Oversharing

Yesterday I was kicked out of my guild raid before liftoff. I will say, the kick was entirely deserved. I get tired of sitting around outside the raid zone waiting on the last 1/3 of the raid to show up. But now I’m just making excuses: I was being a dick, I got kicked for being a dick, end of story.

Anyways, I spent my newfound free time snooping around rival guild sites and rediscovered an internet phenomenon that is both amusing and disturbing: oversharing.

Contemporary example from gaming: “It figures that the day some girl is in my bed wanting me I can’t even perform. Thinking about it today I thought it was kinda funny, so I just figured I’d share. On a serious note though I believe I am going to have to take a break from WoW.”

I blame social networking for the steep rise in oversharing. Honestly, I have deep thoughts maybe a couple of times a day, the rest of the thinking is just noise and doesn’t even hold my own interest. Social network sites encourage people to share absolutely everything and I think people should self-censor the more graphic details, PARTICULARLY when one is speaking to one’s guildmates or servermates or the internet at large.

And yet, people share it all. Anonymity grants courage, I suppose.

What I want from you are your own examples of gaming friends or acquaintances oversharing — or, if you’re feeling clever, invent an example of gross oversharing in a game environment.

I’ll go first. Back in EverQuest, raiding Vex Thal, one of our female priests left the raid after a few hours because she was pregnant and her hemorrhoids were bothering her. My opinion, then and now, “I’m not feeling well” would have been sufficient. The bright side: she didn’t detail HOW they were bothersome.

Another example, also EQ, one of our druids announced that she had asked her husband for a divorce earlier that day. The story could have ended there. She explained, however, that he had gotten home late from work and when she went to kiss him, she could smell another woman’s **censored** on his face. I had no response to that.

Your turn to share … but not too much.

19 thoughts on “Oversharing

  1. We had this ‘sortof weird’ priest in our guild for a while. He also had a druid through-internet girlfriend who joined with him. They happened to live in countries pretty far apart, that is the 7 hours of airtravel kind of apart.

    Well, basically he went to visit her for the first time while they where in the guild. The day after his arrival to her country there was a long, elaborate and very detailed post on our forum about their meeting. Ofcourse including the obligatory intercourse that had followed.

    The girl basically wrote “Oh this is just SO you! *teehehee*” as a response.

  2. A guy in my guild told us he and his wife were into c**-swapping. After he took it into his mouth, he went downtown on her. Two weeks later she’s gets a red stripe on the pregnancy test…

    I think he was joking, but you never could tell with that guy.

  3. This starts off as a bit too much information, and leads into that strange reality that only exists in the virtual world we call home.

    There was a Druid in an old guild of mine, obsessed with attention and PvP. She would often drink in the later hour of the evening and tell stories. They usually entailed a graphic depiction of some sexual act she was involved in, to the point of extremes. Her tales were encouraged by some of the guildies, and to some it was too much and they would often complain in /o.

    Eventually on one drunken adventure, the She broke down and admitted She was a He and had been masquerading the entire time. He couldn’t handle the deceit anymore and had to come clean to his friends in the guild, and he begged for forgiveness.

    I’m not sure how many fantasies came crashing down that night, but /g was a lot quieter for a few days.

    Unsurprisingly, he transfered shortly thereafter. Once tBC came out, I believe he transfered back and still plays on our server. Good for a laugh when you see him outside the instance, and wonder if he’s still ar-pee.

  4. There’s a great website just for this sort of thing.

    The idea is, you over-share onto an anonymous postcard, mail it to that website’s snail-mail address, and then – this is the most crucial part – you don’t type it into guild chat.

    EVER.

    Feel free to share this with your guild: Not Guild Chat.

  5. along those lines…

    ppl can’t seem to just say “afk” or “afk 1 min” and leave it at that. from my perspective WAY TOO MANY PPL go the extra step and share exactly what they’re going to be doing while away from keyboard. i don’t need to know that you’re going to “afk bio.” i just dont.

    why the need to share that you have to use the potty? why?

  6. and on a completely unrelated note, how do i get the “website” link in my info tab to stop reverting to the original one? just in the highly unlikely case that someone clickies my name.

  7. Not sure how much agreement this will be met with on this post, but I think sometimes being “less than vague” is nice. I’m not talking like “share your gory details” specific, but seriously there’s nothing wrong with giving a reason why you’re going AFK. Maybe you’ve only played with players who have sterling reputations, but I think a lot of the time people are tabbed out of the game, or having a chat, or just not paying attention in general. In my opinion, having to leave the game momentarily and saying “bio” is way better than just saying “afk”.

    People going afk uses my time as well as theirs, and I think I’d rather know that it’s going to something necessary rather than some douche reading about the phat lewt he thinks he could get.

    So, no, I don’t appreciate oversharing for the sake of oversharing, but sometimes knowing why someone is wasting your time is better than being left completely in the dark.

  8. A lot of the guildmates share personal info. Of course, it’s mostly about sex life and drinking habits.
    Weight of ones one-night-stands. That sort of thing. Someone even keeps statistics about it somewhere.

  9. I take most stories (particularly of a sexual nature) I read in /gchat with a ton of salt…not a grain. Seriously. Especially when I hear the voice of the author in Vent and it’s still cracking…

  10. Guildmate was in a group once and one of the members typed ‘afk to have sex’.

    Long pause and then someone said, ‘So I guess that’s a bio break?’

  11. Girls who tell me that they are in a bad mood because it is that time, kinda bothers me. The story that Curium told was pretty close to that other blog post that was made here. It was about that guy that rolled a girl and then got stuck with an online boyfriend and didn’t know how to tell him. I guess this happens more than I thought.

  12. We get a lot of random drunk stories (there are days I strongly suspect that a large chunk of the non-minors in our guild are high functioning alcoholics, certainly a good portion of our officers are, though for some reason first kills usually happen after one of our key raiders says “Fuck this noise, I’m gonna start drinking”), but some of our best oversharing ones are actually non-alcoholic and non-sexual.

    One of our GL’s and main raid leaders grew up on a farm, and plays from there when college term isn’t in session, which leads to a variety of stories you don’t really see coming. Some of them are hilarious no matter how inconvenient to progression (somewhere in BWL – “Shit, sheep jumped the fence” GL has gone AFK), some are a little too much information (“Dammit, goat just pissed on the floor” “Why the heck is it in the house and not, you know, in a barn?” “Well, it’s got this deformed face and we kind of feel sorry for it” “…”).

  13. I thought I had a good one back from my Everquest days, but some of these others I’ve read are along the same lines. I guess that is just what everyone ‘Overshares’

    Anyways, back in an Everquest guild I was in, there was a married couple and the wife didn’t work, so she was always online at home. Me being 14-15 at the time and not having anything better to do was right there with her, and needless to say she Overshared everything she could.

    The kicker came when one of the other members of the guild came to stay with them for a vacation, she told me that she was cheating on her husband with the guy, and how much sex they were having while her husband was at work!

  14. I think I’ve blocked out all the over-sharing from my old guild, and my current one doesn’t tend to do that (it’s a very laid-back guild, very much composed of actual, functional adults with jobs and such). The only thing I can remember from my current guild was a time when I was on one of my male toons—what can I say, I like variety—and a guildie started ranting about what bitches all women were (this from a guy who, in fact, still lived in his mother’s basement).

    I pointedly made a comment that it might not be wise to rant about that over guild chat when he couldn’t know who was *actually* a guy or not, but he kept going, so I just ignored him. My guild wisely tends to just ignore folks who go off on jags like that, so when no one jumps to the bait they tend to move on to guilds that’ll give them more sympathy. As it isn’t a raiding guild, we don’t have to worry about soothing the priest’s ego. 😉

  15. So, what are you gonna do now, Foton? Are you going to stay on the server? Transfer off? Quit WoW for good?

  16. like heather said, i think i block a lot of stuff out. we have a /xxx channel where ppl go who wanna share that kinda thing, so is it really “oversharing” if they’re in a channel designed for exactly that purpose?

  17. Ok, the goat with the deformed face and sympathy house privilages is going to stick with me for a while…

    And while once I used to think afk bio would be a bit too much info – we’ve had enough people go afk during instances that yes, I want to know if it’s bio, or computer problems, or the phone, or just wandering to the fridge when we need the dps or to peel adds off the healer. This way I know how irritated to be.

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