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Reading this reminds me of someone I was friends with in high school who quickly turned out to be absolutely insufferable to play any sort of cooperative game w

Reading this reminds me of someone I was friends with in high school who quickly turned out to be absolutely insufferable to play any sort of cooperative game with. They would take absolutely _everything_ that could be shared, and calmly and with complete conviction explain it was better off with them. They were blind to the bigger picture of quickly having nobody who would ever play with them. Magic the Gathering at lunch was also a terrible experience with this person...

williamcotton 3y ago
Teenagers are also experimenting with many philosophies and personas that don’t strictly align with personality disorders… unless you just want to call all of adolescence a personality disorder, which might not be far off…
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  Yeah, that's certainly something to consider. If the case, it's kind of interesting to look back and watch a teenager so heavily blacklist themselves from all social activities every chance they got. My experience with and as a teenager is that they're overwhelmingly focused on fitting in to whatever groups they identify with.
jiggawatts 3y ago
Reminds me of something I learned about other cultures while playing DOTA 2 on ranked ladder. For reference: This is a 5 vs 5 team game where each player character has a loosely defined role, such as "healer", "lead combat", or whatever. The most effective play style is for four of the players to support the strongest attacker-class player, to the point of self-sacrifice. In Australia we would get random south-east asian players joining our servers, and generally we wouldn't even notice other than the alternative scripts in their usernames. Philippinos we would always notice, because they're all acted like sociopaths. Even if they were mute, and had an English alias, we could pick them out reliably. They'd be selfish to a point of absurdity, taking in-game gold away from desperate team-mates even when they couldn't possibly spend the gold themselves. As in, even when they had all item slots full with the best possible item, so they were "maxed out", they would cut off their own support players to take gold at any cost. I just couldn't wrap my head around why they were behaving this way. Also, why just that one country? Why not other countries in the area, like Singapore? Someone from the Phillipenes explained online: They had experienced sudden population growth and now there's too many young people with basically no job prospects. It's a dog-eat-dog world in their country, with fierce competition in every aspect of life. E.g.: There's no "study groups" in school, because why would you help someone else pass their exams? That would just enable them to steal the job you're competing for! So these kids while away their time playing competitive games in internet cafes, and this "stepping on others to get to the top of the pile" element of their lives is made manifest in the crystal clear simulated environment of a game. It made me think: Cooperation, social norms, collaboration, and all of the non-sociopath behaviours we're accustomed to aren't necessarily the norm, with only mentally-ill individuals deviating from it. Instead, it's possible for entire cultures to be sociopathic! Stress, poor job prospects, increased competition, etc... can push everyone towards these behaviours, all at once. In a situation like that, the natural sociopaths might prosper, and the "supports" might end up being horribly exploited or even starve to death.
agumonkey 3y ago
> They would take absolutely _everything_ that could be shared, and calmly and with complete conviction How do you call this ? this kind of shameless self interested bullshit ? I work with someone who has an uncanny ability to talk like this and say vaporous stuff with a strange blend of belief and weight. I don't know how this is called .. but it stumps me every time he does it. He can fail at the most basic thing or refuse to actually share the workload and at the next meeting come up explaining to everybody how things should go because of <buzzword> and <more buzzword>. And he manages to tap deep into your brain on ideas that you will never go against (team spirit, dignity, mission, whatever) so it disengages any critical thinking reflex you might have.

williamcotton 3y ago

Teenagers are also experimenting with many philosophies and personas that don’t strictly align with personality disorders… unless you just want to call all of adolescence a personality disorder, which might not be far off…

Waterluvian 3y ago
Yeah, that's certainly something to consider. If the case, it's kind of interesting to look back and watch a teenager so heavily blacklist themselves from all social activities every chance they got. My experience with and as a teenager is that they're overwhelmingly focused on fitting in to whatever groups they identify with.

jiggawatts 3y ago

Reminds me of something I learned about other cultures while playing DOTA 2 on ranked ladder. For reference: This is a 5 vs 5 team game where each player character has a loosely defined role, such as "healer", "lead combat", or whatever. The most effective play style is for four of the players to support the strongest attacker-class player, to the point of self-sacrifice. In Australia we would get random south-east asian players joining our servers, and generally we wouldn't even notice other than the alternative scripts in their usernames. Philippinos we would always notice, because they're all acted like sociopaths. Even if they were mute, and had an English alias, we could pick them out reliably. They'd be selfish to a point of absurdity, taking in-game gold away from desperate team-mates even when they couldn't possibly spend the gold themselves. As in, even when they had all item slots full with the best possible item, so they were "maxed out", they would cut off their own support players to take gold at any cost. I just couldn't wrap my head around why they were behaving this way. Also, why just that one country? Why not other countries in the area, like Singapore? Someone from the Phillipenes explained online: They had experienced sudden population growth and now there's too many young people with basically no job prospects. It's a dog-eat-dog world in their country, with fierce competition in every aspect of life. E.g.: There's no "study groups" in school, because why would you help someone else pass their exams? That would just enable them to steal the job you're competing for! So these kids while away their time playing competitive games in internet cafes, and this "stepping on others to get to the top of the pile" element of their lives is made manifest in the crystal clear simulated environment of a game. It made me think: Cooperation, social norms, collaboration, and all of the non-sociopath behaviours we're accustomed to aren't necessarily the norm, with only mentally-ill individuals deviating from it. Instead, it's possible for entire cultures to be sociopathic! Stress, poor job prospects, increased competition, etc... can push everyone towards these behaviours, all at once. In a situation like that, the natural sociopaths might prosper, and the "supports" might end up being horribly exploited or even starve to death.

agumonkey 3y ago

> They would take absolutely _everything_ that could be shared, and calmly and with complete conviction How do you call this ? this kind of shameless self interested bullshit ? I work with someone who has an uncanny ability to talk like this and say vaporous stuff with a strange blend of belief and weight. I don't know how this is called .. but it stumps me every time he does it. He can fail at the most basic thing or refuse to actually share the workload and at the next meeting come up explaining to everybody how things should go because of <buzzword> and <more buzzword>. And he manages to tap deep into your brain on ideas that you will never go against (team spirit, dignity, mission, whatever) so it disengages any critical thinking reflex you might have.