Impatience

Whenever I play online games, it always comes to my attention that people are extraordinarily impatient, at least while others around them are just screen names. The two games that brought this to my attention are Combat Arms, the free MMO from Nexon, and Left 4 Dead, the not-free zombie apocalypse simulator from Valve. In both cases, players sit in an online lobby and chat it up until the room leader decides that they have enough players to start. Once the game starts, everyone has fun. However, there are two instances of impatience here that always make the game a little uncomfortable for me.

The first instance of impatience is the most basic: People will get tired of waiting in the lobby and will start telling the room leader to start the game. This would make sense if they did it in a normal fashion, but unfortunately most people online would rather take the more forceful, less-effective method of spamming "start," "go," or otherwise in all-caps until they get what they want. This would also be at least somewhat reasonable if the person was just easily-irritated. However, since the internet revolves around the user even when they're playing an online game with other people, this is the sort of conversation you get:

Cen_Beta: Wow, he wanted you to go when we only had 3 [players]
*NaClsalt enters the lobby, others follow*
NaClsalt: NO GATING
Cen_Beta: Indeed'
NaClsalt: rdy up
NaClsalt: start
NaClsalt: start
NaClsalt: MAPLE (the room leader)
NaClsalt: STAT
imyourdad2: GO
MrQuintero: SATRT
NaClsalt: ...are you afk...
Killer999: go maple
NaClsalt: GOD
imyourdad2: GO GO GO GO OG OG O G OG GG
MrQuintero: B****
imyourdad2: GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Killer999: come on

One important thing to note is that NaClsalt started saying everything he did IMMEDIATELY after he entered the room. He didn't even wait for the leader to recognize that he had entered. This whole conversation took place over the span of ten or twenty seconds. This phenomenon is unfortunately typical of online games as a whole, and is strange to see when the message given to me growing up was one of delayed gratification.

The second form of impatience comes into play when the game has actually started. In certain online games where there are classes that have specific spots that they are best suited for, whenever someone new comes on and doesn't know such things, people have a tendency to say "OH NO THEY'RE A NOOB KICK THEM OR ELSE WE'LL LOSE." I find this odd for two reasons. The first is that everyone has to start somewhere, and you won't know where those spots are except by seeing other people doing it or experimenting yourself. The second reason is that to appease such people, the only real way to do it (aside from outright avoidance, in which case they would never get any new players) is to enter those games as a spectator and just follow whatever class you're looking to play or do what I did before I got Team Fortress 2 and just watch a bunch of gameplay videos online that illustrate strategies for each class. I don't know about you, but I play online games because they're fun, not because I want another class. It's becoming harder and harder to find people who are just interested in a casual game of whatever you're playing anymore... It always has to be about winning. Especially when it comes to First-Person Shooters.

I read an article in the Psychology Today that my parents got for me about how people today are becoming increasingly rude. One example given by the author was when she, driving along, honked her horn at a driver who was about to crash into her as they were trying to park while talking on the phone. The other driver responded by flipping the author off before parking, getting out of their car, and saying "Just off to find a little inner peace, you redheaded b****!" It should be noted that this very aggressive woman was en route to her yoga class.

I'm not sure why people are suddenly losing their knack for chivalry, but it is definitely a problem.

Hype

When I was a kid, I never really noticed the holiday (or everyday) toy hype. I don't remember ever wanting something that the TV said I had to have. The main reason for this is that I was big on video games at the time (and probably always will be), and since video games weren't the must-have at the time, you didn't see too many commercials for them. If I wanted something, it was usually because one of my relatives took me to a store and said "pick something out," and I would find what interested me on my own.

Today, it's a different story. Many things are blown way out of proportion by their commercials, and the things that I think are the two most frequent repeat offenders are movies and video games. When I was a kid and the Super Nintendo was still new, I don't think preorders even existed. Now you have preorders, midnight releases, and events where people will line up outside a store hours before it opens just for the privilege of POTENTIALLY buying a game or console (if you line up too late, you might not get one). This also applies for movie commercials. Apparently the thing for movies now is to show you a bunch of half-second clips of the movie with epic music such as "O Fortuna" in the background and some narrator saying one word at a time. LIKE. RIGHT. NOW. Then following the release of the movie, they have commercials saying said movie is the #1 movie in America/in the world/of all time, regardless of how true that is. You can even find movies about this hype today, one being Jingle All The Way, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, andmovies that are part of the hype, such as The Wizard (which Nintendo used to advertise/build interest in Super Mario Bros. 3 for the NES).

The Wizard actually got me thinking... There are two sociological concepts I want to bring up, those being Idealization and Mystification. Idealization is when someone or something presents the ideal form of itself, such as when a person attends a job interview or when a toy appears in a commercial and appears to be more fun than it probably is. Mystification is when, having gained interest through Idealization or some other form, said thing generates more interest by not giving away anything at all about itself after that. The example used for this is celebrities: People are always interested in them because we see them in movies and then we don't usually hear anything else about them unless they really slip up. As such, their mystique keeps us intrigued, and we find them appealing and attractive.

I will end this post with a quote from Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, who does a weekly video game review called Zero Punctuation.

"There's a reason why I never play demos... demos create expectations and expectations color your opinion of the final product. For most people, the demo for Mirror's Edge colored their expectations a shimmering gold, only to realize once they bought the full game that they had been seeing the light reflecting off a stream of piss."

Academic Pressure

I remember when I was still in high school and we would occasionally have English class interrupted in order to have some aspect of college prep explained to us for the period. What we covered regarding college varied, but two that I remember specifically were when we were shown how to make a proper résumé and when we were shown how to fill out a college application. When making our résumés to submit to our selected colleges, I remember thinking that their ideal resume had an awful lot of extracurricular stuff on it. At the time, I wasn't too worried, and didn't seem to hinder me.

Fast-foward to today. I am in college and am getting similar talks on résumés and applying to colleges, only this time around it is for graduate school and everything seems a lot more pressing. The résumés have more to them, I am expected to do even more, and graduate schools apparently want you to be a student with perfect grades and an endless drive for you to be accepted (or at least, that's what the "ideal resume" would have you believe). I am never sure if such things are meant to show what you should strive for or just to scare you into doing some of those things for fear of falling behind everyone else in the competitive world of today, but I never understood it for two reasons:

1.) While I enjoy structure and do the work that is required, I also enjoy being laid-back and actually having fun once in a while.

2.) Much of what people do for their résumé, at least as far as I've witnessed, isn't because they are legitimately interested in it but rather as extra padding to give themselves a leg up on everyone else.

And as this escalates and people progressively pad more and more, the ideal résumé will only become more and more preposterous, as has the homework load given across all grades (the résumé given to me today by Career Services has "Sally Superstar" winning a different scholarship every year, being fluent in Spanish, and having two or three entries for each of the following categories: work experience, research experience, organizations, leadership activities, and volunteer work), we can only expect the pressure to pad to increase until something gives.

This leads into my reference of this post. In an article on overparenting in the most recent issue of Time, two terms were thrown around for such children who either were pressured into too many things by their parents or were just overwhelmed by the current school system: "Teacups" and "Toasties." They were named for their tendency to break down under the slightest stress or because they came into college already burned out (respectively).

I always worry that someday I may have to pad in similar fashion to get to where I want in the world. When did doing what you love stop being enough to get you where you want to be?