Sunday, January 23, 2011

Tobold, the true believer

There's something genuinely scary about Tobold's philosophical undercurrents. His posts called 'Freedom of choice' and 'Morality' (I'd link, but you don't need a link). Perhaps your sitting there thinking hey, it's a game, your leasure activity, and your playing whatever class you want or something. Oh no, actually there's this social responsiblity you have to play the class you have. Your not playing it because you chose to, but because some system of morality decided it.

"It's just a game, I want to play DPS, and nobody can tell me to play something I don't choose"? Fortunately the question of what is right and wrong has been extensively discussed by clever people hundreds of years ago. And one very good test was proposed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant. It is called the categorical imperative, and invites you to simply think what would happen if everybody acted exactly like you.

Ugh - you know, in real life people can miss out on food or shelter - the very things of survival and some sort of human level of happyness.

So where does Tobold then take a morality meant to help people not die in real life? Into a game of all things, where your character can't even die!

Yeah, so everyone in the game acts like you AND...who dies!?

The only people who have any real life issue with this are those so damn addicted to the game that they can actually be hurt somehow by certain ways of playing it. And you know what, if your in that position, it's not a 'te-he, I'm addicted' thing, it's a AA sort of thing. You have a major problem. You don't blog on morality of others, you instead take a good hard look at yourself and realise your whole life has been set to gravitate around this 'game'.

Morally wrong that people want to play DPS? Even if everyone wanted to play DPS, somehow morally wrong? This is the basic, default sort of dim philosophical thinking that in previous decades would condemn gays - why? "Cause they are wrong!!1!" Why, what do they do? Destroy buildings, shoot people with guns (more than hetrosexuals do)? Something like that? Some practical issue?

Why have gay people become normalised? Well, it depends, humble reader, whether maybe you just find them normalised since everyone else did it and you went with the flow. I really hope that isn't the case and you've questioned it. To me, why they were normalised is because when you actually look at the practical ramifications of gays - they are no different from hetrosexuals.

So here - oh, everyone plays DPS and it's....morally wrong? WTF? I'm starting more and more to think Tobold must look like Stan from American Dad. No - the practical ramifications of everyone playing DPS is - bumpkis. Nada. Zilch. If it's more than that, you've developed an addiction. Think - which would be easier to give up? Cigarettes or WOW?

Freedom of choice must have certain limits, and these limits are somewhere where your freedom impinges on the freedom of others...But I can't accept total freedom of choice without limits, not even in a game.

He says, impinging on the freedom of others in how he can't stand some peoples freedom impinging on others freedom.

It's like the human mind, with Tobolds being no exception from the norm, can't help but feel it's freedom crimping isn't and is simply right (as opposed to wrong!), while the other guys freedom crimping is just terrible and really needs to adhere to X (insert freedom crimping method X to try and stop freedom crimping method Y).

I don't think some peoples brains can really handle others having freedom of choice, even when it's actually a fairly limited range of choice as presented in WOW.

"SHIT! A world where people just do whatever!"

It's like they deny that fact about the real world so much, they go and take their denial into games as well.

Tobolds another guy who so obediently absorbed a morality into his being, he never actually questioned the practical reasons for it, if any. So he can't help but project that morality absolutely everywhere, as he has no rational metric of what physical things it's supposed to be in relation to.

A true believer.

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