Your Friend Wil Declares...

Your Friend Wil Declares..

Don't be a Dick

Wil Wheaton is an actor known for his portrayals of Wesley Crusher on the Star Trek: The Next Generation TV Series, but you can check more about him at Wikipedia.

But he is also a super geek,  Dungeons & Dragons player, arcade days lover and gamer. When he was invited as an speaker on the "Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) 2007" he pronounced he famous words "Don't be a Dick". He told that phrase in a context of unity at the end of his speech, saying that we have different backgrounds, political points of views and religions, we like different game consoles and different TV series and that there were 30,000 people united as gamers there.  He said that he found hard to believe that having 30,000 gamers and geeks united there, the gamer community is still referred as an anti-social group of people. Wil finished saying that if you find someone that think that gamers are antisocial, invite them to play with you, but try not to be a dick when you won.

After that the phrase "Don't be a Dick" was beginning to be recognized by gamers  as "Wheaton's Law". Wil Weathon explained this as a complain on how people "open their mouths" (curse,  make you feel bad or make fun of you when you loose) when playing online games. So he said "Have fun.  Compete, don't be competitive. And Just don't be a Dick".

Wil Weathon even made a web page about the "Don't be a Dick Day".
http://dontbeadickday.com/

Here we see Data being a dick (joke)

But the message is so general that it just don't apply to gamers. It applies to a lot of the online people interaction. People tend to be a "dick" on online interactions, and sometimes high amounts of knowledge (or practice) on an specific subject offers you the risk to became narcissist. So suddenly your high amounts of knowledge on a subject makes you believe you are an authority on it, and that your high levels of awareness can only be disputed by Albert Einstein, Issac Newton and Stephen Hawking sitting in the same table with you.


There are forums when one calls the other "ignorant" and says "that is not an insult, check the dictionary", so you ask, "Will you tell ignorant in real life if the person is staying at you side?". Is this person being a dick for shoving his knowledge on the face of the other person that is just asking for help?

On online discussions there are people replying with sarcasm or with simple uppercase negative words/phrases like "WRONG", "NO", "YOU ARE SO WRONG", "RTFM (Read the fucking manual)" and don't offer any other help. I always says on forums that "Sarcasm does not solves problems" and if you just get tired and people don't understand you, move on to other forum thread and "Agree to disagree". That's all, you don't win money or reputation for having the last word.

Being a dick online also takes effort. You have to write down (document) the sharp sarcastic words you want to reply and read it over to be sure it makes sense and it hurts the other person at the same time. So why don't take that effort to assist the person that is asking for help online instead?

Maybe the phrase "Don't Be a Dick" has extended over of what Wil Weathon originally intended, but I think that the core message still prevails on it, not matter if it applies just to the gamer community, the internet or all human to human interaction.

Being a dick will take you the same amount of effort of being awesome.
What you will choose?