The exercise of power; and life in cyberspace

Power, when exercised arrogantly, tends to diminish.

(One of the thoughts that came to my mind as I meditated on foreign affairs and international relations while harvesting the crops in Royal Story, a Facebook application game. The thought arose as I recalled the arrogant behavior of a certain leader toward the leader of another country to whom the former’s country owes a lot of help.)

Regarding the game I mentioned in the headpost, I came upon a sad notice jotted down by one of my RS neighbors. They have to post such a notice if they couldn’t actively play, as convincing as possible, because some players complain if they don’t get a visit.

The queer thing is that when some players apologize in an FB group for not being able to visit, some other players criticize them for doing so. The critics insinuate that those who apologize seem not to have a life aside from the game as to find the need to apologize. So it’s really difficult to do the “right’ thing.

Anyway, the message in the attached picture is one of the reasons why we should be considerate of people we meet in the Internet and avoid quarreling with them as much as possible: we simply don’t know what they are going through. How sad it is for us to add to their sorrows if they already bear so much.

As for me, I never complain in a pertinent FB group about how my fellow players behave. My in-game sign board reads: “Help urself. B hapi :)”

Regarding those flamers who love to criticize other players, they pounced upon me twice. The first time, after posting one or two rejoinders, I felt lazy to answer back in time. By the time I decided to deal with them in a more masterful way, the thread was already deleted by the admin.

So the next time they flamed what I posted, I readily did a counterstrike and advised them to recruit more confederates, telling them that it would encourage me to do my duty of civilizing them. There was a flurry of exchanges but the next time I looked, I found out I was already kicked out from the said group. *Sigh*

In a flaming encounter, the one who is kicked out is regarded as the winner. It means the other flamers cannot withstand his whiplash so they cry uncle to the administrator to have the opponent kicked out from the group. It’s a cop out. Usually, the administrators in a group where flaming exists are members of the flaming gang. That should explain their boldness and staying power. They are born losers. It’s like a basketball game where they are both players and referees … and still lose. Of course, they would never admit that their butts hurt badly, except indirectly or by slip of the tongue.

I suddenly mastered flaming — or counterflaming, to be exact — in Mobius Forums, which served as the bulletin board of Mu Philippines, a massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) I used to play in the early 2000s. My initial clash with top players pertained to in-game trading wherein I altered the market situation so that it would be fairer and less disadvantageous to low-ranking players, who were usually school kids who had limited playing time due to limited funds. Then, I beat single-handedly the top guilds in spot wars in-game, again to make the situation fairer to low-ranking players as well as to those who didn’t belong to powerful guilds. Eventually, I was ganged up by the flamers and their flame masters in the bulletin board but I beat them there as well.

The flame wars started without me knowing what flaming was. But I was fascinated by the term — flaming, sounds so nice. Astonishingly, I mastered flaming and counterflaming in no time at all. I quickly absorbed all the flamers’ flaming techniques and invented so many flaming weapons of my own — including weapons of mass destruction — that I hardly touched my huge arsenal during the series of flame wars we fought all over the various sections of the Mobius Forums.

Just one WMD was enough to make a gang of flamers lose interest in tangling with me. So I used WMDs sparingly, worried the techniques might proliferate and ruin the art and science of flaming and counterflaming.

(I posted this write-up on my Facebook wall exactly 2 years ago — August 18, 2014. Click here: http://bit.ly/2bLcWJJ. The portion in bold letters was my headpost. The longer portion was my lone comment. I can’t recall anymore — at the moment — who were the two leaders and two countries I alluded to in my headpost. — JRMR)