Warfare

I've started a new tactic with the main asshole in my game. I read an article a while back about how American men don't really have a lot of adult friendships with other men. They have buddies and companions, but no true friends who really talk to them and engage with them on an emotional level. In some cases, a lot of men don't get spoken to at all. This isn't all of them, of course, but a great deal of them do.

I started thinking about the dynamics of the difficult guy from the perspective of the male persona I was playing. What were his actions telling me? Well, for one thing, given the way he would sneer at teamwork, he probably never participated in team sports as a kid. Now for me as a kid who grew up fat, this seems like a good thing, but for many kids, especially boys given the way they are socialized, this is another point of loneliness and isolation.

I also examined why, in this persona, I was more offended by him taking gov after gov than I had been when I was just being myself. I realized it was because of the influence of growing up around hunters. Hunters have a limit to how much game they can take and it's considered in very bad form to go over that.

If I knew this just as someone on the margins of that culture, it was pretty certain the difficult dude was not part of it at all. Now, again, growing up the as a little fat girl, I have no problem that no one ever took me hunting. But for many boys (and yes, some girls too), this is a rite of passage into adulthood. Going into the deer woods isn't just about killing things. It's about hearing stories around the fire, getting taught skills by the older men, and earning their respect as you excel in your tasks. In other words, like with sports, it's another bonding experience.

I also realized that the male persona I was playing, given where he has grown up and the job I have designed him to have, WOULD HAVE done these things. He played baseball as a kid. He played it in high school too and knows the feeling of winning as a team. He's been in the deer woods with the men of his family since he was 11 or so, was happy when he was included. In fact, his sense of male inclusion is one of the reasons he's so chill most of the time.

With that in mind, when I encountered the difficult guy in the multiserver again, I engaged him in conversation. I didn't confront him for being difficult like almost everyone else does, I talked about the game, asked him some questions, and commiserated with him about certain aspects of it.

Later I came back into the multiserver. A gov was getting lower and lower. He was standing near it, but I went up anyway and hit it on 0. I got it.

"Oh I must have had the wrong skills on." He typed this in after congratulating me. It's possible he did, but it was sitting at 0 and he could have taken it at 10. I think it's more a matter of me having the right skills in this situation.