4/12/2021 Clash Sucks
I'll just start off by saying that I was very addicted to Clash of Clans for various reasons. For the uninitiated, Clash of Clans is a game that can be downloaded to one's Android or Apple device. It is part of a score of games known as "mobile gaming" or "micro-transaction gaming." There is quite a bit about personal weaknesses and the game itself that made me do things that, with a right mind, I would disagree with, but because of aforementioned weaknesses, I continued anyway. I talk about the weaknesses throughout as and when they relate to the point.
I played the game, on average, for about 25 hours per week. Most of that wasn't so much "playing" the game, there's really not much to "do" in the game (dumb), rather, I was often filling up the chat feature of the game with every little stupid thought that entered my head. Mainly so that I could get that little shot of dopamine every time someone replied, "lol," and it happened often because I was intentionally trying to make people laugh. As a side note, it occurred to me the other day that the concept of "making" people laugh is a little violent. A little forceful, don't you think? I mean, I understand the concept: when you say something funny and the other person can't help but laugh, but if you get into the semantics, to "make" someone laugh is different than giving someone the gift of laughter. Just sayin. I was definitely opening that app to *make* people laugh for my own selfish satisfaction. When I look back on it, I feel my blood pressure rise a little bit, and my neck feels a little "drunk," for lack of a better descriptor. Similar to being embarrassed. I'm embarrassed that for so long (4 years) I was obsessed with making these people laugh. Hopefully by the end of this writing, you'll understand why I am so embarrassed and ashamed for associating with these people. I knew better, but I did it anyway for reasons that are also outside the scope of this post.
eIt should be noted that much of the following text, while I wrote it, is taken from discussions Adam and I have had about Clash of Clans and my experience with it. Many of the thoughts presented are ones that he presented to me. We had several of these conversations over the course of the 4 years I played the game, and this is sort of a summary of them all. Never was I without cognitive dissonance upon continuing to play after any of the conversations. One day, I made a decision to quit the game largely based on observations Adam offered. I posted my email address in the game's chat feature, said, "Don't be shy, now." left the clan, and deleted the app. That marked the second time I'd deleted the app. It has now been over a year since the second deletion. Two days later, when I had some time to kill, I prepared the following as a response to the emails I was getting.
I spent the entire next day re-writing and editing it to make it a real irrefutable puncher. Peppered throughout the day, of course, were conversations in which Adam shared some insights he has gained over the years regarding debating his point of view with others. Ultimately, after listening, I decided not to send this in an email. The thing is--I've already said in the clan chat most of what I have written here. It was always met with varying degrees of support and resistance from my clanmates. An addiction can make you say and do things you would otherwise do. At the same time, it is only you who can control the addiction, and to get out from under it, you have to want to. Anyway, why I quit and will never play Clash of Clans again. Here we go: ... Glossary of Clash of Clans terms used: Account(s)--a person may have more than one account in the game. Each account requires a separate device and email address. Supercell, the company behind the game, eventually created a way to "sync" the accounts so that a player could sign in to any of their accounts from any of their devices. Attack(s)--each player is allotted two attacks upon the opposing team during a war Boot--kicking someone out of the clan Boot Message--if you boot a player, you have the option to send a personalized message. The default message is, "Sorry, we have decided to boot you from the clan." Clan--A group of people who form a team. Clan members have different ranks, from highest to lowest: Leader, Co-Leader, Elder, Member. Only someone with a higher rank can promote a lower-ranked member to a higher rank. A clan can be "closed" (no one may enter), "invite only" (players may be invited or may ask to join), or "anyone can join" (players can come and go freely). Only Elders and higher can boot people. Donation Ratio--players can donate troops to other players for them to use in individual attacks. Once the donated troops are used, they disappear, and if a player wants more troops for another attack, they must request again. The donation ratio is the ratio of troops donated to troops requested. Green Stripe--there is a log of past wars in the interface of the game. It is presented as a list, and lines where a war was lost appear red, naturally, lines where a war was won appear green. Heroes--King, Queen, etc. strong characters in your cartoon army. Heroes have levels and take a week or two to upgrade to the next level once you start the upgrade. Infernos--defensive buildings to build and upgrade in your cartoon village that cartoonily burn the cartoon army attacking your cartoon village. Opted Out--a player may "opt" in or out of war. Generally, opted-out players are left out of war, but when selecting players for the war, the Co-Leader or Leader initiating the matchmaking process may include opted-out players. Usually this is done because the algorithm requires a multiple of 5 players. Rank--when pertaining to War. Lower ranked players have fewer defensive structures and characters that are not upgraded as highly as the higher ranked players. Sleeper Bases--when you do not build and/or minimally upgrade defensive structures in your village but fully upgrade offensive characters. This affects the matchmaking algorithm for War and gives the team with a few sleeper bases an advantage. Supercell has since implemented measures to prevent this. War--when two Clans are matched using an algorithm. A war consists of 24 hours of preparation and 24 hours of battle. Players can only attack the opposing team during the Battle Day. ... There is a young man I knew, and when I met him, he was 11. He played Clash of Clans rather casually. This child of eleven, one day, was very upset, and I'll get into why in a moment. He came over to a neighbor's backyard with a plastic bow & arrow where a group including Adam, myself, and few other neighbors was hanging out, and he began shooting at us with these plastic arrows. You see, this creative and imaginative and hilarious, if you ask me, child of eleven, for his entire life up to this point, he had never had anyone supporting him or telling him just how normal he was or accepting him for who he is. His father was certainly not a bad father, but he was a normal human American with problems and stressors of his own. He was always telling his son, "You've got problems." "You've got problems." You're damn right he did, but not the ones you think he had. The father was probably mainly worried about how people would judge him for his son's behavior. This isn't a new concept. His mother, having met her twice, I can say she struck me as someone thoroughly in need of love and acceptance herself. She was manipulative and trash-talked the childrens' father in front of them. His half-brother on his mother's side had beaten him, and his mother didn't believe him when he spoke up about it. After the divorce, while spending time at his mother's, his mother's boyfriend threatened him with a knife and put the children's shared cell phone out of reach, preventing them from communicating with anyone else while they were there. At every turn, this child of eleven is having doors slammed in his face and people telling him he has problems, that there's something wrong with him. That he's not enough. That the world would be better off without him. How hard is it, now, to imagine that plastic bow & arrow as a gun, perhaps an automatic. "I hate it here. I don't want to be here anymore, and while I'm at it, why don't I take a couple of these assholes out with me." I was hesitant to invite him to the clan because I already knew what would happen to him, and in my misguided pursuit of some kind of utopia, I invited him to the clan. When my young friend joined, he followed in step for the first war or so, but it wasn't long until the clan (myself included) started beating him just like almost everyone else in his life was. "Make your attacks when we say and where we say, or else you don't belong here." Then eventually just, "You don't belong here," when he was booted the first time. He came back, and as you can imagine, he had not suddenly changed his mind about how he wanted to play Clash of Clans. He was still the same eleven year old person. The clan was not "teaching" (in quotations to imply that what we did there was not actually teaching) him "discipline" or "responsibility" or "teamwork," as the others often claimed they were trying to do whenever I brought up how shitty it is to boot people from the clan for not making attacks when and where is appropriate "FOR THE WIN." No, this child of eleven, what the clan was telling him was, "You're not good enough. You don't belong here." I witnessed in person the color drain from his face and his body become weak and armpits begin to sweat as he read the chat and knew what was being said about him in vague phrases meant to conceal their subject and meaning. Some of these phrases were even mine, although at this point, I was defending him, but I was also upholding the clan's standards and Rules of Engagement, as I still longed to prove to the gang that I was ready to kill for them. Straddling the fence, trying to force utopia. For this, I am ashamed. You can't not be a thing if you are that thing. You have to unbecome that thing in order to not be it. Period. Not only that, but, again, you have to want to. The second time he was booted, I made sure that I would be the one to do it. I thought that if it came from me, I would know that the "boot message" would be polite, and I hoped it would be better received. Looking back, I can see how incredibly stupid and selfish that line of thought was. I've been rejected in whole, several times. In ways and for reasons irrelevant to the point. The fact that the rejector wasn't rude about it did nothing to lessen the pain of that rejection. As I sit here, with blood on my hands, I can't help but wonder about all the people I've given the "cordial boot" to. Or joked with the other addicts about "sending them to an island in a row boat with no paddles but for a boot with a hole in it where they will be forced to sew leather with no thimble." This is literally something I said many times in the chat, fully aware that the subject of the "joke" could see and read it. How did it make them feel to be the butt of this inside joke? Did they go home and beat their kid? Did they go to school and pick on a black kid? Did the black kid then go and rape someone? Did the rape victim then molest a child or beat an elderly person? Or maybe it was something different. Maybe I just dug the hole a little deeper for the depressed anorexic, making it that much harder to climb out. Maybe it just ruined someone's afternoon, and you think, "Well, what's one afternoon?" One afternoon, after how many other afternoons ruined by someone's boss or coworker or classmate or spouse or parent or angry customer (whose afternoon is clearly already also ruined)? Getting booted out of the clan might not be the final straw, but it's certainly one of them. I'm disgusted with myself. For my weak moral fiber and desperation to belong that I enlisted with the bullies. And that my MO was to play the innocent and delicate yet fatally poisonous flower; to put lipstick on the pig. Here's something Adam came up with: I'm not a Christian, but to use a metaphor that many will be able to understand: if Jesus Christ himself were a living entity on this planet today, would you still boot him for not making his war attack? I will no longer be participating in the sucking of souls or bullying people just so I can get that little thrill from winning a little cartoon pretend war. I knew that it was wrong in the first place, and it always made me a bit hot under the collar, but I did it anyway. Looking back, I feel really stupid for this. I'm not beating myself up here. Just laying it out. It really is stupid to bully people. No one wins in that situation, and the really stupid thing is that I was already aware of this phenomenon but, ever the procrastinator, was too lazy to prevent myself from exhibiting this behavior. "Please explain what happened that caused you to miss your war attack," the others would demand in the chat. As if it fucking matters. "Please try to maintain a more even donation ratio." As if we addicts really needed that player's donations with our 18 accounts each (exaggeration. reality is, as far as I know, 2-5 accounts each). I'd like to think that I provided contrast by wording the same messages thus: "Hey (username), noticed you missed your war attacks. Hope everything is okay. If you're not sure you can make your attacks for the next war, would you mind opting out?" While I did genuinely hope everything was okay with the person, it rarely ever wasn't. This misty way of wording it creates a fog to obscure the message being sent: get your fucking attacks in or get booted, you lazy, good for nothing ass. This is not what I wanted to be saying either, but the gameplay demands it, and I will say it again: I am ashamed for participating. Again, I was delusional and thought that I could change the world from the inside of one of the very institutions raping it. Do you really think the "please" changes the tone of the message? Do you really think anyone saw that and thought, "Well s/he said please, so I guess I'll change the type of person I am." By my observation, these remarks have absolutely zero effect on how a player plays the game. Maybe twice in my four years playing the game did I see a person comply, and one of those was me after being told, as a newer player that, "Going into war without heroes is usually a no-no." I only did it because I saw higher players doing it regularly. Little did I yet know of the unspoken Rule of Engagement #8,464 that players with sleeper bases with one or more heroes upgrading may still enter into combat. That comment aimed directly at me did make me blush physically and afraid, LITERALLY AFRAID, to do it again. Over the weeks after that, the way I saw other people being abused made me afraid to receive the abuse, so I shut up and fell in line out of fear. Fear! Actual fear and anxiety with palpable symptoms: raised blood pressure, flushing cheeks, sweaty palms, and butterflies in the stomach. This went on ceaselessly for months. At some point, I thought, "Hey, I'm an adult, I can stick up for myself and try to address this rationally with these people who are abusing me and others." When I brought up how this affected me, the response was a brush-off and lacked any sign of remorse: "It's unfortunate that we are guilty of that." To be fair, I had also admitted to committing the same acts that had been committed against me. I think my point about the lack of remorse still stands. Until I proved to the gang that I was willing to commit murder for them, I got a flutter of nervous butterflies in my stomach every time I opened the app and heard the chime sound. After I started killing people and had been doing it for awhile, proving myself, the nervous feeling was replaced by a nauseated one which was coated with guilt. Apparently these feelings were not enough to make me stop.
As a result of growing up with everything being a competition between my sibling, my cousins and me (and I mean everything: from speed-eating a bowl of cereal at Grandma's kitchen table (this actually happened, I lost) to making it to the car from the grocery store), I developed an unhealthy competitiveness. I allowed the result of anything and everything to determine my worth as a human, mainly because if you're last in one of those contests, you are told "You lose!" and you are usually laughed at. It starts young, and if you're one of those spongey-type people (even if you're not, but I can only speak from my own experience), it gets inside. It affects you. Everything: performance in school, travel soccer performance, attention and corrections from dance instructors, clothes, appearances, perceived social status, what I ate (or didn't eat) for lunch at school, became a measure of my success and worth. I tolerated running track, even though I thoroughly did not enjoy it, just so I could win at something. You'd think I was a fast little fifth grader because I rarely finished below second place, but really I was just a scared empty little fifth grader, desperate for acceptance. Winning didn't make me feel any better or popular though. I still felt like I was barely keeping up with the people I called my friends. I call them friends, but really, I think I saw them not only as idols to aspire to but somehow, oddly, also the competition.
I came to rejoice at winning and despair at not winning. As a result of *that* (and coming back to Clash of Clans), rather than having neutral feelings toward "winning" or "losing" arbitrary and inconsequential contests, I got much satisfaction from being a part of a team that performs all the winning sort of teamwork that it takes to win, but I'll be damned if I'm going to continue forcing that ideology on other people. I won't do it, and I won't spectate it. If another person wanted to be playing the way you are, they would be. I'd rather lose while that child of eleven (or that adult of 40) is off enjoying himself with some other activity or video game than force him to bend to my will for the green stripe. Forcing yourself on another--that's rape, and I do not intend to be a rapist any longer. The fact that I ever cared enough about that green stripe to rape someone else... it sickens me, and I'll have to live with that for the rest of my days. Another twist of the knife was when I saw people who I'd spoken up for and fiercely defended when they behaved in a way inconducive to winning turn around and commit the heinous act of demanding compliance from another player. But y'know what? I created the very monsters twisting that knife. I lied to myself and made excuses so that I could continue to be accepted by the very company of people who originally instilled anxiety in me. A player is missing war attacks regularly and faces my lipstick-wearing pig and changes his ways. Two months later, still missing war attacks but now being met with my complete acceptance of it, he turns around and scolds an opted-out player for attacking out of the range of their rank. This is the type of monster that I had become and then went on to help create. Do I even need to cite the many sources talking about how detrimental an addiction to Clash can be? How Iranian citizens threatened to sit out of an upcoming election if the government didn't lift a ban on the game? How an addiction to Clash of Clans nearly derailed a professional baseball team's chances at a World Series? Not that I support this type of competition either, but I bet the higher-ups at Supercell enjoyed the free publicity. It was the Kansas City Royals in 2014, by the way. How about how the gaming industry and civic leaders in Washington State have launched a lobbying organization in an effort to exempt smartphone games from local gambling laws? You don't think Supercell has their eye on that one? Now, I'm not one to necessarily support the existence of a government, but if you are, you know that when the people and ideals you pledge your allegiance to are saying that this free-to-play/micro-transaction style of gaming is a danger, then that might be something to take note of. Perhaps. Go ahead and do a search for Clash of Clans addiction. You'll read some pretty telling stories. I don't claim to know what level the addiction has reached within the clan I was in or its related clans, but considering Supercell rakes in upwards of $5 million every day (yes, every day), I know that players worldwide are spending in the tens of thousands of dollars annually, some more, some less. I don't think the clans that I have been in have any immunity to the sickness. Whatever the degree of spending of real world money, the game, the wins, those are the drugs. When you demand that someone play it your way, so that you can get your fix, your green stripe, your infernos upgraded, you are stealing their money--their time, to get your drugs. As Adam says, it's not okay for a meth addict, but it's okay for you, right?
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