Real men play Quake 1 on Linux.
Back in my student days I pretty much lived for mountain biking, underwater hockey, Linux and Quake tournaments. There is a certain code to killing people. There are ways to win which are in theory fair but they are frowned upon. There are sure ways to get some pretty nasty insults out of people in gripping moments of live and death gaming.
We all hate campers.
The camper is the spineless little pencil neck shit that finds himself a corner to hide and waits to shoot somebody in the back. The lowest of the low.
Enter the new campers.
The day the finalists for the SA Blog Awards were announced there was something in the back of my mind that bugged me a bit, but I could not put my finger on it.
There has been a bit of noise about this topic over the last few days and one unhappy camper tried the “I’m going home and I’m taking my ball with me” approach to showing his unhappiness with the awards process.
I’m going to try and put my finger on why I think both the SA Blog awards and the ignorant child are lame.
First the awards.
There is a risk to creating a popularity contest in a “distributed thinking” ecosystem. How do you compare original, honest and deeply personal niche content to weak, shallow, regurgitated-happy-meal popular content? Do you count votes? Does democracy apply? I think we are all running our own little dictator states. I rule my feed list, just the way I like it.
Each person has their own view of the blogging world. This is the power of social media. There is no one view or one authority. The news for one.
Do I care who wins the SA Blog awards? Nope. Did I vote? Nope. Will it influence what I read? Hell no.
There is a risk that this popularity contest supports the new campers even if it has the best intentions.
Next, the new campers.
The new camper is the blogger who regurgitates shallow content. They get the hits, they have ads all over their site like an xmas tree. Here you will find the latest video clip which they did not create or the pictures of the latest blond bimbo celeb’s breasts or a series of posts that simply link to other content.
At its best, EPIC is “a summary of the world — deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before … but at its worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue.” “Perhaps there was another way.”
— EPIC 2014
Change the world or go away.
The blog camper pulls the crowds, the feeblebrained click. Every vote counts. There are ways to win which are in theory fair but they are frowned upon.
There is a code and a responsibility to creating content and I have a problem with campers.
ps. To the people out there creating fresh, original, local, personal, Gonzo and smart content.. keep up the good work.
Well said.
Heh, love the analogy. Well said indeed!
This is by far the most sense I have heard all week. However, I don’t even really see why they need a new name; in the olden days we just used to call them all-round “lamers” or if you’re a script kiddie, “l4m3rz”. It’s the kind of people that really does the world more damage than contribute; suck from others’ brilliancy because they can’t or are too lazy to invent their own. “Leeches” would be another word you could use for them.
I guess the main difference between a “blog camper” and a “lame leech” is that the leech tends not to become popular because the general (clueless) public has enough of a clue to figure out a leech is a leech…
but, for the “blog camper” simple lowest common denominator democracy logic fails.
Yeah, you’re right. Sheepishness is a common sickness under the general public. But this has been demonstrated long before by the politicians all over the world. I mean, how are they getting away with what they are getting away with (sorry for confusing phrase) and still get enough votes to stay in government?
I hate this analogy! When it comes to Quake (and more lately, Call of Duty 2) I am a total camper. In Quake 3 it was always with a Railgun… in other games it was always a sniper rifle.
Without writing an ode to ‘being a camper’, the reason I was a camper was because as late as 2003, I was dragging my Pentium 2 300MHz box with me to LAN parties and using it to play Quake 3. The FPS rates simply meant I didn’t have a chance to even try to run around and do any damage against players with vastly more powerful machines. I became a camper for survival reasons… Apologies to the countless mates I managed to floor when only their left earlobe stuck out behind a wall.
Viva, Campers, Viva!
Henk,
read the first line of the posting again (-;
Joe,
Your revengeful anger towards campers tells me you were taken out quite a lot by campers during your gaming days.
Just a comment on the camping- I think everyone camped out at one stage in the beginning. I know I did- for about a minute- untill I saw how much action I was missing.
Good analogy. For me it’s like do’ers and followers.
Yeah, you are right Graham. Most of us camped at some stage or another. Its the do’ers that move beyond that though and start roaming. If everyone just camped, Quake would have been the most boring game every developed! So all go camping and for a while there is no action until someone gets impatient of the state of the game and start roaming. Unfortunately, its the campers that scores as with “blog campers”! Lets face it, blog campers rake in the hits… Therefore this is such a beautiful analogy.
Hmm, Stii, I’m not so sure… I very seldom really raked in lots of frags as a camper. My frags/deaths ratio was probably not too bad, but except for the large space maps, I would sit around bored most of the time and be a completely helpless target to anyone throwing a grenade into my “corner to hide”
I wouldn’t feel too threatened by ‘blog campers’, as I think RSS and other aggregators is doing the job just as well as them.
On another note, do ‘real’ men play Quake 1 on Linux because it’s not quick enough to run anything later?
Real men play Quake 1 because..
Quake 2 sucked.
Quake 1’s rocket launcher was really cool
..yeah, speed, speed, speed, the pace of game play in Q1 was fun.
Q1 had lots of cool hacks and tricks to configure the engine the way you liked it.
Quake 3 was OK.. but not as much fun as Q1.
Most of the games after this are “too real”, I don’t want to be a sniper in a “real life” police raid, inching my way to get the perfect shot while being killed by a single bullet.
The fun is being super human. “Real” is dull.
[...] Lets look at Technorati. Go to Technorati and click on one of the Top 10 hot searches. I clicked on Twitter, which is the hottest at the moment. You are bound to find one or more blogs that say: “Just checking it out!” with a pingback to another blog post (although not exactly in this example. No pingback here, but it does happen often). Now THAT is a blatent “blog camper”. Spamming in its worst form. What people do is they want to be part of the hot topic, but do not even have an opinion on it! So they simply “leech” onto someone that may have an opinion and in return they get some Technorati exposure. [...]