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Puppies in a Wasteland

Thinking about things in a rational way seems to elude most of the Internet and the parasites that are burrowed into its colon (i.e. forum posters). In fact surfing through the gaming forums lately is quite a smelly proposition – it’s a brown tide of uninformed bullshit floating around out there and I’ve pretty much had it.

For those that don’t know, video game forums are where gamers come together and post their thoughts and opinions on the stories of the day, in things called “threads.” On a theoretical basis it seems like a great idea but so does communal farming.

Stumbling across an intelligent gaming thread is like finding a box of happy Labrador puppies in the middle of war zone that has just been hit by a typhoon. You wonder A) how the puppies got there, B) how they manage to be so happy and full of life while everything else is drowned or burned and C) can I take one of them with me? As incongruous as the above situation may be, it’s not completely impossible – improbable, yes, but not outside the realm of possibility.

It’s these moments when I find puppies that I expect Rod Serling to walk into the room and launch into a monologue:

“Tonight, we meet an ordinary man, who, when presented with the most profound of things – a coherent forum thread – finds his sanity stretched to breaking. Little does he realize he has just entered the Twilight Zone.”

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And while I never end up hanging out the side of a jetliner shooting a revolver at a gremlin, some forum threads I’ve perused lately certainly make me feel that way.

The main problem is that pretty much any monkey with a keyboard and a shoddy dial-up connection can post astounding amounts of brainless gibbering – whether it’s about

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the minutia of the latest screenshots from the next “blockbuster” game or wild speculation based on rumors produced in other gaming forums, that may or may not be controlled by Microsoft or Nintendo or Sony or the Illuminati. And like some unwritten rule, the first dozen posts immediately following it need to be one-line responses such as:

LOL

Get lost, Sony fanboy.

This will not end well

Bullshot

[Pithy comment or cat picture] /thread

etc.

Typically on the thirteenth or fourteenth post someone makes a half-hearted attempt at debunking the original post by pointing out the factual errors and actually making specific and accurate references to sources that actually prove what they are saying. It then follows that Mensa Club rejects chime in with profanity laden nonsense until the thread is bumped from the main page.

Another problem is that forum moderators are human beings and therefore are subject to such trifling details as sleeping, eating, and, presumably, going to the bathroom. As such many forum threads can remain unchecked for hours at a time, which is akin to leaving a grain elevator door open at the approach of a cloud of locusts.

It’s this seemingly uncontrollable aspect that makes moderating a gaming forum like trying to pick-up a handful of diarrhea – it’s messy, unpleasant, and damn near impossible to do with your bare hands. Moderators get out their mop and bucket – trying to get a handle on the chaos – but it’s a losing battle. And it doesn’t help that some of those moderators are slathering their own diarrhea throughout the forum. It has become damn near impossible to have any kind of critical thought debated in a respectful and healthy manner.

This critical thought has cropped up occasionally on the Armchair Empire’s own forums and, I’ll be honest, it scares the hell out of me when it happens because I’ve trolled through sewers so long it’s hard to get the old brain ticking again – to rise to the occasion – in order to present some kind of cogent response to a well-made point. The last thing the vast majority of forum trolls wants to do is think – if a response can’t be made in one denigrating riposte, possibly taking a swipe at parentage of the other bottom feeders on the thread, it’s probably not worth responding to. Unless you have a picture of a cat handy.

If you look hard enough, there are gaming forums out there that actually manage some semblance of intelligence. A place where posters have the ability to use punctuation, not drop the f-word at the start of every sentence, and actually stay on the topic presented in the original post, offering honest and useful criticism and opinion. Finding them is the hard part.

- Omni

(October 12, 2007)


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