The "gaping chasm" between blog readers and bad players

One of the reasons I love blogging is the commenters. When people comment on my blog, it reassures me that I am not writing for only myself and that people are actually interested in what I write. However, one of the best things about having commenters is when a commenter posts something that makes me think even more deeply about what I have written. That happened on my last post, Damage Meters and compensation, when Mzungu of The Hitchhiker's Guide to Azeroth said, "I get the feeling that there is a world of reasonable minded folk that read and write wow blogs, and then a gaping chasm separating them from the annoying people who post meters, who obsess over gearscore and who sell single arrows on the auction house." This is something I have seen lamented in the comments section on other blogs as well. Whenever someone posts a post with sage advice that would make our gaming experience much more smooth if everyone took it, inevitably someone will comment saying, "Sadly, the people who do [undesirable behavior] will probably never read this." One has to wonder, then: why do we write such posts?

I suppose one of the reasons is camaraderie. When someone writes a post admonishing something the masses are doing, it allows us to rally around a common purpose, the purpose of trying to eradicate that behavior. Whether or not we do eradicate that behavior really doesn't factor into it, for we feel as if we are somehow part of the solution. We feel that by agreeing with the person writing the post and perhaps writing about the topic in our own blog, we are supporting the cause (whether it be the anti-recount cause or the anti-DPS-doing-the-tank's-job cause) in question. This feeling of camaraderie feeds into another aspect of the "gaping chasm phenomenon" that I feel is worth mentioning: feelings of superiority. Don't try to deny it; when you read a post about some bad behavior that the masses are perpetuating that you yourself are not participating in, you feel good knowing that you aren't part of the problem, even if you aren't part of the solution. You feel like a better player, compared to those who pull for the tank or shout "go go go" in party chat. Posts telling people how not to behave help those who don't behave that way feel good about not behaving that way.

But do these posts do the community any good? We know that they allow us feeling smugly superior to those who perpetuate the behaviors we look down upon, but what if that is a bad thing? After all, the idea that there is a "gaping chasm" between blog readers and bad players is a very essentialist* idea, so it precludes the notion that these bad players could improve with the right guidance and advice. By shoving all of the players we encounter in our time in the game into the category of "bad players," we forget that there is nothing inherent in players that makes them bad, and truth be told, that concerns me.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are players out there who chose to not improve (those who deserve the title of "noob", rather than the title of "newb"), and the people who maliciously do things like listing single arrows on the auction house at full price or ninja'ing loot probably won't be as eager to change as someone who is just making mistakes in a PuG, but I think there's something wrong about the idea that there are "bad players" and "good players". Now, I'm sure people will be eager to say, "But they can improve; we aren't saying they can't." Perhaps you aren't, but allow me to propose a hypothetical situation. Suppose you are in a heroic. A mage in full ICC gear is AoE'ing everything to death and causing more threat than the tank can keep up with, so he is constantly pulling aggro and drawing the attention of the healer away from the tank. Then, to top it all off, as the run is nearing its end, he posts recount in the party chat to show that he had the highest DPS.

Now, there are a few things you can do in this situation. One is to say nothing to him, to curse his ways silently under your breath, and leave when the run is over, happy to just have your emblems. You can also admonish him by calling him out on his behavior and talking down to him. Finally, you could take the proactive approach in, whispering him if possible, asking him at the beginning of the run to tone down his AoE and give the tank some time to build aggro. I would guess that 99% of people take the first option, while a select few of us take the second from time to time. I have done it in the past, and I can tell you from experience that it doesn't change a thing. That leaves us with the third option, and though many people would like to see it as the ideal way to handle this kind of situation, I bet many of you haven't tried to proactively help people improve their gameplay, and I would bet those who have did so with a person who was clearly just new to heroics, not the kind of person who seemed to be more well-acquainted with the game and more set in their ways, like an overgeared DPS who pulls aggro.

Of course, perhaps these people are capable of change. Perhaps some of those DPS don't realize that they are making the tank's job difficult and are thinking," as long as everything is dying and none of us die, it's ok." Perhaps those DPS that over-aggro the tank and think nothing of it would be willing to change their ways. Perhaps those inconsiderate people who seem set in their ways could change with the right guidance. Or perhaps they're just jerks who will never change and just need to be put up with. If you disagreed with me until that last sentence, then you just proved my previous point about essentialist thinking.

So where does that leave us bloggers? If there is indeed as wide a chasm between blog readers and "bad players" as we seem to think there is, then writing these posts is really a self-serving activity. We do it to feel like we are making a difference while giving us a way to feel superior to other people, boosting our ego. I'm not saying that someone who works with their group rather than against their group shouldn't feel superior to those whose impatience and desire to show off hinder the run, nor am I saying that people who practice fair auction house etiquette shouldn't feel superior to the kind of people who put up single arrows at the price of stacks. What I am saying is that those feelings shouldn't need enforcement. We shouldn't need to encourage each other to feel better about ourselves as players because we engage in these fair practices.

With that said, I am not suggesting that we all accept that these players exist without trying to do anything about it. I fully support healers who refuse to heal DPS who consistently pull aggro, as well as tank who go into DPS mode when that happens. I encourage people to undercut players who put up single arrows for full price or to warn other people about their scam. What I am suggesting, however, is that if we truly believe that the members of the WoW blogosphere are indeed superior in their behavior to the general hoi polloi of Azeroth, then we should focus our efforts on trying to improve the behavior of the non-blog-reading community, rather than on preaching to the choir by writing posts giving advice that we already follow. We should focus on posts that talk about how we can get the community to not focus so intently on damage meters, rather than posts that simply talk about how bad damage meters are. We should focus on posts that talk about how we can discourage worship of the all-mighty gear score, rather than posts that simply talk about how skill is more important than gear. In general, we should focus on mobilizing the blogosphere, rather than telling it things it already knows.

And if I am wrong, and if there are members of the WoW blogosphere who can benefit from being told to not focus exclusively on damage or to not make other such basic mistakes, then there must not be such a gaping chasm between blog readers and bad players in the first place, meaning our posts are good for something.

*For those who don't know, essentialism is the view that if someone or something has a certain identity (such as "WoW player" or "bad player"), then there must be certain aspects of that person or thing that are always true. For example, the idea that all WoW players are anti-social and must be addicted to the game is an essentialist idea.