It’s good to understand the player’s actions as being part of a particular game. But it’s okay to punish the player, if you’re feeling altruistic or vengeful enough (that is, you want to do your part to discourage people from playing that game).
It is similarly okay for the player or, indeed, a third party to consider your ‘altruistic’ punishment to be itself blameworthy or anti-social and subject it to punishment. After all, encouraging ‘altruists’ to punish the kind of player who is not powerful enough to deter punishment is typically just another part of the game, one step up in sophistication.
You’re right. We punish the weak. The piling-on effect I see sometimes sickens me; once someone is already roundly criticized, all sorts of cheap moral-enforcement-altruism-signalers latch on.
It is similarly okay for the player or, indeed, a third party to consider your ‘altruistic’ punishment to be itself blameworthy or anti-social and subject it to punishment. After all, encouraging ‘altruists’ to punish the kind of player who is not powerful enough to deter punishment is typically just another part of the game, one step up in sophistication.
You’re right. We punish the weak. The piling-on effect I see sometimes sickens me; once someone is already roundly criticized, all sorts of cheap moral-enforcement-altruism-signalers latch on.
Just like how wedrifid begin criticising people like that, and then you joined in. :P
I definitely didn’t consider that my comment was so self-describing :) Clever.
I guess I could stand to implement a final “how will this be perceived” habit (pretend I’m the observer reading what some other man has written).