There’s a pic going around that was supposedly captured from the WoW forums. It’s a screen cap of a forum post made by the brother of a WoW player, announcing to the rest of the forum that his brother has passed away. He says that he’s making the post because his brother was always proud of how well-regarded he was in the WoW community, and that he thought his brother would want his fellow WoWers to know that he’d died.
The very first response to this heartfelt posting was:
“So did he drop any good loot?”
When I first read this I chuckled lightly. It’s a funny joke. When characters in WoW die, the drop loot. Everybody get’s that right? And then I thought about the poor guy who just lost his brother and, out of love, turned on his computer (the computer he must have been using shortly before he died), opened up his WoW account (another piece of his life) and posted a message to the friends and guildmates who might have known his brother better than he did.
I can imagine the strength it must have taken to make that gesture. The love and respect he must have felt for his brother to even bother. And I try to imagine how he must have felt reading that single sentence:
“So did he drop any loot?”
And I died a little inside.
Obviously, the folks at Kotaku had a different reaction. Earlier today, Kotaku declared this the “Best Forum Post Ever.”
This is why people think gamers are immature children. This, right here: Because, it seems, most of us are. Shame on Kotaku. Shame on us all.
You can rationalize crassness and insensitivity as much as you want. Sure, the internet is a negative place, and people post without thinking. Sure it’s just a joke. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe nobody cares. But sometimes you have to have enough class to not encourage that kind of behavior. Sometimes you have to care, even when nobody else does. Because that’s what people do.
This is how honorable men and women are supposed to respond in a situation like that. More of this would be a good thing.
