Who was the true creeper?

4-4-13

FUCK!

I hate waiting. I fucking hate not knowing what is going on. Sure, paperwork has all been submitted. We upped the offer and signed off on the terms. All of this was done by noon yesterday and the deadline was 6 PM. Now I am forced to wait. It is especially painful since I get up a good 4 hours before most of these yahoos will get anywhere near a computer or office to start any kind of notifications. Bleah!

Yesterday afternoon I watched an interesting experiment in peer pressure and social interactions. Anthony was over and he was playing Minecraft with the boys. They each had their own iPod, but were all interacting in a domain that Anthony had created. My understanding of this game is slightly limited, but it seems to only consist of building things out of blocks, killing random 8 bit sheep and avoiding creepers that consist of zombies and ghosts. Bobby loves the crap out of the game, so he gets pretty involved. What was interesting is that I found out how tame he is compared to the likes of Anthony.

Anthony was a creepy level of intense while playing. He barked orders at the boys and came across as knowledgeable. He obviously has played for a while. That being said, he also has a skewed reality when he is in this game. He is paranoid and possessive and quite honestly, a little freaky.

Ken decided to log in to said game as a character named Boo. The kids didn’t know any of this. Ken sat at the desk while the kids were on the couch. I sat at my desk and could see Ken’s game on the iPad and I watched Anthony’s screen over his shoulder without his knowledge. What transpired next was just disturbing.

Ken started breaking up some rocks. This is pretty standard in the game, and truly not a big deal. This is unless of course you are Anthony and for some reason feel the need to flip your lid when you hear rocks breaking on the game. He took off after the noise, all the while openly verbalizing to the boys how they should follow him and they were going to get the culprit of this strangely offensive action. He was like some kind of war vet who would flip out at the slightest noise and was ready to kill Charlie at every turn. He was hell bent on killing Ken, despite this not being any of the objectives of the game.

Then it got obnoxious.

Anthony started telling the boys how Boo was stealing everything and was a bad guy. Mind you, Ken was an unarmed character who was simply picking up sand, which is standard operating procedure. Anthony was so sure that Boo was an enemy, he was delusional, and in turn, was making sure even Bobby and Dax were “seeing” what he was seeing.

Mind you, by this time, I was silently horrified and flapping my arms wildly at Ken with disgust and shock. Now Ken decided to mess with the kids and did in fact run all around the game, making noise, breaking things and being a general nuisance. Ken’s character is low level, unarmed, no armor whatsoever, yet Anthony perceived him as some kind of superman that could destroy Anthony’s world by just looking at it. Never you mind that Anthony was armed to the nines and wielding a bow and arrow, a sword and various other weapons and protective devices.

After Anthony left, we started talking to the boys about what happened. We never let them know that Ken was Boo, but let Bobby clearly spout off about the intruder. With some careful questioning, we got Bobby to agree that he never actually saw Boo do anything wrong. He even was able to consider Boo’s point of view and we had some decent insightful dialogue about game etiquette and peer pressure. All in all, I would say aside from being a little more scared of Anthony, I feel it was a good lesson learned.