I’m liable to get ranty here.
One of the games I play online is Popmundo. For those who don’t know, it’s a browser-based game, the core of which is to try to make it to stardom in the music business. For all it’s a deceptively simple seeming game, it has some pretty amazing depth. You can try to make it as a solo artist, or as a member of a band you form with other players. I’ve been playing for more than a year now.
My character in the game is a member of a band. We were up to five members. As of last night, we’re down to four. The one who left did not do so entirely voluntarily. It was mostly a decision made by the rest of us.
The one we wound up asking to leave the band last night had been a member of the band for more than a year. He started playing roughly two weeks after Yar and I did. He started off enthusiastic about the game, and I had a great time sharing the game with him and my boyfriend and a few other friends.
Within two months, the friend got bored with the game. It’s pretty open-ended, with little in the way of set goals to strive for. Once you’re past the tutorial quest, you mostly set your own goals. That kind of game is not for everyone. A lot of people like more structure.
Starting about a year ago, my friend stopped doing much in the game. He’d log in often enough to keep the character from dying of neglect, but little more. Since he was a member of the band, that meant that there were some things that became problematic to accomplish. They were things that needed all members to do. When we hung out and talked in the chat channel we share with the rest of our little group of friends, I (and later another member of the band as well) would start off by asking as nicely and politely as I could for him to accomplish X with his character. He’d say he’d get right on that, and then not do it. After asking the same way a few more times, I’d ask less nicely. Then I’d straight out ask, no nice or polite about it, when it still didn’t get done. From there, I’d move on to stating that this needs to be done, then that this needs to be done NOW. I’d work my way through starting to demand that it be done, order that it be done, rant about it not getting done, and often have to reach the point of threatening to dump him from the band before it would get done. If he were a solo artist, or this was a game where a group of people in a band have to rely on each other to some degree in order to move forward, the dilatory attitude wouldn’t matter at all. If that’s the level of involvement he wants, and that’s what he enjoys, then it’s all good at that point.
But this is a game that requires cooperation and involvement to at least some degree from all members of a band if you’re not a solo artist. One person not doing their part impacts the experience of everyone else in the band. If one person doesn’t bother to set to rehearse their scenes in a music video, then it’s useless to film even if everyone else is fully rehearsed, as one example.
On top of that, the repeated rounds of going through all the asking nicely through threats meant that the other band member and I would wind up feeling like horrible nags. We both hated feeling that way. It made us feel like awful people. But at the same time, we couldn’t do much to play the game ourselves without cooperation from the rest of the band. There’s only so much we could do ourselves, and she and I had already taken on the majority of the work with scheduling shows and jam sessions and recording sessions and dealing with our record label and scheduling video shoots and and and…
Yet he forced us to go through that every time. We worried he’d come to resent the nagging, and possibly us for doing it. But given the lack of cooperation, we had little choice unless we summarily ejected him from the band, or left ourselves to start from scratch after all the work we’d put into this one.
Periodically, he’s get interested and be active for a couple weeks, and things would actually get done. We’d rejoice because while yes, we wanted to get these things accomplished and would keep after him until they did, we both much more wanted them to get done because he enjoyed doing them, not just doing them to shut us up. We wanted this to be fun for all of us, including him. But then after a couple weeks, he’d largely disappear again. He’d still be in chat, and we’d still talk and nag when necessary, but he’d rarely do anything in the game without a new round of nagging.
Recently he has hardly ever been in chat either. Some of that was circumstances beyond his control. Some of that was not, though there were reasons, and reasons I absolutely support. If we had not already gone through a year of non-cooperation, we’d have just ridden the current situation out and worked around him the best we could. After all, with his almost never showing up in chat, we now couldn’t even go through the ask nicely with following escalations if necessary. We were all happy with the situation that kept him away from chat. He was happy, and that matters to us much more than a silly game. But we had a year of frustration already, and even when he came back to chat regularly at some point in the future, it’d just go back to what we were dealing with before.
The rest of us in the “band” agonized over this for months. We didn’t want him to feel that we didn’t want him around. We did, still. And still do. But we couldn’t take any more of the pattern we’d been dealing with. Playing a game is supposed to be fun, not headache-inducing. And we’d given him scads of chances in the year since the pattern started. We even did drop him from the band once, and then took him back as soon as he showed up and announced that he’d play more actively. As usual, that lasted about two weeks.
So finally we made the hard decision that we didn’t want to make. We decided to remove him from the band for good. We mentioned this to his girlfriend, who told him so he could log in and she wouldn’t have to act as relay. At first he said he was okay with it, didn’t really bother him, and didn’t matter that much. The more he said that, because I’m good at guilt, the more guilty and the more upset I felt. By the middle of talking with him about it, I was starting to get all teary-eyed and sad and, well, feeling guilty.
But then he tried to lay on a minor guilt trip. And while I’m really good at feeling guilty on my own, even in other situations where I have no real reason to, guilt trips don’t work on me. They just piss me off. I didn’t say anything to him at the time. That would have just been escalating the situation. But because guilt trips make me so angry, I needed to rant about it somewhere.
It was a pretty simple statement. And while true, it nevertheless was an issue. The simple statement was about how none of us had emailed him when we needed something done, or sent him so much as a single private message in the game. Yes, that’s right, we didn’t. I suppose we could have and should have, but we didn’t. But you know, he was never around. We didn’t see him doing anything in the game, he was never in chat, and he never told us that even though he’d be gone, he’d be checking those things every two or three days. How the hell we were supposed to know he was bothering with those, given his complete disappearance otherwise? As far as we knew, we’d be sending messages that would never be seen, and get even more frustrated with the lack of response.
On top of that, there was the way he had been so uncooperative about getting anything done when we talked to him directly about it. If it took a couple weeks of everything from “May we please have your character set to rehearse for the video today? We have a deadline to film by. Thank you. :)” to “Get the frigging video rehearsed NOW or get out.” then why would we think a private message or an email would be at all effective? To me it seemed like something that would be even easier to ignore than when we were talking directly to him. An entirely wasted effort.
So the “Yeah, and no one has my email” followed by “I would like to point out that none of you sent me even one PM. Not one.” guilt trip combo only succeeded in making me want to rant or shake him or both. Especially after the year’s worth of chances we’ve given him, over and over, to actually do his part, or leave the band with no hard feelings on either side if he felt our playstyle in the game wasn’t for him. It took until the point where I was prepared to start banging my head on the desk in irritation and frustration before we reached the point of asking him to leave, and for having ridden out his making all of us that unhappy for a year, we got awarded an attempt at a guilt trip.
When it comes to the game, at this point, he can go fuck himself. I’d been wishing we’d kept him. Right up until the guilt trip. But that? That turned it from “Maybe we’re making a mistake” to “I’m fucking DONE.”
