It’s sad that toxic game culture is so prevalent cuz like. As someone who has ended up in random matches with kids before, I can attest to how fucking easy it is to reverse and un-teach shitty attitudes in kids.
Example: I downloaded Friday the 13th because it’s free on psn. I dunno how to play, so I just enter quick play and I’m matched with 3-4 kids on mic. Immediately on mic they’re shitty and disparaging to each other. They laugh at each others deaths, they actively work against team mates and self sabotage, they call each other “fags”, etc. From the sounds of the voices they cannot be older than 13-14.
I put on my mic and just decide I ain’t havin it. I am nice. I thank them for barricading doors or leaving me items. When they break free from Jason’s grasp I say “good job!” or I try to help them. One kid survived for most of the match by himself. When he dies, I tell him he did a fantastic job.
The mood shift is practically INSTANT. These kids almost immediately stop being dick heads. They start encouraging each other and being kind. After the match all of them try to friend request me. Which should tell you a couple of things:
A) kids want to be kind, and they want to have a nice time playing games. But encounters with adults like me or so rare that they’ve trained themselves to instantly put on a toxic, shitty, defensive veneer when encountering any new person online. It’s literally just THAT EASY to not groom a horrible gaming community, it’s just that NO ONE does it.
B) the speed of which they all tried to friend me was cute, but paints for me such a sad picture? Like these kids are SO desperate to find people to play with who aren’t crappy jerks. They played with me for 10 minutes TOPS and all instantly tried to reach out to me.
tl;dr: The kids are alright. Adults are shit heads.
I cant agree with this post more
I witnessed something similar with my younger brother (this was when he was In fifth grade so bear with me here) and his friends. The teacher assigned for them to build a somewhat accurate spanish mission in Minecraft because their school had gotten some iPads and she needed to assign them something other than a PowerPoint.
Now here’s the thing. Most of these boys, my brother included, have ADD/ADHD. About a week into the project all they had in their shared world was chaos. Somebody filled the place with tnt and lit it up. Holes everywhere. Whenever one would attempt to try and build something (mostly wood huts and not the actual project) it would be destroyed within minutes as the boys began to insult each other heavily and complain that the design was ugly.
I brought my own ipad with me and decided to sit with the boys while they continued their reign of terror. I joined the world and built a hallway out of brick at the very center of this war zone. Immediately one of them tried to destroy it under the impression that “it looks bad”.
“Well, what should I make it out of?”
“Diamond.”
The ten year old mind is a mystery to me…
Anyway, then I showed him some pictures similar to these:
I reasoned that it would be easier to sway this kid toward another pretty block than trying to get him to stick to the materials of the time, so I asked him if he would like to help me replace my brick design with quartz (eh, it’s white).
Bam! One of the ten year old anarchists is dutifully building me a glittering gem hallway for our insanely rich monks.
The other three are off somewhere still yelling at each other and setting off explosives, but we have something built. Much to my surprise the kid asked if he could build the church next because he “wanted to build the most important part”.
Here’s where I learned something important. I don’t have ADD or ADHD but as I said before my brother does. When he gets fixated on something, he’s really gets into it. Once a few minutes had passed and this kid already had four walls up I decided to grid up the entire mission. One gets the church, one gets the farm, etc.
After playing the game with them for an hour, I had a pretty good idea of where each kid should go.
Church kid, I found, was very particular about materials and shape(hence his hangup over the brick). I gave him free reign over the outer walls of the mission and showed him the reference pictures to get him started.
My brother liked the farms most (he was building dirt domes over the cows don’t ask me how I made this connection it just worked, okay), so he was in charge of building pens for the animals.
Another kid was, at first glance, very loud and bossy when it came to decorating (constantly said we were making chairs wrong). Turns out he likes interior design, like putting benches and beds in the little rooms, so his bossiness was just frustration with my brother’s artistic sense I guess.
Another was very good with placing trees and plants around the exterior (I guessed this because he covered the place in a ridiculous amount of trees and I asked him if he would like to know where they are supposed to go). He got to make a vineyard for us and organized how the crops should go.
So how did it turn out?
Actually very nice!!
So what did we learn? Kids actually like to play games and be praised for their creativity and intuition. If I had just told them to stop messing around rather than direct their attention to areas within their interests, they never would have gotten anything done.
After an hour of gaming they:
Mirrored my language; “thank you!”, “which part are you working on?”, “I like this block.”
Realized each other’s strengths; “hey [kid name] can you help me with the roof?” “How do you make the big trees [kid name]?”
Were able to articulate exactly what they did or didn’t like without using force; “that looks good!”, “how about we put it there?”, “I don’t like that block, how about this one?”
On the plus side, since we moved the game file to my device for safekeeping, I now have a cute little souvenir of the time I played Minecraft with four ten year olds.
This is a really long post, but it’s super important. In games like Fortnite where you’ll find lots of kids, it’s important (if you can) to steer them away from toxicity. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run into kids who talk like toxic adults and the act of just being nice to them completely turns them around.
I saw this thread on twitter and was able to get screen shots literally minutes before the Grand Prairie Texas High School resource officer deleted his account. In just one day @flybrownhuniee’s tweet had over 70,000 retweets and 180,000 likes.
They look so proud of themselves. I’m actually embarrassed for them. These are adults in charge of children, and they’ve lowered themselves to taking selfies with property they’ve stolen from the young and defenseless.
Such bravery these cops display. Literally stealing candy from children, and then hiding when an armed shooter comes to murder children. Thin blue line who?
I recently welcomed another freeloader into my home! her name is Tinkerbell and she’s my boyfriend’s cat of 7ish years. she escaped his house after a break-in about a year ago and suddenly showed up on the front doorstep 9 months later, and we’ve finally been able to bring her inside! she won’t meet my orange boy Josh (who I submitted a while back) for a while but I’m looking forward to their Halloween cuddles 🧡🖤
Black and orange cats make a great duo, if I say so myself.
GRYFFINDOR:
“And what would you have done if
it had attacked us? She had a momentary picture of Petulia standing in front of
some horrible raging thing, but it wasn’t as funny as she’d first thought.
Petulia would stand in front of it, shaking with terror, her useless amulets
clattering, scared almost out of her mind…but not backing away. She’d thought
there might be people facing something horrible here, and she’d come anyway.”
–Terry Pratchett (A Hat Full of Sky)
just a thought but why do we gays always come out in the car like what is it about sitting in a car that makes us tell someone we’re gay
There’s a reason for this.
Psychologically, it’s easier to have difficult conversations while in a car, especially if the person you’re talking to is driving, because it removes the pressure of making and/or maintaining eye contact since the driver has to watch the road. Also, the existence of a finite end point to the ride – when you get to wherever you’re going – gives you an automatic easy out to end the conversation, making it easier to start it in the first place.
In fact, some parenting experts actually recommend starting hard conversations with your kids in the car for these exact reasons.
I’ve always thought of cars as a sort of emotional liminal space. There’s something about being in a confined vehicle in motion that makes you feel a bit removed from reality. Your feet are not touching the ground, you’re moving faster than you ever could out of a car, you’re occupied with a task that’s both demanding and automatic, and your brain and emotions get a bit unfettered.
THIS IS THE BEST DOCUMENT IN ALL OF HISTORY. Basically, it has a script in it that has a “Post to AO3″ option and it will go in and fill in ALL the HTML you need – italics, bold, paragraph breaks, you name it!
It has directions in it for how to use it, but it’s real simple. You just always chose “Make a Copy” when you start writing to make a new document that you can then re-name. Change the language to American English (or whatever language you use) and type away. Then right before you post, click the button, get all the code in there, copy, paste, AND POST.
It is literally so, so glorious and I want to tell everyone.
(Also, the AO3 Cool FAQ page has some other cool stuff too!)
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