Google defines "hazing" as "the imposition of strenuous, often humiliating, tasks as part of a program of rigorous physical training and initiation."
Hazing IRL has kind of a funny history, especially as of late, but has been a mainstay in special clubs, fraternities/sororities and certain organizations for a very long time.
In Sandbox, however, hazing manifests itself as one of our most self-defeating traditions in the form of Policy. Policy-lynching noavis, who are more often than not new players who wandered into the wrong lobby by accident, is barely a form of hazing at all. Most people who are hazed know that it's coming, but because of the insular nature of this website and how we've developed a sort of dialect, there's no way for a new player to immediately navigate and understand this.
Really it shows a critical lack of awareness when people act as though a new player is going to know all of the EM lingo and how to play, especially Sandbox-specific terms. This website has no tutorial and the game starts speeding by so quick that unless you're just selecting things at random and just trying to run so that you stay in place, you're going to fail.
There's been plenty of threads denouncing the treatment of noavis before, and this isn't really one of those threads. This is more of an address to those in the community that still practice and defending hazing.
A lot of people tell me when I confront them about policy is that noavis ruin games and veg. This just goes back to the fact that this website doesn't have a tutorial. A lot of new players only have experience with something like ToS, which has a very different voting system than EM's. So when they look at their action screen at night and there's no indicator of what to do, how should we expect them to do anything right if their role is more complex than a cop or a doctor?
It's not like there's a way to check what your role does in Sandbox anyway. You have to go to the learn tab, and again: new players probably don't know how to navigate the website. If someone announces that they're new to EM, I'm glad that I see people directing noavis on where to go to get avatars and check out what their role does. But for those of you who are concerned with the game being ruined by noavis, does it really kill you if you help them out before the game starts?
Yeah there's not always going to be time before the game starts to give them a crash course, but if they happen to survive the first night then engage them there. Besides, it's not like you'd be talking about anything worthwhile during the daytime (let's save that for another thread.)
The nihilists in the back of the room will tell me that it doesn't matter if we get new players, that the site is dying or deserves to die. To quote Shounen from my Consensus thread: log out. If you really want EM to die, why are you still here? Looking to prospect in a ghost town? Good luck. And if you really want to terrorize this website, the users, or deprive Lucid of revenue, your efforts are better served in Main Lobby where most new players hang out anyway.
If you're one of the people who lead policy lynchings, I would rather take my gamble with a dozen new players than continue to play with the likes of you. Better the devil you don't know than the devil you do.
