Benjamatic of Artemis

Games are a fun place to try out ideas that can educate us about real life. In 2008-ish, after having received all the formal education that I have publicly admitted to receiving on this blog (a whole bunch of lefty human systems training,) I joined a web browser turn-based space-trading strategy MMO called Pardus, in what was a new Universe called Artemis. In Artemis there were 3 rival galactic governments:

1. The Federation was something like the good guys in Star Trek.
2. The Empire was something like the bad guys ins Star Wars.
3. The Union was 3rd economic powerhouse that wasn't branded as particularly good or evil.

Of course I signed up with the Empire along with a number of my friends. Most of us ended up in a player alliance called "The Imperial Navy." This alliance was fun to be a part of as we quickly and forcefully carved out our own territory in space and became one of the most influential alliances in Artemis, crushing anyone who stood in our way. As players we started to understand how and why evil empires get up to the evil antics they do in real life.

Then a new game wide announcement was made that would change everything: Earth (in Federation space,) had a giant asteroid heading for it, and if Earth could not raise enough resources to stop it, Earth would have catastrophic consequences including a population decrease of at least 90%. The Imperial Navy quickly came to consensus, no matter what happened we could NOT allow that asteroid to be stopped.

I myself was focusing my character (Benjamatic) and his ship on becoming a very proficient pilot, so I didn't have the firepower yet to help much with this effort. However my strategy that I promoted in the Imperial Navy was perhaps the most important one we used: lie. Any time someone caught a member of the Imperial Navy sabotaging Earth space, or blowing up near by space stations, or raiding resources needed to stop the asteroid, or just flat out attacking and doing piracy directly on other spacecraft, our response was the following: deny, deny, deny. We specifically erred on the side of being polite and apologetic, "oh wow, I am sorry, that pilot is out of line, we'll reign him in immediately. We know many of our pilots are near Earth trying to help, we hope there aren't any misunderstandings going on with us being in your area of space." And we brutally sabotaged them in every way we possibly could, and they were too busy struggling to stop the asteroid to be able to investigate our claims of innocence. If they had retaliated against us for what we were doing we may not have been able to successfully sabotage them.

And we were successful. Earth's population was destroyed, crushing The Federation's economy. And we gloated, loudly, pronouncing our victory, making us the most famous Alliance in the game at the time. As players we got to have the experience of being the Evil Aliens who destroyed the Earth, and it was an amazingly fun time indeed.

But notice something else here: every time Putin amasses troops near his border or starts sending "peacekeeping forces" into another country who did not ask for those peacekeepers, it's super obvious to me what Putin is doing. I have done that myself before. Insisting on your innocence while you are most obviously guilty is confusing to the powers that be, and this hesitation is exactly what you need for your evil plot to succeed.

The Imperial Navy after the attack on Earth thrived. With the muscle we had developed and growing territories we controlled, we were poised to become the most powerful player alliance in the game. The Imperial Navy's focus was now on empire building rather than terrorizing The Federation. As such politics were involved, and soon we were not allowed to engage in hostilities without permission from Imperial Navy leadership.

But I soon realized I was starting to play this game for dozens of hours per week, and I had other things I wanted to do with my life instead. I was going to have to stop playing all together, because the game wasn't casual, it did too much to draw you in to play every day. So I had to quit. 

I wondered what sort of social experiment could I do before I quit the game, something that would be fun and edifying but definitely terminate my participation. In school I had studied all sorts of social dynamics including white privilege. I decided that Benjamatic (a non-human alien) was going to become the Devil.

I started by making well publicized announcements that Humans were too incompetent to be allowed to fly spacecraft safely around other pilots, and I used the tattered and destroyed economics of the space near Earth as evidence of this incompetence. I then took my formidable ship and my deadly piloting skills and started ambushing Federation spacecraft. Every time I took out another federation ship, I made my demands again very publicly, this time listing every Federation pilot who made me kill them by not helping me pressure the federation to ground all human pilots.

I was the biggest celebrity in the game for a week or two while my suicide plot unfolded. By making controversial racist remarks against human space pilots I got a lot more attention than I deserved. However this also attracted the game's largest bounties on my head as Federation players continued to donate to raise the price on my head while I continued my racist terrorism.

Eventually I was massively outgunned by well financed warships coming after me. All my resources were wrecked and I found myself cornered in Imperial Navy space, but the Imperial Navy wouldn't let me out of that space because they full well knew what I would continue to do if they did. My character sold his ship, donated all the money to the most fearsome anti-federation Pirate player alliance he knew of, and then I shut down my account and never played the game again.

I thus discovered a reason contributing to overtly racism that they did not teach me at university or grad school: attention. "Bad press is better than no press" as they say.  Now when I see someone using their whiteness as the main point behind political ideology, I realize this may be attention seeking behavior. 

UPDATE 2022.03.26: Adari Davonrai's player read the above post, and was playing in Artemis by the end of my above story, also as a member of The Imperial Navy. Here's what he had to say about it:

"I was certainly there...  I still play Pardus now and then,.. Some time after you left, we got the Federation side of the story.  The Imperial Navy tactics didn't just confuse them and allow the meteor to hit Earth.  It largely destroyed Federation unity.  Several Fed alliances were working together to save Earth.  When they started to realize they were failing (due to TIN interference, though they didn't know it at the time), they began to blame each other, and their coalition began to struggle.  When the meteor actually hit, the coalition between Fed alliances completely fell apart, and players within those alliances started blaming other members of their own alliances... When we claimed credit, many of those on the Fed side involved either didn't believe us or just ignored it, and when they finally did accept it, that only caused more internal conflict in the Federation.  It took a few years (real life time) for the Federation to recover from that.  Some Feds even bailed and defected to the Empire or the Union.

After you left, TIN [The Imperial Navy] did well for a while.  I had a brewery and a slave camp until they added severe reputation penalties for having slave camps, even outside of faction space.  My character was/is also rather racist against humans, and when I still had the slave camp, the opening page text announced that we don't enslave intelligent species, thus our slaves are 100% human.  I also had some fun on the RP forum with that.  TIN eventually fell apart when Darth Thrawn started university and didn't have time to lead, and leadership passed through several people until one betrayed us, took the alliance funds and kicked everyone out of the alliance...  Now days, the Empire is one huge alliance called Ember that is friendly with the Federation, which is part of the reason I don't have much motivation to play anymore..."