Too long; do not read (Destiny)

by Claude Errera , Thursday, July 30, 2015, 17:07 (3195 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

THAT is the point of threads like my "ooooh baby moments" post. Bungie has proven time and again that they look, they listen. That doesn't mean I expect them to do anything just to please me... again, I'm just putting it out there for them.

I almost posted in the oooh baby moments thread with a story... but couldn't decide where to put it. So I left it alone.

I'm going to put it here, because I think it explains a little bit about the problem.

When I was much younger, I joined the Peace Corps, and I went to Guatemala. One week after arriving in country, I went to a large party, being hosted by a volunteer who was leaving after their 2 years. At some point during the evening, I was outside in the back yard, and I happened to look up.

I was 22 at the time, and I had traveled quite a bit as a kid... but I had NEVER seen a sky like the one I was looking up into. We were in the middle of absolutely nowhere in central Guatemala; a tiny village with almost no electricity, so the sky was... the sky, not the dome of human-generated light that most of us (even in rural areas in the US and much of Canada) see. I had never seen so many stars.

I remember sitting down because I was so stunned. My mouth was probably open. While I was sitting on this stump, a volunteer who was nearing the end of her service came and sat down next to me, and looked up to see what I was looking at.

After a few seconds, she looked at me and said "What I wouldn't give to have your week-old eyes."

We get used to beauty and wonder so quickly - I've seen this over and over again, as I go to amazing places. I spent a week once on Namibia's Skeleton Coast, and by the end of it, I hardly even noticed the sweeping dunes. I'd been looking at them for days, they were no longer spectacular.

This is what made me sad about your thread. (The CONCEPT is fantastic. Asking people to think about the things that impressed them... awesome.) You started the thread with "it has very few of these moments for me" - and a huge number of the people who replied agreed. Because they were judging those moments with TODAY'S eyes, and not thinking about the first time they saw whatever it was. Some people even SAID this - The first reply, from TheeChaos, included this line:

I think that I was rather impressed my first time around on alot of things, but I have played everything so much its lost its glammer.

So you started this fantastic thread, where you invited people to remember the things about Destiny that made their jaws drop... but you framed the discussion in terms of how tired you were of all of it because of the repetition. And so the vast majority of responses looked at it from that viewpoint.

My list would have been much closer to Kermit's - but given how the tone of the conversation was when I read the thread, I didn't feel comfortable posting that, so I just stayed out of it.

We KNOW that as humans, the wonder of something disappears with repetition... so it's incumbent on us to spend a little bit of effort to try and remember that wonder when it's gone. (The more repetition that happens, the more important it is to remember the first time.) Of COURSE TheeChaos is going to remember more of Halo's 'high points' if he's only played through them 3 times. But it's not really fair to Destiny to say "because I've been playing this game so much, the wonder's not only gone, I can't even be bothered to remember where it was."

So when Mig describes his ideal DBO as a place where those sorts of posts aren't allowed, I can't agree with him. DBO is precisely the best place for these kinds of posts: a group if relatively mature, thoughtful, dedicated and enthusiastic fans who adore this game and are able to talk about our own personal dislikes without going crazy (most of the time ;p).

I need something to be clear: whether or not Mig actually believes those posts shouldn't be allowed (and I don't actually for a SECOND believe that's what he thinks; I think he'd RATHER folks didn't post that, but that's completely different from DISALLOWING THEM - i think you've totally misunderstood his intention), DBO will NEVER be a place where conversation is censored in that way. No b.org forum has ever been censored in that way. I discourage certain types of posts - but I do it by asking, not by demanding. And that's not going to change.