> "I sometimes wish there were two words for "respect", one that expresses the idea that you ... should be decent to them just because they happen to be human.

> "I sometimes wish there were two words for "respect", one that expresses the idea that you ... should be decent to them just because they happen to be human. The other to express the kind of respect that one earns." Thank you for putting this into words. This summarizes part of what bothered me about this article. My wife and I are both gamers. Neither of us have ever been treated without human-respect at LAN parties. Competence-respect is usually given to me due to prior reputation (I'm active in the community whose LANs I attend.) She is often assumed to be just tagging along, until she starts destroying people. Competence-respect comes pretty quickly if you demonstrate competence. There were times in this article when it seemed the author wasn't given human-respect, and that's a circumstance where someone needs to be either told off or walked away from. But at other times, the issue may have been competence-respect, and that's a circumstance where the first attempt at respect-earning should be to say "I can take it from here", pick up the controller, and play.