Video Games: A Lesson For Life

As my longtime readers (lawl) will be aware, I'm a gamer.  Professionally.  That means people pay me money for things I make an imaginary, pixelated avatar do from my computer that they can see.  This is in and of itself remarkable considering people are willing to throw money my way for my ability to press keys in a particular sequence while barking out orders to others so that they may play more efficiently, and win.  And win a lot we do.

But that's player versus player content. There's also player versus environment, which is a group of people responding to some predetermined set of algorithms.  This is, in my estimation, less challenging since a program can only do so many things. Each person in the team has a designated set of potential functions and sets of abilities available to them, which when used in concert can be brought to bear in a way that we'll call a 'victory' of humans over programs.  The two primary roles are 'tank' and 'healer'; the tank essentially calls the play, and takes it in the face. The healer compensates for everyone else's screw ups and pre-programmed damage the in-game characters will take. Else, that match ends and the players try again.  So, naturally, the tanks are generally expected to have above average knowledge of fight mechanics since their decisions heavily determine what the players do and whether or not a victory is in the making. Anyway, I'll stop prattling and get straight to the lesson in life.

To the extent that so much is placed on the tanks' shoulders is the to extent they have the ability to handle, avoid and mitigate incoming problems.  People generally listen to the tank, or, department head.  What happens when you have a stupid department head and a smart worker bee?  Well, if the department head were smart, he or she would know to listen to the smarter drone. But we've already set up that our tank/department head isn't the brightest of the lot.

How is it that one might deal with such a person? In the real world, one must factor into the equation the continuance of a paycheck. But a well-placed quip can engender a mutiny.

In the ordinary course of affairs, if the tank is unhappy, the group is unhappy and the person making the tank unhappy usually gets cordially invited to leave. Or, in other words, the drones get fired for not heeding what the boss says.  But I'm craftier than the average bear (no pun there; this was a warrior).

Round the first: we had just finished some fight or other where my 'toon' was constantly being selected for mean things to happen to it. The random number generator is sometimes unfriendly, and I've long suspected that gnomes (my toon's race) have a weighted priority for abuse.  Anyway, through some fancy finger-work, and judicious use of abilities with long and short cooldowns, I was highly convenient for a healer to have in the group - meaning he didn't have to pay that much attention to keeping me alive. As a former raid healer, I grew to appreciate damage classes who burn their abilities to spare my attention and available resources compensating for their laziness.

Fight ends. 

I say something like, "sheesh - what is it? pick on the gnome day today?" Everyone has a good laugh since in World of Warcraft gnomes are a hated people by quite a lot of players.  And much loved by others.  So, they're always good for a joke.

Except the tank.  He's a dick. (gender insult there for Nanny Ophelia's pleasure). It might have been PZ Myers trying to squash everyone else's fun.  Anyway, other than the courteous greeting when the randomly selected group was assembled by the game, no one had really said anything beyond "ready?" and "sure, let's do it."

So, the tank says that I talk too much.  So, apparently, three sentences in about half an hour is too much for this douche.

I sow the seeds of doubt, as you can see in this pretty picture. Note the arrow in the picture that I've drawn in; that indicates my damage per second. The top number is the total of everyone in the fight, then me, then the next person, who did less than half my dps.

Then I kick it up a notch.

Round the second, in pictures. Sorry!