Skynet has no emotions

A long, long time ago in an apartment far away, I played a Star Wars text based RPG in Yahoo Groups.  Yahoo Messenger was new and I recall doing a bit of beta testing on it and it was quite exciting that there was something other than AOL to text chat with people.  I connected with people all over the world playing this game.

Due to a growing friendship with a few guys in the UK who had become fairly consistent players, I got chosen to help regulate some of the game play in the groups.  I was a little disappointed as I found out the guy had pretty much stolen rules word for word from the old Star Wars RPG, especially when it meant that it didn't really translate to an online RPG system where there was no dice to roll.

But the worst thing I had to deal with was attitudes of the players.  I had a rule: if someone's post completely pissed me off, I waited until I replied.  I found that the sooner I posted a reply to someone, the more emotional the reply and the less it made sense.  I had become caught up in the emotion and the insanity of what someone else was trying to do to me.  My thoughts were disorganized because I was trying to get how angry I was out too fast.  I also found that my posting in the heat of my own emotion only inflamed things more and eventually made the situation worse.

So I began waiting.

I left their nasty words, their anger, and their attacks there online for everyone to see for anywhere from a few hours, to an entire day.  And I thought.

I distilled the post down to what I needed to address.  The act of waiting allowed me the time to organize my thoughts, work on my arguments, and find the documentation I needed to back up why I would need to make a ruling one way or another, where they might have gone wrong, or where someone else began a snowball effect leading to the problem.  It also gave time for the other person to calm down too.

For those few hours I looked like an idiot that couldn't stand up for myself.  But since I had taken the time to reply, and perhaps even reword some things to make sure they were neutral and definitive, I took a situation from an all out flame war into a well thought out and definitive reply.  My rulings were rarely questioned, overruled, or taken lightly.

The social media of today doesn't give us that time unless we take it.  I've had years of practice carefully wording what I type.  I am painfully aware how emotionless and inflectionless email and the written word can be unless we imbue it.  So I try to be careful to put a positive spin on almost everything I write online. 

And yes, perhaps even abuse a few emoticons along the way.