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"I'm waiting for the poet to die." Someone said that, in a boss room, as he watched two other people fighting for their lives. Who said it, what boss room, who the poet was ... that doesn't really matter. Some said it ... "I'm waiting for the poet to die." What a chilling thing for someone to say. Certainly, on one hand you can look at it as someone standing by the video game in the arcade, waiting for the guy who's playing to run out of quarters. For some people, that's all this is. But it's more than that to most of us. We are not just playing an arcade game in isolation, alone in a crowd, but rather we are part of a community, part of a virtual world. We are part of a society, with all the ties that bind any society together, all of the rights and duties, the privileges and obligations, that are a part of that. Certainly, there are Nexus characters I would stand there and watch die. Not many, but I can think of one, at least, someone who has hurt me, someone who has hurt my friends, someone who has proved themself to be a total jerk. There are people whose actions have earned them an exemption from my normal willingness to help. But this was not a case of long-standing emnity between those two people. The person who said it did not even know that poet ... and he stood there "waiting for the poet to die." He wanted the boss. He wanted the boss, and anything it might drop, so badly that he would destroy one more of the threads that hold us together as a community, one more of the things that make us human beings instead of snarling, savage creatures fighting over scraps. Is it that important? Important enough to wait for the poet to die? |