Aggravating Encounters with Teens and a Moron

I couldn’t resist telling this story one more time, just to amuse Kenshu, who heard me relate it a few times last night.

So I log into WoW, and there in the private chat channel we use is some noob named Geometrix, which is a name I’ve never seen before.

I ask him whose alt he is. He replies that he doesn’t have an alt on this server. “Well, how did you get into our chat?” “I was on autojoin.”

“Well, it’s a private channel, and you should leave.” No response.

“The command to leave is /leave [channelname].” No response.

Now in WoW chat, if you are the only person in a channel, you are the moderator. And since he had blundered in there before I logged in, he had moderator status. So I couldn’t kick him out, although I tried all the commands.

After much cursing and swearing and command trying, Kenshu logged in, and I said something like “hey Kenshu, there’s a noob in the chatroom who refuses to leave, I’m trying to find the command to kick him out.”

At which point Geometrix responds with “Well! If it’s THAT important to you . . .” and goes on a tirade. He leaves the chat and the proceeds to send me angry tells. I put him on ignore. Then I proceed to gossip to everyone who will listen about the jerk I just encountered. He was sort of unique and special in his obnoxiousness, even for a WoW player.

Then afterwards I was drawn into a discussion regarding a couple of teenage girls in the guild. They are officers in the guild because they’re both knowledgeable and enthusiastic players that have come up through the ranks. Last night one of them said something icky to a guy player that she knows as a friend, and a butthead player, FightingIrish, popped up and said something to the effect of “eww, that’s so gay.”

They were ready to throw him out right away but instead threatened him with it. I said something about “probable cause” and “due process” – can’t help it, overexposure to long boring legal documents. And sure enough, the dude responded to the baiting by getting more offensive, so we threw him out. And then, the guildleader had a meeting with the two teen girls, me and another older female player.

Let me just say that interacting with teenage girls makes me very sympathetic to my parents for putting up with teenage me. It also makes me extra glad that my tubes are tied. The girls turned everything into being all about them, took criticism extra harshly and immediately assumed we didn’t want them around. Not true, we just wanted them to stop abusing their officer powers, it’s bad for morale.

So after a lengthy session of reasoning, reassuring and fending off retaliatory conversational low blows, we ended the meeting. And afterwards one of them made sure to do everything we had asked her to stop doing – after the guildleader had logged out for a while. But she didn’t keep doing it, it was more like a token protest, and nobody easily offendable was on.

And our guildleader did a sterling job of using his psychiatric skills and teenager wrangling powers. I genuflect in awe.

I am of two minds about the teenage girl players. For one thing, having encountered quite a lot of creepy scumbag male gamers, I’m well aware that WoW is not the safest environment for them. But our guild has a lot of parents, older people and female gamers to rise up and squash any older guys trying to manipulate them.

And these particular teenage girls have ‘net smarts and although they sometimes slip and spill their real names, or deliberately set out to attract male attention as a means of controlling the space, they both seem more than capable of dealing with creeps.

So I think they’re probably fine where they are, in our strictly moderated group, and I would worry about them if they ran off to another guild where they might be outnumbered by guys or harassed by pervs.

Also, one of the things these games are demonstrably good for is teaching leadership and teamwork skills. The boys get plenty of that from sports and from their team oriented hobbies, but girls socialize differently, in cliques. I think the girls have done a great job of closing the academic gap but they, or WE if I’m going to go dividing humanity into two separate groups, still seem to be a little more inclined toward backstabbing oneupmanship than mutual cooperation (as do a lot of the younger male players as well). But anyway, without wading into the swamp of feminist theory, I think it’s really good for teenage girls to learn how to be team players in a friendly environment where they’ve got an ignore button and a report button in case harassment happens. I really hate it when I’m chilling with girlfriends and all they want to talk about is bad things their other friends or female celebrities are doing, or try to get me to take sides in whatever argument they’re engaged in. I definitely think everybody in the world could benefit from some teamwork practice, and especially teenage girls.

At the same time, they are a colossal pain in the neck, and I have major sympathy for anyone who has to deal with teenage girls on a regular basis. I couldn’t do it. I’ve functioned as “mom’s cool friend” in the lives of a few teenage girls, helped chaperone sweet 16s, things like that on a strictly part time basis. And I’m aware that not all teenage girls are alike and it’s very very very bad to make a generalization about an entire category of people.

Yet on the other hand the teenage girls that I’ve experienced tend to be dramatic, it’s always all about them, if you’re not paying attention to them you’re mad at them, if you are paying attention to them it’s probably because you’re committing some kind of mean grownup oppression upon them, they say mean argumentative things but if you forget they’re only teenagers and take the bait you can crush them and send them into agonies of self consciousness with a couple of wrong syllables.

Teenage boys can be difficult too, especially if they’re either in a pack, but the girls just strike me as somehow more obnoxious and at the same time needy. They remind me of my cat, who likes to come over and beg for attention, and then when I reach down to pet her she smacks my hand and runs away. Then she comes back and does it 40 more times.

Yeah, we grownup girls do the same things too. Get emotional over occasionally misinterpreted slights, act catty, stab each other in the back, flirt it up and hog all the attention and then cry when we get too much attention. We just tend to ease up on the teenager tactics as we get older, so it’s sort of overwhelming to see it in its raw and unformed state.

And we did sort of make one thing clear – you don’t have to like everybody. Just because someone works your nerves doesn’t mean that one of you is wrong and one is right. Or that anybody wants to hear your twelve point argument on why you are right and they are wrong. Which led to a discussion of players we grownups didn’t get along with, and why, and that we could exist in the same group with people we didn’t like by doing our best to avoid the friction.

And then, after the group broke up, I was stuck in conversation with one of the girls. She was terribly concerned I thought she was a homophobe, because the whole mess started over FightingIrish calling her gay (due to a false assumption she was a boy).

There was a thread in the official WoW forums the other day. Six pages long, the last I looked. The top post: “why do people make female characters?” Posted by a guy who was clearly convinced that playing games is an exclusively male thing, and all the female toons around him were played by men.

I replied to her that I certainly did not think she was. She was very glad. She told me that her brother is gay and she feels very protective of him and opposed to the homophobes we run into in games. I replied that I was “str8" but live in San Francisco and quite a lot of my friends and neighbors aren’t. She said that she would never want to be seen as being unfriendly to the GLBTQ community – that’s how she said it, even including the Q (stands for “gay lesbian bisexual transgender and queer” – the “queer” was a recent addition to encompass anyone who doesn’t fit the other labels yet doesn’t consider themselves straight aka str8).

And at that point I realized that the whole mess had conflagrated into a brouhaha because she was feeling very protective of her brother and of people like him.

That’s a damn good kid in my book, even if her methods weren’t the best.

Still doesn’t mean I’m going to volunteer to chaperone the high school prom or go be a counselor at Girl Scout camp or something. Oh hell no.

But obnoxious as they are, I’m glad they’re in my group, and I feel a little bit similarly protective towards them too.

And meanwhile, here’s a video of rabbits in a hopping competition.