Post

Jutsa wrote:

Eh, nothing much. Ok, upon actually typing this and being half-way through, I thought it best to put it in the spoiler cause... well, I'm a chatterbox.

The stupidly long history of how I joined GP

Basically I asked Unibot (I didn't know who he was back then) if I could co-author/pick up his old draft about making @@CAPITAL@@ underground (back when GI started basically), he said sure but only if I help with the Laz liberation, and I figured I'd kinda like to give military GP a try (was just getting into forum stuff after all), and so I did it, and then I told Frenchy who was over in the GI discord about being in military, and he said "oh yeah come join meh" and he was like "it's a raider region" and I was like "do I have to raid" and he was like "you can do regional maintenance stuff" and I was like "sure" but next thing I knew, it was pretty much only raiding. Thought about becoming a defender originally, but then I kinda grew to like the guys there and plus I didn't realize they hated each other so much so I was basically kept there right away. Eventually the region merged and the new region shied away from military to region-hood (not totally, but a good bit), and the government was particularly unstable then, so I spent a lot of time trying to make sure the region had some newcomers to make it stable. Seems to have worked. Never did co-author that draft of Unibot's though because by the time spring came round, I realized I didn't even do it, and rereading it I thought "What was I thinking?". Good times.

Ah, well, OK. Raiding is this weird gray area, after all. Technically, it is not against the game rules to raid. The game machinery allows that, so you can do it, I suppose.

But at the same time, all that raiding does is to spoil the fun of the game for others - so I can't really be impartial.

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Here is a little digression.

A couple of days ago, there emerged a video of a Turkish couple on social media who were caught on a security camera while they brutally destroyed a snowman.

Yeah, my word choice may be ridiculous. After all, a snowman can't feel pain, so what brutality are we talking about, right? But no, you should have seen it. They literally punched and kicked it with all their might, as if the poor snowman was their archenemy, until what was left of it was a heap of snow.

The shopkeepers in the area who had diligently built the snowman were upset the next morning when they saw it was gone, so they even went into the trouble to check the security cameras to see what happened overnight. That's how the midnight revelry of the violent couple surfaced, and was leaked on social media.

It made me angry. I felt sad at the loss of maybe hours of meticulous work that the builders had put into making that snowman, and their hopes, their childish joy & anticipation of seeing it the next morning... all destroyed at the whim of a silly couple.

It reminded me of some snotty kids who I was forced to play with in kindergarten, and who destroyed the things I built with LEGOs, getting a kick out of destruction. (Mind you, they weren't dismantling the stuff I built in order to build new stuff. They just did it for the sake of destruction.) Fruits of your labor annihilated in a moment by a mischievous little brat... It is hard to make, but so easy to mar, so a tower you built in half an hour can tumble down in half a second with the kick of a b*stard. It drove me crazy.

Similarly, when some people defended this violent, snowman-destroying couple, I was mad. It wasn't OK to destroy a snowman so recklessly. The snowman was the fruit of someone's labor, someone who had given in to the little child in him/her (or maybe someone who WAS a child) and made that snowman. Maybe they were hoping to see it again next morning, and it would have put a smile on their face.

A lot of people would say "Come on, it's just a snowman." just as a lot of people would tell me "Come on, it's just a silly LEGO tower, you can make a new one."

I wanted to slap them in the face.

Because it is never just a snowman, or just a tower.

It's your work, and it's dear to you.

I feel the same way about raiding.

Sure, it's just a game. What's the big deal about losing your WA delegate or getting kicked out of your "cyberhome" by the new raider lord who swings the banhammer, right?

Maybe.

But it's never just a game.

It is an endeavor (though it may be a futile one) that people invest their time in and where people find joy. Raiding is a form of robbery, where these people are robbed of their joy.

Just like the poor guys whose snowman was destroyed.

Maybe that's why I have a hard time forgiving raiders...

(Don't take it personal, though)