Let me give you my opinion on people in general:
One third is stupid as a brick, another third is (in a varying degree) mean and only the remaining third is somewhat bearable. Besides other character traits you will also find a certain level of ignorance interspersed between all three parts (not surprisingly showing the clearest in the mean portion).
You can see that all in all the odds are pretty much stacked against me liking a person. I also find that the older I get the more I despise people who go out their way to be pricks (some intentional and others not even realizing it).
Agreed, some of those I’m labeling ’stupid’ may indeed never had the chance to educate themselves and to learn how to use their brains beyond the basic functions. Still, even such a valid excuse can only carry so far. And not rarely I wished that speech was one of those functions restricted to a higher degree of neural complexity. And let’s face it: There are tons of people with a fairly normal IQ who manage perfectly to act as if IQ was a four-letter-word.
I’m shouting all that down to you from a seemingly very high horse. Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. While I would not call myself stupid or mean I have enough questionable character traits to realize I’m not too much of an endearing person myself. This consequently leads to a healthy amount of self-loathing, since I’m not very ignorant, either. So don’t mistake that as an “I’m better than the rest of the world”-speech. I just don’t allow my opinion about myself to soften how much people manage to annoy me.
I always thought that with age I would learn to become more lenient, more tolerant. I’m still waiting for that to set in. Until then my default attitude is that I will suspect anybody to be a prick until proven otherwise.
All in all social interaction is a delicate dance between enjoying it and restraining myself from strangling the person in front of me [1]. And while social interaction on the internet is in many ways a different beast the basics stay the same. Stupidity, meanness, ignorance are just as prominent (if not more so) than in real life. One major difference is that it’s often easier to walk away from it than in a given situation in the real world. At this moment “walking away” looks like an appealing choice.
Consequently multiplayer games hold little interest to me right now. I will buy Portal 2, but I doubt I will play it with others. Unless Battlefield 3 has a decent enough single player mode I won’t buy it (and of course it will primarily – or even exclusively – be multiplayer, so there you go).
As for TF2: I still love it and I know where to get into a decent enough game with people who to a majority belong into the “bearable”-section of my “people-scale”.
But even when I jump into a game occasionally I do so in a detached kind of way, keeping a distance between me and the others and avoiding all kind of social interaction beyond the game mechanics. Of course that might easily make me look like a strange and arrogant prick myself. Trust me, the irony is not lost on me. [2]
All this has very little to do with TF2. It’s a bit of a soul-baring and probably more personal than I would usually feel comfortable to share, and you most likely be interested to read. There’s a certain amount of self-indulgence, but I guess every now and then we are all entitled to something like that. But it also seems appropriate as it plays into the reasons why I’m discontinuing the Fort.
If you want a piece of wisdom to take away from the drivel above all I can offer you is probably the fact that you should cherish every person you get along with well (let alone those you really like or even love), since each of those are rare and most obviously part of an endangered species.
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