Toxicity of Kindness
Jan. 27th, 2022 11:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kiteinspaceWas watching Broxah stream today. He got really tilted.
He got tilted because he had been coaching somebody on how to not tilt and play well despite setbacks - the next game his protege was on the opposite team, and his own team was playing very poorly, playing emotionally, and Broxah watched them make mistake after mistake, unable to do anything about it and questioning again and again, "Why are they doing this? Why don't they want to win? What can I do? I don't want to play this game anymore."
I think that being a kind person means that you consider effecting good consequences for those around you something that you can control, something that you will to happen, and when someone is behaving badly you wonder why they are choosing to behave that way. You are frustrated at the lack of control that you can have on the situation. You fall into a despair of not understanding why someone chooses to effect negative consequences on their environment. Because YOU can imagine yourself in that scenario and how you would behave to counteract your negative tendencies, you can't see why someone else is responding to a scenario in the way they are responding to it, rather you are hyperfixated on your judgement that the behavior they're exhibiting is the WRONG one - because you hold yourself to a standard where you don't perform it.
Being kind is to act in a way where a group of people have generally agreed upon a standard of acting, which is to say, to consciously change the way you act and be disciplined about it. The problem with discipline is that it can render you inflexible.
A kind person is an angry person in a situation they can't control, whereas an indifferent person who behaves sporadically at most times may be the one who has the energy to be kind when the patience of others fail them, or the empathy to be able to be kind, because they are perceiving the world around them without judgement.
It's very hard for me to accept that someone I live with or choose to spend my time around is not choosing the courses of action that would enable them to be effective, kind, healthy in their life. I think it's definitely true that I've tried to manicure the trajectory of my thoughts and actions to be optimal since a very young age. In Broxah's frustrations I see myself.
"I don't want to play this game anymore. What can I do? This is such a fun game, and if it's not this game it will be the next one. I can't do anything about the fact that people just don't try to win this game. And they get no consequences for it. Here they are, queuing up for the next game, where they will do the exact same thing. What is even the point? What's the point of playing this game?"
I know how he should react. (there's the judgement, again.) (Can you have growth and improvement without judgement? Is it better, or worse?) It's just a game. People have always played like this, so just accept that your teammates will make poor decisions and focus on your own play. (Maybe it's harder for a jungler who always has to look to others to make plays, whereas laners are usually a straightforward duel)
When Sneaky fought Adam and Eve for the first time in Nier Automata, a scripted biased battle, he came back again and again, like 20 times, while chat told him to just quit and grind some more. He was getting one-hit and hardly doing any damage. But he found enjoyment in learning the enemy's instakill attack patterns. Every time he got just a little further in the scripted fight. The chat was spamming the dialogue that played at the beginning of each fight as a joke about how repetitive it was getting, how it was getting on their nerves. It didn't get on Sneaky's. When he played the fight to its timed conclusion, he gloated at chat. "Who needs to grind more now?"
When Sneaky had bad teammates, he might be frustrated at them and make snarky comments at them when they made bad plays, but I think he found ways to be distracted doing his own thing. Maybe that's what Sneaky means when he says he's like a dog and doesn't remember bad emotions. If there's a program playing in your head all the time, which you can focus on instead of external things that demand your focus, maybe it's easier to bear the frustrations of the world. Sneaky's fight against Adam wasn't fair. The game was elevating the difficulty curve arbitrarily for that one instant. It's the game's perogative to do so, thought, right? It's not my game, it's the programmers' game. It's Yoko Taro's game. Don't I just have to trust Yoko Taro that this is gonna be fun? So the game League of Legends, when you're playing with teammates who can't regulate their emotions, that's not fair. I will lose a game because of no fault of my own. So, why attach importance to losing at all? Don't I have fun controlling my characters, playing out impossible scenarios, exercising my skill when I can?
To answer Broxah's questions:
The people he's playing with might not be trying to win. They are walking their own, frustrated path. They do spend their whole day like this, playing out positive openings and raging and quitting negative ones. They don't get consequences because this is a way that works for playing this game.
The thing is that everyone is playing the same game. Everyone enters the rift with five strangers, many of whom will be throwing the game. My own performance can make it so that we're more likely to win, but I can't guarantee it. So then, winning is nice as a treat, but is not an equal indicator of my effort or my skill. It can come as a result of it, but it doesn't determine it.
He got tilted because he had been coaching somebody on how to not tilt and play well despite setbacks - the next game his protege was on the opposite team, and his own team was playing very poorly, playing emotionally, and Broxah watched them make mistake after mistake, unable to do anything about it and questioning again and again, "Why are they doing this? Why don't they want to win? What can I do? I don't want to play this game anymore."
I think that being a kind person means that you consider effecting good consequences for those around you something that you can control, something that you will to happen, and when someone is behaving badly you wonder why they are choosing to behave that way. You are frustrated at the lack of control that you can have on the situation. You fall into a despair of not understanding why someone chooses to effect negative consequences on their environment. Because YOU can imagine yourself in that scenario and how you would behave to counteract your negative tendencies, you can't see why someone else is responding to a scenario in the way they are responding to it, rather you are hyperfixated on your judgement that the behavior they're exhibiting is the WRONG one - because you hold yourself to a standard where you don't perform it.
Being kind is to act in a way where a group of people have generally agreed upon a standard of acting, which is to say, to consciously change the way you act and be disciplined about it. The problem with discipline is that it can render you inflexible.
A kind person is an angry person in a situation they can't control, whereas an indifferent person who behaves sporadically at most times may be the one who has the energy to be kind when the patience of others fail them, or the empathy to be able to be kind, because they are perceiving the world around them without judgement.
It's very hard for me to accept that someone I live with or choose to spend my time around is not choosing the courses of action that would enable them to be effective, kind, healthy in their life. I think it's definitely true that I've tried to manicure the trajectory of my thoughts and actions to be optimal since a very young age. In Broxah's frustrations I see myself.
"I don't want to play this game anymore. What can I do? This is such a fun game, and if it's not this game it will be the next one. I can't do anything about the fact that people just don't try to win this game. And they get no consequences for it. Here they are, queuing up for the next game, where they will do the exact same thing. What is even the point? What's the point of playing this game?"
I know how he should react. (there's the judgement, again.) (Can you have growth and improvement without judgement? Is it better, or worse?) It's just a game. People have always played like this, so just accept that your teammates will make poor decisions and focus on your own play. (Maybe it's harder for a jungler who always has to look to others to make plays, whereas laners are usually a straightforward duel)
When Sneaky fought Adam and Eve for the first time in Nier Automata, a scripted biased battle, he came back again and again, like 20 times, while chat told him to just quit and grind some more. He was getting one-hit and hardly doing any damage. But he found enjoyment in learning the enemy's instakill attack patterns. Every time he got just a little further in the scripted fight. The chat was spamming the dialogue that played at the beginning of each fight as a joke about how repetitive it was getting, how it was getting on their nerves. It didn't get on Sneaky's. When he played the fight to its timed conclusion, he gloated at chat. "Who needs to grind more now?"
When Sneaky had bad teammates, he might be frustrated at them and make snarky comments at them when they made bad plays, but I think he found ways to be distracted doing his own thing. Maybe that's what Sneaky means when he says he's like a dog and doesn't remember bad emotions. If there's a program playing in your head all the time, which you can focus on instead of external things that demand your focus, maybe it's easier to bear the frustrations of the world. Sneaky's fight against Adam wasn't fair. The game was elevating the difficulty curve arbitrarily for that one instant. It's the game's perogative to do so, thought, right? It's not my game, it's the programmers' game. It's Yoko Taro's game. Don't I just have to trust Yoko Taro that this is gonna be fun? So the game League of Legends, when you're playing with teammates who can't regulate their emotions, that's not fair. I will lose a game because of no fault of my own. So, why attach importance to losing at all? Don't I have fun controlling my characters, playing out impossible scenarios, exercising my skill when I can?
To answer Broxah's questions:
The people he's playing with might not be trying to win. They are walking their own, frustrated path. They do spend their whole day like this, playing out positive openings and raging and quitting negative ones. They don't get consequences because this is a way that works for playing this game.
The thing is that everyone is playing the same game. Everyone enters the rift with five strangers, many of whom will be throwing the game. My own performance can make it so that we're more likely to win, but I can't guarantee it. So then, winning is nice as a treat, but is not an equal indicator of my effort or my skill. It can come as a result of it, but it doesn't determine it.
