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Five Geek Social Fallacies: How They Effect RP


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Five Geek Social Fallacies

 

Within the constellation of allied hobbies and subcultures collectively known as geekdom, one finds many social groups bent under a crushing burden of dysfunction, social drama, and general interpersonal wack-ness. It is my opinion that many of these never-ending crises are sparked off by an assortment of pernicious social fallacies -- ideas about human interaction which spur their holders to do terrible and stupid things to themselves and to each other.

 

Social fallacies are particularly insidious because they tend to be exaggerated versions of notions that are themselves entirely reasonable and unobjectionable. It's difficult to debunk the pathological fallacy without seeming to argue against its reasonable form; therefore, once it establishes itself, a social fallacy is extremely difficult to dislodge. It's my hope that drawing attention to some of them may be a step in the right direction.

 

I want to note that I'm not trying to say that every geek subscribes to every one of the fallacies I outline here; every individual subscribes to a different set of ideas, and adheres to any given idea with a different amount of zeal.

 

In any event, here are five geek social fallacies I've identified. There are likely more.

 

Geek Social Fallacy #1: Ostracizers Are Evil

 

GSF1 is one of the most common fallacies, and one of the most deeply held. Many geeks have had horrible, humiliating, and formative experiences with ostracism, and the notion of being on the other side of the transaction is repugnant to them.

 

In its non-pathological form, GSF1 is benign, and even commendable: it is long past time we all grew up and stopped with the junior high popularity games. However, in its pathological form, GSF1 prevents its carrier from participating in -- or tolerating -- the exclusion of anyone from anything, be it a party, a comic book store, or a web forum, and no matter how obnoxious, offensive, or aromatic the prospective excludee may be.

 

As a result, nearly every geek social group of significant size has at least one member that 80% of the members hate, and the remaining 20% merely tolerate. If GSF1 exists in sufficient concentration -- and it usually does -- it is impossible to expel a person who actively detracts from every social event. GSF1 protocol permits you not to invite someone you don't like to a given event, but if someone spills the beans and our hypothetical Cat Piss Man invites himself, there is no recourse. You must put up with him, or you will be an Evil Ostracizer and might as well go out for the football team.

 

This phenomenon has a number of unpleasant consequences. For one thing, it actively hinders the wider acceptance of geek-related activities: I don't know that RPGs and comics would be more popular if there were fewer trolls who smell of cheese hassling the new blood, but I'm sure it couldn't hurt. For another, when nothing smacking of social selectiveness can be discussed in public, people inevitably begin to organize activities in secret. These conspiracies often lead to more problems down the line, and the end result is as juvenile as anything a seventh-grader ever dreamed of.

 

My Addition: This is exceptionally true of roleplaying groups on line. Selection processes that let in everyone despite a roleplaying test, that don't ask people to leave despite characters not meshing, that are focused on making a big happy family.... that ironically end up excluding people. People are all welcome but since one person's story is about them being slightly stronger than the average human and another person's story is about them having the power of ten gods... they avoid each other. People meet in secret to run stories; there's the "real main group" of players and RPers and the other people. Seriously. Do not feel bad about politely telling people "This doesn't fit in with our guild/group/whatever" or rejecting some concepts just so long as you explain why or are willing to work with them to have them change to fit.

 

Geek Social Fallacy #2: Friends Accept Me As I Am

 

The origins of GSF2 are closely allied to the origins of GSF1. After being victimized by social exclusion, many geeks experience their "tribe" as a non-judgmental haven where they can take refuge from the cruel world outside.

 

This seems straightforward and reasonable. It's important for people to have a space where they feel safe and accepted. Ideally, everyone's social group would be a safe haven. When people who rely too heavily upon that refuge feel insecure in that haven, however, a commendable ideal mutates into its pathological form, GSF2.

 

Carriers of GSF2 believe that since a friend accepts them as they are, anyone who criticizes them is not their friend. Thus, they can't take criticism from friends -- criticism is experienced as a treacherous betrayal of the friendship, no matter how inappropriate the criticized behavior may be.

 

Conversely, most carriers will never criticize a friend under any circumstances; the duty to be supportive trumps any impulse to point out unacceptable behavior.

 

GSF2 has extensive consequences within a group. Its presence in substantial quantity within a social group vastly increases the group's conflict-averseness. People spend hours debating how to deal with conflicts, because they know (or sometimes merely fear) that the other person involved is a GSF2 carrier, and any attempt to confront them directly will only make things worse. As a result, people let grudges brew much longer than is healthy, and they spend absurd amounts of time deconstructing their interpersonal dramas in search of a back way out of a dilemma.

 

Ironically, GSF2 carriers often take criticism from coworkers, supervisors, and mentors quite well; those individuals aren't friends, and aren't expected to accept the carrier unconditionally.

 

My Addition: This is why people have difficulty with groups. The idea that someone is being "exclusive" which is "wrong" if they say that they only want specific things within their guild/organization/whatnot. I saw a very heavy RP group open up on TSW about the Dragon. What it meant, what their culture was, spirituality, and so on. When they rejected people who weren't playing Dragon they were called elitist, stuck up, snobby... I watched one of those rejections happening because I wanted to observe their interview process. People just felt like they were entitled to join because they made a character regardless of whether or not it fit. Further, this comes up with people who... okay, let's not mince words: are actively bad RPers. This doesn't necessarily mean their typing (though it can) but people who do things in RP which are about facilitating their own enjoyment at the cost of others -- always demanding the camera by drama (I'm bleeding spontaneously give me attention now), who are mean to other RPers (I wanted to be X's boyfriend, I'm going to stalk your character and attack you now even though I was asked OOCly to please stop harassing people).

 

Ideally before this gets back one should be able to say "hey. Please. about your roleplaying maybe you want to try doing X" but this fallacy rears its head. Not only is it difficult for people to accept being told to correct wrong things... sometimes it's hard to try and give advice. Advice like "put more spaces between your words because it's hard to follow" has sent people off. I think a lot of problems DO arise from people trying to be so kind to one person who's messing up they end up... you know, kinda ignoring what it means to the rest of the group who has to deal with them

 

Geek Social Fallacy #3: Friendship Before All

 

Valuing friendships is a fine and worthy thing. When taken to an unhealthy extreme, however, GSF3 can manifest itself.

 

Like GSF2, GSF3 is a "friendship test" fallacy: in this case, the carrier believes that any failure by a friend to put the interests of the friendship above all else means that they aren't really a friend at all. It should be obvious that there are a million ways that this can be a problem for the carrier's friends, but the most common one is a situation where friends' interests conflict -- if, for example, one friend asks you to keep a secret from another friend. If both friends are GSF3 carriers, you're screwed -- the first one will feel betrayed if you reveal the secret, and the other will feel betrayed if you don't. Your only hope is to keep the second friend from finding out, which is difficult if the secret in question was a party that a lot of people went to.

 

GSF3 can be costly for the carrier as well. They often sacrifice work, family, and romantic obligations at the altar of friendship. In the end, the carrier has a great circle of friends, but not a lot else to show for their life. This is one reason why so many geek circles include people whose sole redeeming quality is loyalty: it's hard not to honor someone who goes to such lengths to be there for a friend, however destructive they may be in other respects.

 

Individual carriers sometimes have exceptions to GSF3, which allow friends to place a certain protected class of people or things above friendship in a pinch: "significant others" is a common protected class, as is "work".

 

Geek Social Fallacy #4: Friendship Is Transitive

 

Every carrier of GSF4 has, at some point, said:

 

"Wouldn't it be great to get all my groups of friends into one place for one big happy party?!"

 

If you groaned at that last paragraph, you may be a recovering GSF4 carrier.

 

GSF4 is the belief that any two of your friends ought to be friends with each other, and if they're not, something is Very Wrong.

 

The milder form of GSF4 merely prevents the carrier from perceiving evidence to contradict it; a carrier will refuse to comprehend that two of their friends (or two groups of friends) don't much care for each other, and will continue to try to bring them together at social events. They may even maintain that a full-scale vendetta is just a misunderstanding between friends that could easily be resolved if the principals would just sit down to talk it out.

 

A more serious form of GSF4 becomes another "friendship test" fallacy: if you have a friend A, and a friend B, but A & B are not friends, then one of them must not really be your friend at all. It is surprisingly common for a carrier, when faced with two friends who don't get along, to simply drop one of them.

 

On the other side of the equation, a carrier who doesn't like a friend of a friend will often get very passive-aggressive and covertly hostile to the friend of a friend, while vigorously maintaining that we're one big happy family and everyone is friends.

 

GSF4 can also lead carriers to make inappropriate requests of people they barely know -- asking a friend's roommate's ex if they can crash on their couch, asking a college acquaintance from eight years ago for a letter of recommendation at their workplace, and so on. If something is appropriate to ask of a friend, it's appropriate to ask of a friend of a friend.

 

My Take: The last two are connected frequently in RP but are slightly less detrimental to guilds as a whole. Just... you know, be aware these things happen and what they mean.

 

 

Geek Social Fallacy #5: Friends Do Everything Together

 

GSF5, put simply, maintains that every friend in a circle should be included in every activity to the full extent possible. This is subtly different from GSF1; GSF1 requires that no one, friend or not, be excluded, while GSF5 requires that every friend be invited. This means that to a GSF5 carrier, not being invited to something is intrinsically a snub, and will be responded to as such.

 

This is perhaps the least destructive of the five, being at worst inconvenient. In a small circle, this is incestuous but basically harmless. In larger groups, it can make certain social events very difficult: parties which are way too large for their spaces and restaurant expeditions that include twenty people and no reservation are far from unusual.

 

When everyone in a group is a GSF5 carrier, this isn't really a problem. If, however, there are members who aren't carriers, they may want occasionally to have smaller outings, and these can be hard to arrange without causing hurt feelings and social drama. It's hard to explain to a GSF5 carrier that just because you only wanted to have dinner with five other people tonight, it doesn't mean that your friendship is in terrible danger.

 

For some reason, many GSF5 carriers are willing to make an exception for gender-segregated events. I don't know why.

 

My Take: This results in so much OOC drama. You see this one a lot in WHY AREN'T YOU RPING WITH ME conflicts with people when you go off and meet more characters and it results in them getting jealous and starting to act strange. I've also seen guilds get really upset that someone was RPing away from their guild. Not from a specific event. Just at all. Yeah.

 

Interactions

 

Each fallacy has its own set of unfortunate consequences, but frequently they become worse in interaction. GSF4 often develops into its more extreme form when paired with GSF5; if everyone does everything together, it's much harder to maintain two friends who don't get along. One will usually fall by the wayside.

 

Similarly, GSF1 and GSF5 can combine regrettably: when a failure to invite someone is equivalent to excluding them, you can't even get away with not inviting Captain Halitosis along on the road trip. GSF3 can combine disastrously with the other "friendship test" fallacies; carriers may insist that their friends join them in snubbing someone who fails the test, which occasionally leads to a chain reaction which causes the carrier to eventually reject all of their friends. This is not healthy; fortunately, severe versions of GSF3 are rare.

 

Consequences

 

Dealing with the effects of social fallacies is an essential part of managing one's social life among geeks, and this is much easier when one is aware of them and can identify which of your friends carry which fallacies. In the absence of this kind of awareness, three situations tend to arise when people come into contact with fallacies they don't hold themselves.

 

Most common is simple conflict and hurt feelings. It's hard for people to talk through these conflicts because they usually stem from fairly primal value clashes; a GSF3 carrier may not even be able to articulate why it was such a big deal that their non-carrier friend blew off their movie night.

 

Alternately, people often take on fallacies that are dominant in their social circle. If you join a group of GSF5 carriers, doing everything together is going to become a habit; if you spend enough time around GSF1 carriers, putting up with trolls is going to seem normal.

 

Less commonly, people form a sort of counter-fallacy which I call "Your Feelings, Your Problem". YFYP carriers deal with other people's fallacies by ignoring them entirely, in the process acquiring a reputation for being charmingly tactless. Carriers tend to receive a sort of exemption from the usual standards: "that's just Dana", and so on. YFYP has its own problems, but if you would rather be an asshole than angstful, it may be the way to go. It's also remarkably easy to pull off in a GSF1-rich environment.

 

What Can I Do?

 

As I've said, I think that the best way to deal with social fallacies is to be aware of them, in yourself and in others. In yourself, you can try to deal with them; in others, understanding their behavior usually makes it less aggravating.

 

Social fallacies don't make someone a bad person; on the contrary, they usually spring from the purest motives. But I believe they are worth deconstructing; in the long run, social fallacies cost a lot of stress and drama, to no real benefit. You can be tolerant without being indiscriminate, and you can be loyal to friends without being compulsive about it.

 

Hey, Are You Talking About Me?

 

I haven't used any examples that refer to specific situations, if it has you worried. Any resemblances to geeks living or dead are coincidental.

 

 

With credit to the original article © 2003 Michael Suileabhain-Wilson. All rights reserved.

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this is pretty sweet. I'm unable to read all of it atm, but from what I've read it's pretty interesting. I've seen many examples in and out of RP, have been guilty of a few here and there, even.

 

 

Nice work finding this and adding your own to it!

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There's nothing inherentaly wrong with being a bit clique-y at the end of the day, I just hate that people throw it around as being negative.

 

For example:

 

We've kind of allied ourselves with a Heavy RP shell that many of those in my group wouldn't really fit in with. This isn't to say we wouldn't get along with them (We do) but our RP values are VERY different. They believe in High Immersion, IC most of the time chat; we believe in OOC most of the time, medium immersion chat. Our guilds are very different, and was founded on completely different belief systems. Trying to bring the two together in the same guild would be disastrous. It just wouldn't work.

 

Our IC guilds probably won't work either. They are a much nicer organization than us, we're one after power "by any means." I can see a lot of problems should we ever meet ICly. And that's IF we ever meet ICly, cuz it's quite possible we may not, neither side if forcing the issue of us HAVING to RP with each other. And that's fine!

 

Here's the thing: We're are actually quite friendly OOC. I talk to them quite often, and we have plans to take them with us when we do endgame. This is where the clique's end and where they should end. At the end of the day, we have our own corners, but we're nice to each other and understand each other! We don't need to be 100% inclusive to be nice to each other and it doesn't even seem clique-y.

 

I think at the end of the day, sometimes people are trying so hard to be inclusive they are hurting themselves, but at the same time their is no reason to be nice to other groups. Clique's are only bad when people begin to see themselves as better than anyone else around them.

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