Well, the point of the dickwolves comic was to bring attention to how games tend to leave NPCs to horrible fates–calling attention to game designers always throwing NPCs in the refrigerator, not trivializing rape. And yet, that’s how it was seen. I agree that it was their response to the controversy that made it a big deal.
It reminds me of an incident when I was in college when the local newspaper decided to do a profile on a law student named Matt Hale. You probably saw this idiot on national TV or the Internet. I saw him walking by my dorm nearly every morning. I saw the 2edgy4me punk kids wearing their World Church of the Creator shirts. They ran the piece in February, which is of course Black History Month. The whole point of the piece was to call unwelcome attention to a white supremacist group operating right there on campus. The black student body responded by getting angry at the newspaper for running racist crap during Black History Month. Publicly, the newspaper fell all over itself to apologize. More privately, the staff was left asking, “What the actual fuck just happened here?”
If you’re gonna contextualise it in terms of Black/White, as an Australian I don’t have much to say about it other than it’s too fraught a situation to entertain much hope from where I’m standing… lots of bad blood there.
(Some Australians definitely have a different experience, but most of us feel very little impact on our lives from our problematic relationship with our indigenous folks - aside from inheriting a stolen continent - probably because they’re a smaller and more isolated contingent, and as for Africans, they’re only just arriving, and happily, I gather)
The majority of Americans have a literally black and white view of most issues concerning racism. The one-drop rule encodes the way we think; in North America, Tiger Woods is a “black” man, despite the fact that he’s got far more Asian ancestry than African. To people in the USA, Australian Aborigines are the same “race” as African Masai, and use of the word “Blackfella” will generally be misunderstood. (I’m not defending or extolling this, just pointing out that Australians probably see things differently than Usonians.) To many Americans, the only racism that really counts is that of “whites” towards “blacks” - bigotry directed at Koreans by non-whites is rarely considered newsworthy.
The subculture of computer programmers that Eric Raymond writes about as “our tribe” (which is fairly heavily represented on bOINGbOING) is overwhelmingly white, male, (a)theistically Abrahamic, and massively ignorant concerning privilege, poverty, and gender issues. Lack of personal experience with these issues frequently manifests as unpleasant Ayn Rand style libertarianism, but can also show up as a nauseating “political correctness”… which sometimes gets labeled (perhaps accurately) as concern trolling.
Lack of personal experience with these issues frequently manifests as unpleasant Ayn Rand style libertarianism
Not trying to derail the conversation, but it may come as a shock to you that I come from a fairly high poverty area at least as far as the U.S. is concerned (though admittedly mostly white) and it’s shocking how many dirt-poor people you’ll meet who are hardcore libertarian. It’s…weird.
Basically, concern trolling is always intentional attempts to drag the thread off topic with your “concern”, but it’s possible to concern troll without really realizing that concern trolling is what you are doing. A concern troll may honestly believe they are helping the discussion by making it about their issue or themselves instead - but they are still hooking people and intentionally trying to make the thread about their issue or themselves.
AFAIK that’s the main way “concern troll” is used, the person who says “OMG I am SO CONCERNED because [you are fat/you are doing BAD THINGS while pregnant/you are eating soy/you are not attachment parenting your child/etc.]” The concern may or may not be feigned; the point is that the conversation topic is de-railed by said commenter whether or not they realize they are trolling.
A year and a half later, I realized what bugged me about this!
The idea is that if you can convince people there is, somehow, an abstract danger, e.g. “concern driving trollies”, then there is justification for citizen action / activism.
Yes. We are responding viscerally to the neuroticism of creating threats out of thin air and then requiring others to agree that action must be taken. I.e.: trolling others for their assent to one’s constructed madness. My kids do this all the time. They must be stopped.
