Trolling Needs to Stop

A Big and Unfocused TL;DR about Hurricane Sandy and Loss

On Monday, around 7 PM, the power to my apartment went out entirely. I had just finished Dishonored (review coming) earlier that day and was just perusing around the internet. This power outage, sadly, was no coincidence. It was the result of the infamous Hurricane Sandy, which tore its way through the northeast. Notably, it left millions of homes and businesses in my home state, New Jersey, without power. Worse, it devastated the Jersey shore, destroying homes, tearing up boardwalks, and leaving entire towns covered in water and sand. The photos are heartbreaking, and though I am an indoors kind of guy, I feel severely dismayed about what has passed through my state.

As of 11:50 AM yesterday, power returned to my apartment following a 15-minute fake out the previous day. Since then, I have been able to enjoy heat, hot water, and internet unfettered. I am lucky, however you wish to interpret the word. Many people in New Jersey and New York City are still without power, and many are still evacuated from their homes, living in hotels or with family if they managed to escape the hurricane in the first place. Although my home has been returned to normalcy, the fact is that the area around me still has not. Supermarket stock is being wiped out as soon as it is put on the shelves because of people's empty refrigerators at home. Gas stations that manage to get power have lines going down highways within five minutes of reopening, and many are reporting that they have run out of gas due to their supply being overtaxed. For lack of a better word, it is chaos out there.

By now, you are probably wondering why I am talking about this on my video game blog. Aside from a single game reference, this largely seems irrelevant. Here's the truth, and it is a truth I shared with a lot of gamers out there. It was not long before I missed my video games in a bad way. During the week, I work full time, and I miss playing. Work also requires me to travel, which means even less gaming. But the fact that it's there when I get home along with my partner and two cats is comforting. Even when I'm home doing something else, I know I can power on my PC or PS3 and escape into the fantasy world some video game developer has envisioned. Whatever psychological reading one can make from it, I do use video games and their environments as an escape from the day-to-day grind. For nearly three full days, I had no escape. I lived minute to minute completely confronted with darkness, cold, and boredom.

This isn't about me, though. I feel so close to my video game hobby that the thought there are others out there presently deprived of their passion upsets me. Video games can be seen as juvenile by the ignorant public, but they mean a lot to a lot of people. Also, if you're purely a console or computer player like I am, it's not as portable a hobby. You can't leave your home with a game in hand and expect that, like a DVD, your family member or hotel has something to play it. For those who have lost their homes entirely, they have also lost hundreds to thousands of dollars worth of their prime source of joy. And along with books or DVDs, when it comes to rebuilding, these objects - these escapes - will not be the first items they purchase to return to normalcy. Seeking warmth and food is the primary objective for a lot of families right now, and no amount of I Am Alive or Red Dead Redemption playing has prepared any one of us to deal with constantly trying to survive. The comfort of video games, too, is that we are not personally dealing with the protagonists' problems.

Maybe this is a surprise, but this isn't about those people either. The fact is that daily, gamers around the world act privileged to a disturbing degree, and it's because they don't deal with real loss. The internet has become a hot bed of disturbing trends in behavior mostly enabled by the anonymity it provides. When a game reviewer gives a big-budget game an 8 out of 10, there are those who feel entitled to attack that reviewer personally, threatening his life and his family. Two points higher, and people go on long diatribes about how the reviewer was bought and exerting effort to discredit him, knowing nothing about the actual truth or his personal financial situation, which I'm pretty sure is only slightly above that of a retail worker's. If a woman wants to engage the gaming world in an open discussion about the disservice video games do to women, it is unnervingly OK to unload threats of rape and violence that would make most prison inmates blush. Lastly, when a trusted developer releases a subpar (not necessarily awful) game, cries of execution and public shaming begin to surface.

You know, it's fine to complain. Don't let anyone tell you that you don't have a right to complain. It is impossible to spend every minute of every day deciding whether the problem you're experiencing right now is as big as a starving child in Africa or a cancer patient in Haiti. When your game freezes or your hero unheroically falls through the floor he was standing on, you have every right to feel bothered. It is by a reasonable set of standards that developers can create gaming experiences which successfully act as escapes for us, the gamers. However, complaining and wishing loss on anyone for any reason are two seriously different actions. Do not lose sight of the fact that you are physically able to complain. You have a body that functions as you desire it to do so, not strapped to a wheelchair and blinking to communicate. Don't forget that whatever goes wrong in the game, you can reset and keep playing because you have a home, electricity, and a system to play it on. There are others who wish that your problems were the only ones they had to worry about, but more importantly, they wouldn't wish their experience on someone. Someone whose spouse and son drowned in a flooding basement during a hurricane would not threaten pain or loss of life to someone else who wants to talk about redefining gender expectations.

Here is the TL;DR for those of you who just want the point:
Keep complaining, and try offering constructive criticism to make gaming continuously better. But, until a game developer, publisher, journalist, or even player causes you or your family significant loss of wealth (bankruptcy), shelter (home destroyed by tide), or livelihood (more games with female or gay protagonists do not threaten this category), and sometimes even then, you have no right to threaten that person or company violently or sadistically. That is called harassment, and it is destructive and sickening. Moreover, it does not serve the gaming world, including yourself. Things will not get better because of your threats and insults.

I don't have a huge readership here, and maybe I never will, but if this post nets me a label as a "White Knight Fag" or some such, then I will embrace it. There is a whole army of White Knight Fags ready to clean up this goddamn kingdom.