Eeek! They're leveling faster than me! Keep them AWAY!

So I ran across a public Plurk the other day that said:

“People who started later then me in WoW [World of Warcraft] are now higher level then me. ^^; Guess that’s the price of having a life. Good thing there’s a level cap.” (lol)”

“The price of having a life.” There’s an implied value judgment in that statement, equating a slower leveling pace with a better quality of life, a snobbery that dismisses everyone who levels faster than the speaker as “Not Having a Life.”

I guess the term that encapsulates this is “Snobbery”.

You're recruiting *him* for our guild? Have you seen his mount?

But snobs aren’t people who are merely discriminating or choosy. After all, there’s nothing wrong with finding the best doctor to cure your ailments, the best school to send your children, the best tank for your party, and so forth. For snobs, there is an additional step:

“The distinctive mark of snobs is not simple discrimination, it is an insistence on a flawless equation between social rank and human worth.” –Alain de Botton

Put differently, snobs select a few traits (or sometimes just one trait) and use it to gauge your entire value as a person. Or in the Plurk above, whether you “Have a Life” or not.

Snobbery permeates every subculture. From anime snobs who sneer upon ignorant fools who don’t even know what ‘sempai’ means, to cosplay snobs to insist that even contact lenses have to be handmade by the wearer, to blogger snobs who use increasingly esoteric metrics to show that their e-peens are bigger than everyone else’s, snobs infect geek culture just as much as they infect mainstream culture.

Snobs insist that your worth as a human being can be reduced from its infinite complexity down to a few markers. In the mainstream monoculture, determining those markers is relatively straightforward: The car you drive, the clothes you wear, the people you hang out with. What your family name is, where you went to school, where you live, what your job is. “What do you do?” is a harmless-sounding question asked at parties and social gatherings that attempts to gauge your entire worth through your occupation.

For the last question, I find that the answer “I’m a lawyer” shuts up most people. (Except for lawyer snobs, who ask the additional question “What firm do you work for?” But you can’t please everybody.)

The trouble is that snobs beget snobs. Being the target of snobbery is unpleasant in the way only social rejection can be. And just like new seniors who look forward to (mis)treating their juniors the way their seniors (mis)treated them, victims of snobbery eagerly await the day they can be snobs to a new batch of newbies. “I was around from the beginning!” the snob says, as if it justified treating another human being like dirt. Or at least members of a lower caste.

But snobbery actually indicates a deep-seated insecurity about the snob’s own station. It takes a very fragile ego to feel ennobled by the act of tearing other people down instead of resting upon your own bedrock of self-worth.

Don't worry, Naruto. Greater skill actually means they're less l33t than you.

The thing that confuses me the most about above-mentioned Plurk, however, is that it was made by the Head GM of a local MMORPG company. Perhaps this is the attitude they take toward their own customers? A deep-seated disdain toward the very people who excel within the pocket universes they rely upon for revenue? A condescending perception of the shepherds toward the so-called sheep they herd?

Or maybe he’s just a snob.

(Have you seen his grammar though? “Then” instead of “than”? He must be a terrible person… )

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