Thursday, May 3, 2007

In-game Harassment Leads to RL Beating (lol!)

I picked up on this story earlier this morning. I'm not sure if it's real or not (I'm assuming it is because of the police report), but it's definitely worth noting either way. Here are a few snippets from the article:

Bronco Carson, a World of Warcraft player from Mexico, reported to police on Saturday that three men broke into his home and beat his arms with clubs and totalled his computer. The reason? Carson had been repeatedly ganking the WoW character of the wife of one of his assailants...

...Carson made the mistake of giving the woman his address, telling the woman that "if her husband was man enough to just come meet me to settle this."


Now, I've witnessed some pretty pathetic attempts at gaining the attention of female players over the years. Much of the behavior breaks down into what can be considered harassment, which justifiably results in two very frustrated parties. But I have NEVER heard of someone ridiculously giving out his address and ASKING to be confronted in a physical manner, just to maintain communication with the female he's essentially stalking. I mean, that's just a new level of pathetic, isn't it?

Alex has it's fair share of creeps, to say the least. They engage in elementary-grade-level practices in order to tell a girl, directly or indirectly, that they like her. You remember what you'd do back in the day, right? You'd follow the girl around, showing off your skills on the monkey bars, always targeting her during dodge ball, putting bugs in her food, eating glue just to gain her attention, flinging mud in her direction, etc. That's what this is all about. The difference is that we're no longer little kids and that such behavior can no longer be explained away as a result. Unfortunately, it's not punished either.

WoW provides a consequence-free shelter for such individuals - we've been dealing with the same "stalkers" on Alex for years now, even after many complaints to Bliz about their behavior. So when a player gives out his real address and asks for the consequences to come find him, it's a pretty fair measure of how juvenile his mind really is and how disconnected he is from reality. I feel bad for him and people like him, really, because they are truly sick in the mind.

One thing this story highlights is that there ARE consequences to how we act in-game, whether we see them or not. People do get angry, annoyed, etc, and you will earn a reputation that probably speaks greatly about the kind of person you truly are (in an indirect sense, this gets into why Prom Kings values lengthy applications and downtime over "progression," but that's a completely different post). If you're the kind of person who doesn't care about such things, well, I'd like to see how that affects you in other aspects of your life (probably not so well, I'd imagine). And, you might not want to give out your address. You might one day find yourself like our good friend Bronco here.

By the way, what kind of parents name their kid "Bronco?" Either he's incredibly impressive in the nethers, or his parents must have a horse fetish I don't care to think about any further...

3 comments:

Zy said...

Jago whats your address again?

Jagoex said...

I live in a van down by the river.

Zy said...

A homeless hippy? D: