sunglasses wrote:Just remember, it's your character in the game that has the negative traits-not you. Some people really, really get into role playing. Such as Notch.
Hey, kiss my grits Suns. :P
On the real, though, a big ol' part of my little guy's journey in that thing was how close to home it all started hitting over time. I have, over the years, sacrificed quite a lot of the things that most people just sort of embrace as normal, all for the sake of principles. And while I continue to assert that there is a wealth of intangible benefits to be had from living that way, the problem is that
many of the tangible benefits I once enjoyed are gone, and this because of eschewing those principles even for a split second. Not all of the things that put me in this position are things that are universally disdained; only some are particularly terrible.
The biggest issue I had in playing was that it felt like the people who killed at night and robbed and spat at authority were the ones who were going to win. What irked me particularly was the emphasis on everyone having a happy life as a result of winning. It just didn't seem fair. I thought of several cases of people who were tried for a long period of time for murder, and ultimately acquitted, and their declarations of life finally getting back to normal. Life isn't going to ever go back to normal for the families of the murdered one, and life is ended period for the victim. Where the hell is the justice in that? Now that's real life, and this was a game, of course, and telling myself that is always a shot of fresh perspective. I suppose I'm just very tender-hearted. Examples keep springing to mind: I know a couple friends who experienced bombings near their houses, and both seemed so nonplussed about it. There's a woman I know at the airport who broke up with her worthless and possibly abusive boyfriend, only to reunite with him because "it's a lot cheaper" and using his indiscretions as an excuse to start keeping her own dark secrets.
There's another woman I know... she had an affair with a man a couple years ago. I knew her and the guy both pretty well, and I know the details of it accurately. He'd wanted to keep a safe distance once it seemed like their friendship was getting too close, but after he took a step back she'd get a little desperate; I guess her husband was very distant and even a little cold sometimes. One day they were together with friends and she was surreptitiously trying to get him all worked up, and finally he had to ask the next day what was happening with them. She said she'd fallen in love with him and had given it a lot of thought, and was ready to run off. She'd been married to her husband ten years at that point, and he was married too. Once the affair got to be too much for his conscience, they both told their respective spouses, and while she was still ready to leave, he started to regret his actions terribly. This led to them breaking up, staying with their spouses. It also led to her telling her friends that she'd been all but raped, and in general making herself look as innocent as possible. He lost a great many friends because of these events.
That's part of what got my goat, too. At one point Moo said that everyone had pretty much dropped all pretenses of hiding who they were. Now that deception is a part of the game, but for some reason it started to strike out at me when people were just getting away with doing these terrible things. It reminded me of that silly woman who messed with my friend. Of course he brought hell on himself with his own stupidity, and I don't mean to excuse that either. And AGAIN... all that was real life, and this was a lark. I was a pirate in the last game and didn't have any fun little quirks of conscience killing people and deceiving in that one. I think this game just kind of intersected with a point in my time where injustice started really affecting me. It's a phase I'm sure, and it'll pass.
The POINT of all this ranting is... it wasn't very fair of me to put all that inner turmoil into a character in a game that's supposed to be fun, and I'm sorry if it's ruined anyone's experience. I will endeavor to divorce real life from roleplay a little more as time goes on.