The Guild Leader’s Girlfriend, or STFU Noob Geeks

There’s an old truism in MMOs: if your endgame guild leader’s girlfriend starts playing, it’s time to find a new guild.

The reason? An endgame guild requires a balance of trust to work. Give and take, especially if it’s a hardcore game where item drops are measured in months or years instead of weeks. You have to set a fair pecking order, and stick to it. Paladin A lots the drop next, even though you need it more, because he’s been tanking the raid for six months and you just started. You show up every raid, and you get more than Bob, who misses raids right and left. You start the instances, understanding you earn DKP that will get you what you want as long as you keep playing. No changing the rules, no cheating, etc. And if for some reason this happens, the leader either tosses the offender out, or people start leaving en masse.

But the girlfriend…yeah, she causes problems.

She shows up in your guild, and she NEVER follows the rules. Because there is a greater rule; the person you sleep with gets what she wants over random strangers on the net. Your guildmates aren’t going to yell at you irl, not have sex with you, make your irl days a living hell, and likewise. The rare good girlfriend will know this and not join your guild.

The bad one will let the power go completely to her head.

Nothing can kill a guild quicker than this. Nothing. She doesn’t get the culture, she hasn’t played long enough to understand the web of trust (boyfriend is great at power leveling), and she isn’t into the game enough to understand. So as soon as you see her, chances are you’ll start looking for a new guild.

I mention this because there are a lot of noob geeks (I want to say fake geeks, but I’m being kind) that are like this.

They come in, and immediately want to change everything to their benefit. The biggest offenders are the SJW’s.

SJW: “This industry is misogynist!”

D.M.: lists the twenty or so female heroes that have led superteams and generally been examples of equality 20 years or more ago, when people thought lolBuffy was progressive. Women have led both the X-Men and the Avengers, and the comic book industry has embarrassed almost every other aspect of culture, including literary novels, in how well women are represented.

SJW: Mansplaining!

The point in this is that you get people who are, well, scrubs. Sirlin calls a scrub a person who expects the rules of the game to always favor them, rather than understand the rules and the inequalities, and work with them. For geek culture in general, a scrub is someone who liked the movie Avengers. A normal noob geek will be “wow, that’s cool!” and start reading graphic novels, understanding the timeline, and learning more. They learn the rules of being a fan, more or less.

A scrub will immediately jump to complaining about Black Widow.

I’m calling them a scrub and not a fake geek because I assume they actually like the Avengers. Even if it’s a frustrated like. Something compels them. A fake geek is someone who doesn’t care at all, and just moves in to change things for their own purpose. But the scrub immediately tries to bend something they are in to their will.

I understand this because at one point, I was a scrub too.

What I learned, and it was not easy, was this: You need to love something and understand it before you can change it. Because then you will be aware of how much you stand to lose if you do. It is possible to destroy something fairly easy. Be it a guild, a game, a fandom, or what have you. If not destroy, divide it.

This matters for the Christian church, too.

Dear Gay Marriage people,

I would be a lot more understanding if you had any idea of what the church you are so heavily demanding to change is. You don’t strike me as people who love or understand the church. You strike me as scrubs at best, fake geeks at worst, who want to see the church divided and destroyed to benefit yourself. You want the church devs to patch in the nerf to the Christian faith you feel will even the playing field and no longer make LGBT a gimp class to play. You want the game to be something different than it is, so you are trying your damnedest to make it change.

But you don’t care.

I think you’d find people more interested if you realized that this isn’t a case of bowing down to Emperor Tolerance’s demands. That maybe if you argued that this orientation is something that has to be managed and that there is no good answers, rather than it being like gravity and we must conform. That if you had any reality, appreciation, or love for the faith, you’d be hesitant about acting. The universal Church may persist, but the local church may not. Remember Soviet Russia and Japan.

Sincerely,

D.M.

I think probably the best example of a Christian scrub is Rachel Held Evans. If you read her books, you quickly find out she has no idea what Christianity even is. The Year of Living Biblically was embarrassing that way. She just doesn’t get Christianity except in that she was raised in the lingo, but she sure is hell-bent on changing it to reflect the enlightened secular opinions she does understand and get. Whether in a game, or a faith, this is dangerous.

Now STFU noob geeks, and get back to learning the mechanics of the next raid. It’s just about not standing in the fire. The fire isn’t going to change, you know. Quit whining on forums already.