Most Apathetitionate

Must... stop... laughing...

The world of online games is littered with idiotic leagues, tournaments, awards and special clubs of every denomination. You can't set foot in a game world without being told it's been declared the most amazingerest of all time!!!1 by four of five (thousand) organizations which it bribed for publicity.

Sometimes though, the very nature of the supposed recognition is so mind-boggling as to call into question whether anyone bothered to look up words in the dictionary or the entire contest was written, choreographed and decided by randomizer. Take, for instance, this front-page news item from LotRO.

 "Last year the LOTRO Community was named the most passionate in gaming. Now it’s time to prove it again!"

Now, i'll admit LotRO has some positive qualities, which have kept me revisiting it even as I abandoned other WoW-clones. However, the nature of a product's customer base is decided to a great extent by its features, and LotRO is a dull game. I don't mean just that hey, i haven't been eaten by a dragon lately, but that it's an idiotically simplistic single-player grindfest with no more complicated tasks than following a gigantic map marker to the place where you hit the blatantly obvious things with giant glowing names above their heads until they drop so you can feel like a big man. It is a dull game which has attracted dull players.

The LotRO community? Imagine grandma in her recliner watchin' her stories. Imagine every facetiously 'nice' uneducated housewife who never uses four-letter words but gladly supports killing whoever her government wants. Imagine the kid eating paste in your grade-school class and every stoner with a backwards baseball cap. Those are the people of Middle-Earth. They do nothing but endlessly farm whatever the game developers tell them is the latest, greatest instance while ignoring 90% of the game, the few times they put in any effort to form groups at all. You couldn't get a sentient life reading out of most of these walking lumps of mold if you injected a mixture of Shakespeare, Einstein and Darwin right into their hollow, complacent skulls.

Passionate, they are not.