#john rants

To me, this is just an infuriatingly cruel part of culture where I see so often the abuser defended and the abused put down. I have worked Security for many, many years and I have seen all sorts of terrible things people will do to each other for profit, revenge, or even just plain fun. I’ve help document, investigate, and clean up scenes covered in blood and broken teeth because “she should have known better than to come here with them”, I’ve seen people afraid to report their abuser because they were told to “just toughen up and deal with it, it’s normal to fight sometimes”, I’ve been one of the last people to see a person alive because someone took a joke too far. Now, I’m not saying that a simple PK means that, that person is the most terrible person that ever lived and must be clearly committing every crime in the book. What I am saying is that, just because you /can/ do something, doesn’t mean you should. I’m saying that people mocking other people because they said that their feelings were hurt, or that they don’t enjoy having to be pitted against other people unwillingly is wrong. Yes, it’s important to do your best to grow some tough skin to help you weather the difficult times. But tough skin is still skin. It still has a finite number of layers and it still can be broken and it can still bleed. You never know if the player you just PK-ed or the player you just mocked for speaking up was on their last straw. In society we’re taught to take being put down at school, by our bosses and by customers at work, by that one person on the bus, by the people we see online and just /deal/ with it. But a person can only deal with so much before it weighs down on them and it can really, really hurt. How about instead of asking someone to deal with it, we told them their feelings were valid and maybe offered an alternative instead of laughing at them? How about just because you /could/ be a jerk to someone, you decided not to? I know a game isn’t ‘real life’, and not every pvp-er is Sin Incarnate, there are plenty of awesome battleground games, e-sports, races, and all sorts of things where people have to compete and outdo each other and I’m a huge fan of those! But I want people to remember that games still touch other people’s lives and at the end of the day your fun should never come at the expense of someone else just because you can.