LOL Interwebz: Trolling Is a GamerGateway Drug

Every Thursday in LOL Interwebz, Luke T. Harrington explores the quirks and foibles of Internet culture from a Gospel perspective.

It started out innocently enough.

Here at CaPC, our fearless leader posted a piece on #GamerGate that I thought was pretty good. Worth sharing, even. So I took to Twitter and posted the link along with one sentence of my own commentary  (“Gamer culture has been yelling ‘Take us seriously, but don’t you dare criticize us!’ for way too long“) along with the obligatory #GamerGate hashtag.

Like most of my tweets, I expected this one to sink into the ether, never to be heard from again. Instead, my smartphone immediately started blowing up with notifications.

At first, I ignored them. Use a popular hashtag, get a bunch of responses, I figured. And you don’t get stuff done by arguing with people on Twitter. I had important house-husband stuff to do. Laundry, groceries, take the kiddo for a walk, write some sappy thing about crayons. This house wasn’t going to husband itself.

But halfway through that aforementioned walk, my curiosity got the better of me. I looked, and I couldn’t stop laughing.

“A religious site?” said some random guy. “I can’t take anyone seriously that thinks a magical man in the sky is looking over us.”

Obviously, most of us would have trouble taking such a site seriously. But since no religion that I know of teaches that, I thought it might be worth my time to endeavor to educate this individual. so I offered him an olive branch. “You are clearly an educated person and a deep thinker who would be well worth engaging,” I wrote back.Once you’re just substituting insults for jokes, you’ve crossed the line between “guy on the Internet who’s kind of funny” and “guy on the Internet who just needs to get off the Internet.”

And, mind-blowingly, he actually felt the need to respond to that. “Educated ppl don’t believe in magical deities for which there is absolutely NO evidence to support,” he helpfully informed me. I admit I was a little confused, since I had acknowledged his impeccable credentials in my previous tweet.

In truth, it was around this time that I realized I was probably interacting with a 12-year-old and should give it a rest. Once you’ve started trolling, though, it’s hard to stop. There’s something addictive about sarcasm—not to mention the morbid curiosity as to how long this gifted individual will let you poke and prod him before he figures out his chain is being yanked. So I kept poking.

“Well said,” I conceded. “Did you read The God Delusion all by yourself, or did your mommy help you with the big words?” At that point, I pulled out. I was flirting with that line between trolling and just being mean, and I knew I should quit.

But, I found, I couldn’t.

Once you’ve started being a jerk, it’s pretty hard to stop. Your brain keeps angling for that emotional high of confusing the self-serious people in the room. I didn’t bother my atheist friend again, but by day’s end I had both sarcastically reassured the #GamerGaters that Call of Duty 47 would arrive right on schedule and declared that gaming was less a hobby than a time-waster (not really an idea I buy into, for the record). Each new Gater I annoyed was another feather in my troll cap, and no amount of feathers was enough. I became my corner of Twitter’s resident #GamerGate troll, firing off sarcastic missive after sarcastic missive and reveling in the annoyance and confusion I caused.

I could justify this if I wanted to. If anyone deserves to be trolled, it’s probably the #GamerGators. Even taking them at their word, that the movement is all about Ethics in Games Journalism and not about all the harassing of women they gleefully do, it’s simply a level of nerdrage entirely out of proportion to the offense. But impotently raging against impotent rage is probably just as pathetic as the rage itself. Really, I was being a jerk because it was fun to be a jerk.

Sarcasm is a drug, and I was hooked. It began to spill over into my other interactions, with my family and friends. When my sister expressed disdain for a joke I passed on, I responded with a comment about a thousand times more rude than it was funny.

It all came to a head when a #GamerGator released a three-hour (!) YouTube critique of Richard’s original post that was equal parts insane, self-refuting, and hilarious. I should have ignored it, but its bat-guano craziness was impossible to look away from. I started trolling the creator, first in the YouTube comments and then even on Twitter, till I finally said something I kind of regretted. “Your special brand of crazy is hilarious,” I told him.

And that was the moment I truly realized I had crossed over from trolling and just being a jerk. Once you’re just substituting insults for jokes, you’ve crossed the line between “guy on the Internet who’s kind of funny” and “guy on the Internet who just needs to get off the Internet.” (That, or you’re Joan Rivers.) I stepped back and I looked at my work, and I felt kind of bad about it. Kind of…dirty.

But what was I supposed to do? Someone was being wrong on the Internet!

I guess I could have done this:

“This guy. Let’s just pray for him and leave well alone.”

That was a comment on Facebook from Nathan Valle, who’s a contributor here and clearly a wiser man than I’ll ever be. He was right, I realized. There’s a time to speak and a time to stay silent. A time to kill and a time to heal.

I hadn’t done anything that terrible, in the grand scheme of things. I didn’t cause the Holocaust or invent New Coke. I hadn’t been kicking puppies or dunking kittens in lead paint. But I had insulted a brother, and Jesus says even that sort of thing deserves the fires of hell. And doesn’t sarcasm mean “to rend the flesh”? (Yeah, sort of.) It’s always easy to convince yourself you’re the only thinking person in the room (that’s how things like #GamerGate happen, after all), but by the grace of God, sometimes we can come around to realize that actually we’re the jerkwad.

So I repented, and I said a prayer. Not a prayer that the jerks on the Webz would realize how right about things I was (because, obviously, I am), but that there would be peace on earth and justice would roll down like waters. That the cause of the fatherless and the widow would be defended. That the One who is mighty to save would make all things new, both within me and throughout his creation.

And the good news is that Sunday came around shortly after this. I knelt before God, repented of my sin, received forgiveness, and joined in the feast. Because, luckily for me, all are forgiven and welcomed in Christ. Even murderers, rapists, and Internet trolls.

Image via Jonathan Brodsky at Flickr (cc).