Primitive Tribes
Hello and welcome. I am Jimmy Goodall. You might have heard of my sister, Jane Goodall. She has made a career out of living with primates--studying their habits and way of life. I've done a similar thing with my career. I study Battle.net users.
Right now, you may be thinking, "How are the two similar?" Well, if you're thinking that, you've never been on Battle.net before. The species act very similar indeed.
I decided that I would try to observe a certain group of users, just as my sister would study a certain family group of apes over a long period of time. I chose a "clan" (as groups of users call themselves) that went by the name of QuasiMonkey. Yes, Monkey. A connection to my sister, perhaps? Only the gods know.
I observed the clan over a period of weeks. They met often, and never suspected that I was not one of them. Of course, I took on my role of clan bot quite nicely. I dare say, if I wasn't a geeky scientist, I could be a geeky actor.
This is a typical list of the clan members that would attend a meeting. I am the first one listed.
Many of the members would routinely change aliases. It often became quite a chore to keep track of them all.
This group seemed to enjoy playing a game of some sort. I noticed that it always took the group no less than ten minutes to actually get one of these games started. Sometimes a member would be even more confused than normal:
Another member would then try to help out the one that was lagging behind in the IQ race:
Of course, as seen by the "phil=foo", mockery was rampant in this clan.
Also rampant was confusion. Right in the middle of this conversation, a prominent member felt the need to say:
I was tempted to question him about whether or not this "beats wars" was the game that they played, but then remember that I was supposed to be playing the role of a silent observer.
This "philio" member made a comment about how members shouldn't mock on other members. The member called "MinerCotren," who I shall refer to as "bad speller" from now on, apparently felt that "mock" and "make fun of" were two different things:
That BiosFix, he's always a character.
To be precise, he's an insane character. At one point, he started talking to himself. For a long time:
On a particular night of observing, BiosFix arrived early. It was just him and I. He didn't do anything for quite a bit of time, and I noticed something called "Blizzard Trivia." I watched this, and saw this question pop up:
I had learned from the members' conversations that there were two upgrades, but I could not remember what they were.
I had been under the impression that "Defensive Matrix" was given to these "Science Vessels" from the beginning. I was obviously mistaken.
Becoming rather bored, I decided to throw out the whole "silent observer" charade. After all, it was only BiosFix and myself. I tried to stimulate some conversation:
That only served to cause BiosFix to try and create some sort of artwork:
Unfortunately, my cover had been blown. I was able to observe just one more mockery before I had to leave this clan for good. This time, it came from a spelling error. It was bad speller's spelling error. philio seemed a bit confused by it, and bad speller wasn't very happy.
The End