Elitism

I've been playing League of Legends a lot lately and, truth be told, it's because I don't want any repeats of what happened after I won the Gamespot tournament. It wasn't pretty back then and people do tend to learn from experience. So, you could pretty much say that I've been hiding out in a game that is pretty much fun except for the fact that if you are stuck with random trolls, you can look forward to a solid 45 minutes or more of non-stop harassment. Good times! Actually, it sucks. I would love League of Legends if I had the option to politely exit a match without risk of being penalized for being a human being who wants to play a game for fun and not be tortured for the next hour of my life.

Gamers play games for a variety of reasons but most would say that they are playing them to either escape any real life stresses or to simply have fun. What most of us would consider fun would be playing the game as it was meant to be played without being verbally and nonsensically berated by some jerk that you've never met in your life. It's actually worse though to be stuck with people that you presumed to have some sort of friendship with and end up being just as bad as the random troll. Then, you're stuck with them, long after deciding that they need to be removed from your friends list, for 45 minutes or more. Good times! No.

I was running League of Legends through Steam for a few days and a good number of friends asked me what my name was in it to add me. I thought that was cool. I do actually enjoy playing a variety of games with my friends and not just TF2. Let me say, it's been really utterly eye opening. Because I've come into the game late (it's been out for a few years), most of the people that I know are already at the maximum level. Some of these friends decided that, because I was a "noob", then it was proper for them to swoop in to "teach me" how to play LoL. Mind you, I've been gaming for 31 years now and I've never once needed anybody to teach me how to play a game in all those years. I prefer to dive in and blunder along until I figure it all out. I don't know if it's autism or if that's just simply the way I learn but prattling off a bunch of data to me is like me trying to learn something from what is essentially white noise. These friends, however, mean well and I respect them for that. They want to be helpful and that's cool.

Yet, not all of them are like that. There has been a few that, for some unknown reason, seemingly want to impress me. Like sticking me as a level 5 in a PVP match with two ranked level 30s only to be matched against three ranked level 30's and then I die...frequently. Then, they berate me for dying so much. It's not hard to comprehend that the difference between a level 5 and a level 30 is pretty sizable. It's not just a matter of experience with the game. In LoL, you have runes and masteries to improve your chosen champion, which slowly become available as you level. In that situation, I was like a soldier going out to fight a war with a squirt gun when everybody else had AK-47s. In matches against AI, it doesn't get any better with these sort either. Instead of pushing forward to take down the objectives of the match, they seem to be more interested in coming into the lane I'm working on to attempt to wipe out foes like I'm going to be impressed or spending most of their time simply jungling and ganking kills to raise their score with no deference at all towards the objectives. All it does is simply draw the match out to unreasonable lengths of time. I'd rather just win quickly then watch the game get slowly and inexorably unbalanced by that behavior. And god forbid I should remark on it because clearly they are more experienced than I at the game.

Experienced or not, dumb is just dumb and these people obviously have no clue who the hell I really am. If they did, they would know that I don't equate skill at a game as adding any value to any one. I measure people by their behavior and temperament. I prefer people who work together because that shows a consideration of others that "elitest gamers" frequently lack. In other words, I'd rather have 100 really great noobs at a game on my friends list than one elitest jerk. Friends lists are for friends. Why be friends with somebody who acts like a jerk to you or to others?

Friends are people who you admire for the qualities that you find value in. Adding somebody to a friends list just because they're good at a game and no other reason isn't adding a "friend". Especially if you would normally find their behavior annoying, irksome or just downright rude. I was pretty much called an elitist jerk today and yeah, maybe I am an elitist. My elitism isn't about skill or experience in any game. It's not about what they do for a living. It's about who they are inside to me. My elitism is for good people just as I would surround myself with in real life. If that makes me an elitist jerk then so be it.