Liang Nuren wrote:
I would say that this is not an example of your friend not knowing where the line was - it's an example of the scammed person not knowing where the line was. Consider that the scammed person is likely to exhibit this behavior regardless of whether or not he lost the ISK to a scam, to titan PVP, or to a bad market investment. From a purely cold blooded point of view, even though I feel really bad every time I run across one of these people, its better that they spend that ISK on me than on someone else. Ultimately I don't view this as much different than someone who's addicted to any expensive habit - from cigarettes to alcohol to hard drugs. They are responsible for their own health and finances.
Hopefully the hard lessons that come from spending too much on any particular habit drive home hard enough to curtail such behavior in the future. And frankly, if someone like that is scammed entirely out of Eve it will probably turn out better for them in the future.
-Liang
While I agree with a great deal of what you hypothesis on the blog, specifically that The Wis broke out of the "Magic Circle," why didn't you apply the same standard to theMittani's call to harass another player to the point of suicide? Sure one of them might have been distraught over the loss of some Internet spaceship pixels; but, the other one forgot that there was a real person behind an avatar and made the decision to call for people to harass another player into killing himself.
I'm sure that you weren't trying to, but your blog post comes across as "blaming the victim" for having someone go on an international live-stream and call for other players to make him kill himself. To me they both seem to have lost perspective and took the game too far.
I would also argue that if theMittani had just presented his "humorous" story and left it at that we wouldn't be having discussions like this. Breaking out of the circle isn't what attracted the gaming media's attention, it was the morally repugnant, and possibly illegal, display during the Q&A session. Drunk or not I can't think of anyone I know that would off the cuff call on other people to harass someone into offing themselves.
That, in my estimation, is why this went from a simple FanFest presentation to a genuine news story.
YMMV