Reply To: Button Counters

[onlyonepinman 18062xp 2]

I’m going to be the voice of discord again here, Devil’s Advocate perhaps.

There’s nothing wrong with being a rivet counter. Or a lore whore. Or even being the opposite and being captain alpha strike. We all get into hobbies for different reasons – for some historical accuracy is one of the things they are interested in. Online communities, whilst allowing us to share with like minded people from across the globe also mean that we will more frequently encounter people with different views to us as well. It’s a double edged sword.

I don’t think the problem is that people are button counters but purely from how people behave, whether it’s in person or online, when they encounter people who don’t have the same motivation as they do.  I think with everyone sharing everything online all the time, we see the people with no social skills who are willing to point out all the historical flaws in someone’s army or someone’s painting far more frequently than we otherwise would and to be honest many of the people who do it online are the same in real life. Without access to online communities, if we were unlucky we might encounter a couple of these people in our local gaming community whether it’s a store or a gaming store. When we transition to online communities you get to those same people from every gaming community the world over.

There’s no easy solution either. Sure we can all dog pile on them when they do it but does that make us any better if we do? We can try telling them politely that what they’re doing isn’t cool however from experience (I have friends who can be a bit like this) they don’t have that filter and in many cases they can’t abstract the concept. They can understand that what they did in that instant was wrong and they can apologize but they can’t translate that into an abstract concept to drive a change in behavour overall. It’s surprising how many people are like this. I am not going to talk about people being in any kind of spectrum because I am not in anyway qualified to make that diagnosis, but I do know that there are people whose brains just seem to work differently and who struggle to grasp some of the social etiquettes we take for granted. I am reasonably certain there’s nothing they can do about that either.  Lacking social skills probably doesn’t make you a bad person, troubled maybe but not bad.

And of course, online there are trolls. Many, many trolls. Normally they just want to get a rise out of you. I won’t try to  guess what percentage of people online are trolls (and we’re all brutally honest, we have probably all done a little bit of it at some point or other, when we encounter someone who has pissed us off maybe). But even if 9 out of every 10 button counters are just idiot trolls, my preference would be to ignore them to make sure that we don’t dog pile onto someone who is probably genuinely well meaning but who for some reason lacks social skills.

I realise this doesn’t offer many solutions beyond “just ignore them”