DrHappinessTL;DR
- I agree with a lot of what Tagg says, and personally I'm trying to distance myself from the scene for similar reasons.
- The competitive scene is toxic. More than a substantial amount of people are incredibly discrimanatory or spread awful things about groups or individuals within the scene.
- Volunteers are (perhaps unintentionally) taken for granted and the game has the tendency to have people burnout quickly and just picking new people up as replacements
- In general, it's hard to justify putting effort into the scene, when you get nothing in return and people are rarely grateful outside of events.
I emphasize a lot with this video, lots of what Tagg said in the video I can relate to (outside of the whole invite thing lol). Over time I've been trying to create distance between myself and the game/scene but it's almost like an addiction. I stopped enjoying the core game about a year and a half ago and planned to quit multiple times since then. Much like he mentioned in the video, I don't want this game to rule my life especially since more and more of my free time is being taken up by work. The only thing tying myself to this game at this point are friends and the fact it's quite easy to get experience in production etc.
The scene is toxic, end of. Whilst a decent amount of people are lovely, there are a concerning amount who are outwardly discriminatory or just assholes. In some groups that I am in I've heard some downright disgusting things said about groups of people and even individuals in the scene. I try to not take any personal offence to anything, but sometimes what people say brings back really unwelcome memories and makes me uncomfortable. It really puts me off meeting new people or joining new groups because I expect that they would be the same. The community 'tried' to address such toxicity, but just ended up with a private discord server where people try to agree that being toxic is bad and briefly discussing drama when it happens. No one really cares enough to actually do something. I'll admit I'm no saint myself; I've acted irresponsibly in the past and I am not proud of it. We all need to put a little bit of effort into making sure that people feel welcome.
This sort of brings up the point regarding productions. The unfortunate truth of the scene is that without volunteers, the competitive scene is screwed. The scene takes advantage of such volunteers, bleeding them dry until someone replaces them so we get to have a show. Many people who get into production or stuff like that do it out of love or appreciation of the community, but quickly become disillusioned; especially when people trash productions because it wasn't what they thought the production should be doing. It's really easy to shit on people when you aren't the guys behind the scenes. Every few years or so, the production setup has to start from scratch because the 'old guard' gets burned out or have to get actual jobs and if we don't actually start taking action it's going to happen again.
This is more just a personal vent than anything else, but a lot of the reasons why Tagg left the scene I also share with my own relationship with this game. Getting to see everyone at LAN have a great time and seeing your name in the credits of a production truly is one of the best feelings I've had, but every time an event comes around it becomes harder to justify investing so much time and effort into it. With the amount of time, financing, and detriment to my physical & mental health that such events have caused; it's frustrating when people act like complete pricks to one another, from both a personal and organisational level.
empathize*