet to tweet. i have gained wisdom but at what cost etc. etc.

the end, no moral

Comments

[tresfoyle]

oh I'm already *fascinated*

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

It's sad when people get into serious arguments over things that were meant to be fun, like games. It happens more often now, probably because so many social networks are designed to encourage and reward bad behavior.

Re: Thoughts

[amphobet]

True, though hobby snobbery has been a thing for a long time.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Snobbery, yes, but the level of violence has increased, largely because the Internet makes people feel more free to be vicious than they would in person or in previous modes of contact.

Re: Thoughts

[amphobet]

Yeah. That is unfortunately true. I've wondered if it's a similar phenomenon to "road rage."

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Related, not identical, but some of the same causes feed into them, including but not limited to:

* Most humans are pervasively stressed nowadays. That doesn't just erode health, it drains the energy that people have to withstand further frustrations. So when they run out of energy to keep suppressing it, they snap and start screaming or worse.

* When people are face-to-face, they have more motivation to remain civil, or at least closer to that. When they are separated by barriers -- like a car or a computer -- then there is less holding them back. This makes some people more hostile, or even outright violent.

* There are two crossing influences. One is the breakdown of extended families and other social structures, so people get fewer examples of mature behavior and adult influences as they grow up, and less opportunity to develop relationship skills. People don't have to be more isolated, but that's what winds up happening much of the time. Conversely, the amount of violence in entertainment has gone up, as films show things graphically that used to be just implied, and whole new genres like video games have developed most of which are all about committing some sort of violence; plus of course the devolution of news from sober journalism to who can scoop the most eyeballs with the most outrageous material. The media don't have to influence people to negative behavior, but it's an easy path to take -- especially with a paucity of more positive examples to counterbalance it.

So there are a lot of factors that combine to push people in a nastier direction. It can be hard to resist that, and sometimes people just get tired of trying to swim upstream.

If I realize that all I'm doing is bitching because I'm in a bad mood, then I quit trying to interact and go read fanfic or something. But some people can feed of negative energy, so they deliberately prey on others. Or as above, they just don't have enough energy left to maintain their self-control.

Most platforms contribute to this problem instead of quashing it. From the sound of it, Cohost did better, and Dreamwdith is also good, but a lot of people have said that places like Twitter and Tumblr are just a sharkfest. 0_o

[binarystargames]

Consistently, yes.