Bill Cammack

I had a strange evening last night. Very strange evening.

The strangeness wasn’t that anything strange occurred. Pathetically enough, my ‘problem’ last night was that I hung out with a non-social-media acquaintance. I don’t even know that the word ‘pathetic’ is appropriate for that sentence.

I didn’t have a good time last night, because the entire time was wasted. I also didn’t have a good time last night because I was figuring things out and making calculations on the fly. I also didn’t have a good time last night because I wasn’t able to e-stalk the IRL acquaintance of mine that I was slated to hang out with. I also didn’t have a good time because I started the evening “too late”, which was actually ‘right on time’ for hanging out in NYC… midnight. I felt a lot of stress last night. I thought about a lot of things that I haven’t thought about in ages. I won’t be going through this again.

It was worth it for two reasons: a) I learned so much and b) nothing happened.

Strangely enough, and I refrained from using the word ‘pathetically’ there… I really *CAN* break my ‘problems’ from last night down into lack of utilization of social media. To not make this one of my epic novels, I’ll say that my inability to research my acquaintance due to his lack of presence on the net, combined with his inability to research the society we live in and understand it led to my needing to explain A LOT OF THINGS to him last night while I was simultaneously running scenarios through my mind, attempting to predict/avert potential problems with people ALL ******* NIGHT, which led to my experience of stress that I can write about now. I can’t even write about it properly, because I’d physically rather just expel it from my system and forget the sensation entirely, but I’m keeping it for now so I can attempt to make something useful out of this post.

The ‘problem’ is that the NYC nightlife scene is garbage. It’s been garbage for a long time. Except that’s not THE problem. The real problem is not understanding that the nightlife scene is garbage and therefore not being able to accept that it’s garbage and ‘play it where it lays’. When people don’t understand what’s going on around them, they feel like it’s unfair and start to get upset about it. When people get upset about things, their behavioral patterns become abnormal or skewed. In the video game world, the extreme versions of people like this are known as Griefers:

A griefer is a player who plays a game simply to aggravate and harass other players. Griefing is a form of emergent gameplay.[1]

Griefers differ from typical players in that they do not play the game in order to achieve objectives defined by the game world. Instead, they seek to harass other players, causing grief. In particular, they may use tools such as stalking, hurling insults, and exploiting unintended game mechanics. Griefing as a gaming play style is not simply any action that may be considered morally incorrect. Though the staff of each online game defines griefing in a manner that best fits their game, certain criteria must be met for an action to be considered griefing. An act of griefing involves the following three types of actions to be considered grief play:[2]

Interestingly enough, the entry for Griefers doesn’t explain WHY they’re such AssHats. Griefers feel downtrodden, either IRL or in-game. Most of the time, they’re complete SCRUBS (can’t play the game worth a damn), and they get tired of constantly losing, day in and day out. Every single game they LOSE. Regardless of how much they practice, they LOSE. Since they figure their team’s going to lose regardless and they’re most likely to be the first casualty ANYWAY, so even if the team wins, they won’t feel any GLORY, they start shooting teammates or sabotaging their own team’s play in some fashion. The reason they do this is in order to feel like they control SOMETHING… Like they have SOME control over ANYTHING. Their whole reason for playing is to hear how upset their teammates are, which is an indication that they affected someone for once in their miserable lives.

This same psychosis occurs IRL (in real life). HAHAHAHA Somehow, I’ve stumbled onto the perfect analogy for what was stressing me out last night. I was hanging out with a Griefer. :D The problem with hanging out with Griefers is that YOU look like you’re down with whatever ridiculousness is going on in THEIR heads. To go back to the video game analogy… When a Griefer’s detected, the team’s going to turn on that person. Better to get rid of them and play minus one player off the bat than let this idiot mess up everyone else’s plans. If you’re clearly affiliated with that player, they might come after you too, because they don’t want you taking revenge for what happened to the Griefer. So, even though philosophically, you agree with them and would rather have this player kicked from the team, there’s a good chance that you’re going to get dragged into the problem. So… The solution is NOT TO HANG OUT WITH GRIEFERS IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!

I didn’t have this choice, because due to this person lacking a social media presence, I wasn’t able to e-stalk him and avoid the situation entirely. I found out that he was an IRL Griefer ‘on the fly’ which is what totally ****** my night up because I spent the rest of the time calculating potentials and possibilities. Not only was my time being WASTED, but I was getting stressed out from being clearly visually affiliated with an obvious IRL Griefer. The reason I didn’t just LEAVE is that I wanted to learn from the situation, and I was hoping… HOPING it was going to be a free lesson. :) Thank God it was.

cont… IRL Griefers [Part 2]