An Online Social Experiment

I’ve been getting accused of hacking a lot recently. It’s not that I’ve gotten any better over the past few months — at least not that I’m aware. What’s more apparent is that the average skill level of the players on pubs has dropped as the game has aged. Whatever it is the decent/good players are doing now (if they’re still playing), it’s certainly not pubbing non-S&D servers.

Oddly enough, even though “hardcore” mode was always filled with lesser skilled players, it seems such servers have taken the biggest hit in the skill department. Since there are far too many “hardcore” servers and not enough normal ones, I end up playing them a lot even though I’m not enthused by the idea. More often than not, things go crazy and people get angry with me.

Here’s an example of the kind of crap I’ve been pulling off recently.

I got an idea the other day, and even though it was only a few days ago, I don’t remember exactly where it came from. Maybe my aliases like ihateyou, We Are All Dead, and — dare I say — poopknuckle were too “aggressive” and that somehow made it easier for people to bitch, whine, and accuse. I’d been getting accused so much that I decided to try a little experiment.

If I alias as a girl, will people stop accusing me?

Will I cease to be called a “faggot” or “hacker” or “hacker faggot” eighteen times per match? Will the experience, in general, be nicer even though I’m still destroying everyone and pissing them off just as I would with any other alias?

Picking from a random list of suggestions from FuLLBLeeD and modifying it slightly, I decided my alias would be punkrockgrl (and later added another “r” to round it out to punkrockgrrl). After all, emo/punk/scene girls are often hot as fuck for reasons I don’t understand. Surely it’d make things go over more smoothly with all the lonely virgins I’d be beating in an online video game, right?

I don’t have a definitive answer yet, but my presence has definitely been an annoyance to people not on my team.

Results thus far have been mixed. Some people have been more sociable. I’ve had dudes saying “lol” and “son of a…” when I pulled off something impressive/annoying rather than go straight to the accusations or calling luck/spam/lag. I’ve had guys ask me questions whereas normally they wouldn’t. One even asked what kind of music I listened to. I told him rap, of course. Things started out nicely; I thought my experiment was going to be a resounding success in the realm of showing just how pathetic and predictable most gamers are.

But I’d been playing in normal mode. Normal mode tends to be where more normal people reside. You’d never believe it offhand, but in general it’s the bad players who are the fat asses, the losers, the fuglies, the virgins, etc. The good ones are quite often normal-looking, non-virgin dudes with at least some sort of social life. This has been my experience with FPS games at least. It makes it all the sweeter when one of the losers tells a good player to “get a life” because it’s more likely that he already does more away from his computer than the loser. Projection, man. It’s brutal.

Anyway, once I made my way down to “hardcore” mode the shit started to hit the fan. As my kill-death ratios started hitting 5:1, 7:1, and 9:1 — a feat much easier to accomplish in “hardcore” mode — people started getting ruthless. What started out as a slightly more calm and peaceful endeavor ended up as a noob crusade against me.

When I started one round I had eight people from the previous round spectating me. Eight! I know bad players are often insecure about their badness, but god damn! Naturally, spectating didn’t help convince some of them. Like I said in the last post, once a dumbass is convinced you’re cheating, nothing’s going to sway his opinion. He’ll look for any little thing that he can attribute to hacks and will do so with fervor. He’ll force the smallest, most inconsequential thing to be proof of foul play in his mind even if it’s entirely irrelevant or guided by chance.

As for my general findings, I’m not sure the frequency of accusations has moved at all. I’m still getting accused, but there does seem to be a bit of a change. People are either less committed to their allegations — “Are you hacking?” or “Nice prefiring.” — or more scathing and dedicated to their pointless cause — “Stop hacking, you fucking nigger.” I guess the thought of there being a girl on the other end either makes people less or more douche-like than normal depending on how socially inept they are.

Overall, I was quickly labeled a “bitch” and told to go “suck a fat cock.” Sometimes it got more personal as some guy would call me a slut and tell me to suck his cock. It was entertaining to say the least. Whereas with a guy-like alias people tend to stick with generic name calling, they seemed to get a little more creative and serious whilst I was a girl. I guess we can chalk that one up to misogyny.

I mean, if girls don’t like you in RL™, it’s pretty easy to rail on them online and try to get your ego back. Then again, when a girl’s going 9:1 on your ass, I’m not sure recovery is even possible. Most of them just rage quit, and I laugh all the way to the bank where I exchange their testicles for cash money.

I have to wonder, though. What is it with white people and their obsession with the word “cock?” “Dick” is so much nicer, in my opinion. “Cock” has a porn-like ring to it — it sounds forced and fake.