Pam's Corner

Example: I downloaded Friday the 13th because it’s free on psn. I dunno how to play, so I just enter quick play and I’m matched with 3-4 kids on mic. Immediately on mic they’re shitty and disparaging to each other. They laugh at each others deaths, they actively work against team mates and self sabotage, they call each other “fags”, etc. From the sounds of the voices they cannot be older than 13-14.

I put on my mic and just decide I ain’t havin it. I am nice. I thank them for barricading doors or leaving me items. When they break free from Jason’s grasp I say “good job!” or I try to help them. One kid survived for most of the match by himself. When he dies, I tell him he did a fantastic job.

The mood shift is practically INSTANT. These kids almost immediately stop being dick heads. They start encouraging each other and being kind. After the match all of them try to friend request me. Which should tell you a couple of things:

A) kids want to be kind, and they want to have a nice time playing games. But encounters with adults like me or so rare that they’ve trained themselves to instantly put on a toxic, shitty, defensive veneer when encountering any new person online. It’s literally just THAT EASY to not groom a horrible gaming community, it’s just that NO ONE does it.

B) the speed of which they all tried to friend me was cute, but paints for me such a sad picture? Like these kids are SO desperate to find people to play with who aren’t crappy jerks. They played with me for 10 minutes TOPS and all instantly tried to reach out to me.

There’s this park in South Africa called Pilanesburg where in the late 20th century, the government would “cull” elephant populations by killing all the adult elephants. The only ones left were the ones that were super young. Fast forward to the mid-90s, and a lot of the baby elephants had grown up and were going around stabbing rhinos to death (much like many young men who have experienced trauma do).

Since rhinos were endangered, the people in charge of the park were going to kill the aggressive elephants, as they did at many other national parks that had the same thing happen. But at Pilanesburg, they decided instead to bring some adult male elephants into the park, and immediately the rhino killings stopped.

OP acted like a responsible adult elephant.