by Xyn_Air » Sat Jan 26, 2008 7:56 am
I really enjoyed reading this thread, as the issues it raises (good, bad, and otherwise) are things I have often pondered myself. Let's see if I can sum things up succinctly and sensibly:
1) Humans are by nature both competitive and comparative. That is, we like to try to be the best at something, and we like to know how people or things measure up to one another. You know, we compare things like aircraft performance, number of flight hours logged, and the sizes of our . . . of our . . . um . . . of our feet!
2) Humans are cooperatively social animals. That is, we form extended social groups for work and leisure where we pool resources, make collective decisions, and try not to kill one another as often as we might kill strangers, bill collectors, and people who cut us off in traffic.
3) Being competitive and cooperatively social does not always go together, but we try to make it fit. Attempting to do the seemingly impossible do allow us to fly, after all. Thus, we have sporting competitions where we expect the winners to not gloat and the losers to not pout. Professional sports and free agency have buggered this concept beyond repair.
4) Gloating and pouting only inflames competitiveness and undermines cooperation. SimV, wanting at all times to encourage harmony amongst its members tries valiantly to avoid creating situations where wankers may be born of gloating and pouting. However, we are all probably still prideful little buggers, and try to outwit one another with skillfully rendered avatar's and siggy's. I would either gloat or pout, but I have failed to figure out how my images stack up to other's, and I am thus reduced to "glouting".
5) Despite all that harmony, we are still humans, we are still competitive and cooperative, and thus the question remains, Is there some sort of yearly competition that can be help without us all ending up in a big dogfight in the sky?
Well, I have tried to think of a competition that can feed our hunger to have things weighed, measured, and stacked up against one another without making us have a big, ol' family brawl here in the forums. My thought:
Aviation related end of the year awards! Topics could be: best new aircraft, best story of pilot skill, best service on a commercial passenger liner, biggest aviation news of the year, and so on. Suggestions could be gathered and posted (by some sort of official person in charge of such a thing), people could vote (secretly even!) on their choices, and the results could be announced. And then we could all win and drink in celebration.
I am particularly a fan of drinking in celebration!
Well . . . that turned out way longer than intended, but I hope the (horrible) jokes interspersed throughout at least made it a bearable read.
~Darrin
PS
I vote myself most likely to ramble for pages without ever really knowing what the hell he is talking about! ;D
