Disappointing start to the day...

Courtesy: Minions Fan facebook page.

This morning I was doing my regular constitutional, that is I get up at 5am roughly and play my Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes.  Part of the game is a guild association where you join a group of up to 50 other players who participate and earn currency to buy gear and character advancements.  I suggest you go and have a look at the game, far too much to go into here.  Suffice to say I ran afoul of the guild leader for having the audacity to question his leadership.

I was measured, I pointed out what a guild was and that a third of the guild did not meet what goals he was setting.  I was advocating for the third who did not meet his goals. I was the highest level player in the guild - Level 82 (higher than the guild leader), had 70 characters, I was not perhaps the most tooled i.e. power gamer oriented participant in the guild.  Instead of his accepting my opinion his reaction was to berate me, to say this is his guild, for me to start my own guild if I don’t like it, etc etc, and before I knew what was happening I was demoted from an officer position and then expelled from the guild.  No chance to offer any form of response or acceptance of his position, bang I’m done and dusted. I viewed this rather poorly as a petulant reaction of a child, it cost me in game resources which at this stage I have no idea if they are lost or stored and restored upon joining another guild. [addendum: I don't loose them, yippee!]

So what’s my gripe this morning?  Communication and leadership where is it these days?  Leaders are no longer listening to people; in the case of my game this was truly evident.  The decisions being made were to advantage a select group, rather than the whole.  This can be seen in the world today where the political elite or the Hollywood elite believe they speak for the whole world believing they know what’s best.  So the leader of this guild rather than communicating shuts down the whole debate process, much like the liberal elites do by shouting over your opinions. 

Where has this left me?  Angry to say the least.  Am I going to start a guild, no.  Am I going to join another guild or rejoin the old one – no.  Yet again I am reminded of how petty and self indulgent humanity is and why I find it so hard to function within society.  That individual who runs that guild has just crippled me emotionally for a while, and this is part of who I am.  This is what frustrates me so much with the society today and why I find futility in existence.  Where even in a game you’re reminded constantly of and cannot escape the same mentality of the people who populate the real world.

Now I don’t know if I have the enthusiasm to play the game anymore as it now has a trigger attached to it.  “In the strictest sense of the term, trigger is used to refer to experiences that “re-trigger” trauma in the form of flashbacks or overwhelming feelings of sadness, anxiety, or panic. The brain forms a connection between a trigger and the feelings with which it is associated, and some triggers are quite innocuous”. (source: http://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/psychpedia/trigger) For me my whole life is virtually dedicated to avoiding triggers, this means I exhausted, neurotic and reclusive.  So I think I’ll just stick to solo games which don’t require group online interaction in future.

Just another day in the life of a person battling mental illness...