Is the gaming community oppressive?
The internet may be known for its trolls, heated debates about religion and politics, but gamers also use the internet, even if in a different way. Here’s what I think gamers, me included, do wrong in the world we are building. They may be wrong, so feel free to judge.
With game developers and server owners limiting the control and creating non-existent rules on the internet, it is quite surprising how so many of gamers still think that they are the cool rule breakers and the dangerous ones on the web. Nowadays, a lot of gamers know a little bit of coding, or they can just have a cheat engine, and think hacking in-game can also make them the top elite of the gaming community, when in fact, admins can just ban them and these “hackers” won’t work their way back with the same username.
On the contrary, I’ve seen a lot of people kissing up to sys admins and in-game admins to the point of slavery just so they can get perks like own a land close to spawn or get to use military grade weapons, secure a place in a tournament or even (not saying names) work their way up in the hall of fame for no reason. That’s lame. Sure, admins should get some thank-yous for their long hours of coding (I’ve once had to take care of two servers for a week) and trying to juggle all the problems in real-time, but some admins just buy a server from a hosting service that does all that for you. Maybe at the beginning of time admins were nerds who wanted total power over something, but now they are social animals like us too and do not need to be worshipped.
Then there are the people who like to play with a twist: mods everywhere and all these complicated registration rules on servers. I’d rather study calculus than know the history of your father’s father’s father, and how in 1888 there was a guy who changed your life forever that’s why I need to change my skin to enter this lobby. Really, thank you for making matchmaking possible, and for having a good playerbase, but make it easy and quick for me to go anywhere! Also, I do not like the “wait for admin” button that people use when they are angry at my attitude.
Now onto developers, and their three new discriminations: region, internet speed, game rep. They hate and love people based on these three factors more than they should hate cheaters, or how we hate griefers.
Region restriction is the new racism, and not just for games: for any downloads. In a world where it’s easy to travel anywhere, and where anime such as Log horizon portray gamers as people who don’t like classification, how ironic is it that we cannot download certain software simply because of our IP. It’s really turning down a lot of potential customers to anything and extremely frustrating for travelers or people with friends in different countries that can’t all use the same service at once.
so much real timeThe game reputation is probably the only way developers recognize and eliminate griefers and bad sports. It started out entirely based on the community so it does require people who report are unbiased, and gladly, it works miraculously. However, it does kind of mean that if in GTA 5 you are a “bad” person and then went to the “jail” servers for two weeks, you are more likely to friend “bad” people (seriously who is “bad” and “good” in criminal game) from the bad people’s servers then when you can go back to ordinary lobbies you will end up going back to the bad sport lobbies a lot more frequently because even if you want to start a new life, you kind of can’t. It’s worse than fearing to put your real name online because now your game name that you cannot change since you paid a lot of money for all the virtual game library you own -cannot start over - are now stuck with these labels. Permanent ban from Minecraft servers are kind of the same thing. Your name is now something you must protect, which kind of reduces the fun of hearing people rage.
no can doThen the last type of “discrimination” which is a silent suffering, and that is internet speed and lag. You’ve probably suffered lag before, been kicked from a lobby once, but believe me some people have it way worse. Servers with anti-cheating code kick people with significant lag for suspected teleportation. If people are around, you may get reported and eventually banned forever.
from otakudaydreams.wordpress.com“I’m scared to make friends and promises on skyblock servers because I can’t use the internet.” My friend, who only plays skyblock, once told me I never understood what she meant until I joined a skyblock server with her. She takes the emeralds and then can’t buy with them because the villager’s trading HUD doesn’t open.
Apparently, Microsoft hates people with bad internet speed. If you’ve played the console version of Happy Wars, you’ll see an entire team rush out to build towers and completely annihilate the enemy with epic meteor showers while one guy with the speed of a snail is going to build a ballista in the main tower. Even though this is under the excuse that other players don’t lag, but occasionally the game suddenly ends or does these PC version bugs like towers not responding thing. Most people would think that this is a claptrap argument, and that other players don’t have to deal with this, but losing league points because your DSL doesn’t connect is too much. Penalties are good motivators, but they should be smarter in their penalty system.
who's happy now?Going to the title, is the gaming community oppressive? We only pretend there is no rules when there is too many? We pretend there is no kingship when we are participating in making people look more important than us? I don’t know, and this is kind of why I only join servers for minigames in Minecraft. With the exception of Watch dogs’ online feature (you’re all notoriety points thieves anyway), most online games do have worrying issues like griefers and cheaters, but does this really mean that all of our gameplay is affected and all of us suspected of being bad people just because of a high internet traffic on a few days? Tell me your opinion in the comments.
