Trolling or Bullying? [HOT]

Day 2,001, 19:33 • Published in Canada Canada • by Mizu64


Welcome to another edition of Our Great Voice fellow readers, today we are gonna discuss about a very popular old term, "trolling". Is trolling the same as bullying? I think not. For a long time now, we've seen eachother involved in a fierce bullying paradigm that either no one saw, or either no one cared enough to condemn, and let's be honest, who gives a **** about a bunch of players throwing insults and phalacies and shrinking utteries at another group of players? I mean, it's not the first time we see this kind of "trolling", who in the eRepublik playerbase would even care a little about this? Yeah, me.

I bet some of you might know Ignacio Burk, he's a renowned psychologist that has wrote atleast one book in his life, with a very original title actually, "Psychology". I had the good luck of finding one of his books, so I purchased it and got off the lawn and the internet life to read some of it.. But I never got to finish it because, man, school is tough. Anyways, he said in his book "Psychology" that "man learns fundamentally in two ways: trial and error or by compensation". You might be thinking "this guy be trippin'" no, i'm not trippin', this actually makes too much sense and is very incrusted in what this article is trying to reflect. So, based on what I just said, let's proceed to define what "trolling" is and what "bullying" is.

- Trolling: An action, or series of actions that develop into a behaviour aimed at pissing off someone else by being either stubborn in an undesired behaviour or provoking unpleasant situations that instead of turning out funny, are intentionally driven to being pissy, without directly provoking any real physical or emotional harm, mainly for what the "trolls" qualify as fun. Computer trolling is at most times pissy but nonetheless inoffensive.

- BULLYING: Directly attacking someone else physically or verbally with the intention of harming them may it be physically, emotionally or integrally, with the sole purpose of letting the victim down and lower their self-esteem and/or damage their physical integrity. Bullying usually comes with internal anger, and some times even with ire (the greatest of the anger moods) therefore causing huge psychological/physical damage in the victim, sometimes permanent, which may lead to higher consequences, including death: either of the victim, or of the bullies due to the "needs of revenge" or payback that flourished in the victim.



Alright, now that you clearly see the difference between Trolling and Bullying, let's continue. Not long ago, I told you that Ignacio Burk said that man learned either by trial and error or by compensation, and we can apply this to the so-called bullies. Trolls tend to go from the "bored person looking for mean fun" kind of troll, to "person that has to piss others to feel good about himself" kind of troll, though we won't talk about that because it's too hard to explain, has many factors and would take me this whole article to do so, so no. On the other hand, bullies tend to "bully" due to the negative feelings they retain within themselves: Jealousy, anger, ire, social exclusion, cyberadiction (which is not an actual term until DMS V comes out), family issues, or even a mixture of all or some of those might be the reason a person bullies another person, although in games like this bully is usually driven by a mixture of cyberadiction and jealousy: A person feels that this game comprises their entire life, or a very important fraction of their life, and they can't stand the fact that they are not taking part of an important role in this important game that takes an actually very important fraction of their time (not life) but that they perceive as an important fraction of their life... wake up guys, this is not how things are.

First of all, there's a life out of here waiting for you and a bunch of opportunities laying straight ahead, so don't lose your values and your virtue for a dumb game, and much, much less for a dumb objective driven by such an inocuous feeling such as jealousy, because it really won't take you anywhere at all in life. Second of all, with this attitude you're not only doing bad by harming others, you're also doing bad by harming yourself and by feeding all those negative feelings that rest inside of you, don't do that this is a web browser online game, a game in which the attitude of someone depends on the interaction between a bunch of existant living human beings sitting behind a computer working altogether, so don't bully, and overall, don't let yourself fall into becoming another bullying victim.



What can I do? I'm being harrased all around eRepublik, i'm being insulted constantly and this guy won't stop hating on me...

- First of all, there's an old wise saying that goes something like this: "don't feed the trolls", but in this case, i'd prefer "don't feed the bullies". Bullies like to know that their victims are suffering and want them to answer back with the same level of hatred just so they can take control of the situation and play to be victims, that's their only aim so don't let them do that. Bullies hate it when their victims don't show any kind of response to their sad attempts of, well, "bullying", and consume themselves in their own anger. After a while, they either suicide in anger or stop bullying you in the flagrant way they've probably been bullying you in, so the best way to keep a bully away is to completely ignore them. Another good way of hitting where it most hurts them is to report them. Reporting someone is very easy and takes about five minutes to be done, try it some time.

As we reached this point, i'll do a stop here to talk about what inspired me to create this article... there's been some bullying going on against a player of eCanada named Dozzer_X, I don't know if it's because of hatred, jealousy, past grudges, or anything related to that, but this attitude must stop. We are a united community of eCanadians that cooperate one another in every way we can, and therefore we must elevate this to the highest of our tenets. Dozzer is a nice person, I had the chance of having a conversation or two with him, and I could tell that at first sight, he is also a PP and the MoFA of eCanada, and he performs a great job in every responsibility he's granted, so it's not fair to just dismiss everything he has done and call him with insulting prerogatives that in nowhere suit his character or what he has done for our eCountry because of such childish and selfish reasons. So please, just think about that.





We are a joint community, and we are characterised for maintaining the sense of national unity above everything else, and for making it easy for everyone to adapt to our socially friendly environment. Don't throw this friendly environment down the garbage: keep it running, eCanada.

Remember, in eRepublik, bullying brings first hand repercusions in someone's psychological integrity and game comfort, resulting in a deterioration of the game experience for the whole community.

Think positive, live positive, and the key of success will be only one staircase away from you.