Issues With Issues

This post contains spoilers about NationStates issues. You have been warned.

Being the editor of a great deal of issues (there are now 176 or so in the game I believe) my nation's name appears as a link in many an NSer's daily NationStates session. As a result, I get a lot of telegrams. The majority ask the same mind-numbing question: how do you become a game moderator? But that's not what I'm talking about in this post, oh no. This post is about the people who plague me with telegrams about issues (I'm not including the ubiquitious 'how do I submit an issue?' here though).

About 50% of the telegrams about issues I get are about typos and contextual errors (like when I mistakenly referred to AIDS as a Sexually Transmitted Disease - it's not, it's HIV that's the disease. I'd originally put AIDS in as a filler until I found out how to spell syphilis and then forgot about it. D'oh!) and another 45% is about suggestions for new options on existing issues (but we don't do that for a plethora of reasons I'm in no mood to explain here!). About 0.01% is praise for issues, usually just saying that they liked a certain bit (I got one recently about including a Minster of Silly Walks in an issue). The other 4.99% however are from people who are angry and want my blood.

A good example of this is an issue I wrote (didn't edit - I was a forum moderator at the time) called 'Streaker in Snooker Game Fiasco' where you can either ban streaking or actively encourage it. I was totally unprepared for the backlash I received because of it, and it wasn't because they were particularly averse to streaking - it was because of the issue's description which reads thus:

After a sixty year old man with psoriasis streaked past cameras and millions of sports fans during the snooker league playoffs, protesters have called for tougher action.

Did I have something against people with psoriasis? Was I cruelly depicting these people as horrific freaks? The answer is no, of course I wasn't. The point I was trying to make is that many people get totally hysterical about nudity sometimes (I remember hearing somewhere about someone trying to sue Janet Jackson after being 'traumatised' by seeing her accidental exposure on the television. For a billion dollars. Or some such figure.) and just how much the physical appearance can make them even more hysterical. Had it been a pretty, buxom, blonde, twenty-year-old woman there may have been much less fuss. But the fact it was a sixty-year-old man with psoriasis, oh dear me!

Happily, most people understood after I explained this. But some other complaints I've had have just been bizarre. Like the woman who claimed to be an ex-prostitute and was said to be very offended by the issue on the subject of prostitution ("Give The Red Light District The Green Light?") and advised me that I should 'get some first-hand experience' on the matter. She even supplied some handy links in case I wasn't sure where to start.

The last complaint I'm going to mention was over this issue description:

Recent studies showing that the sources of @@NAME@@'s most common street crimes (vandalism, muggings, joyriding, and witchcraft) are children under the age of responsibility has prompted a national outcry for governmental action.

This one caught me totally by surprise. I received a rather irate telegram from a follower of the Wiccan religion who was outraged that witchcraft had been listed as a crime, despite the fact that it still is in most of the world today. That asides, it had never been my intention to offend anyone, I had just thought it would be funny to juxtapose something totally un-streetlike amongst the crimes. I originally considered embezzlement and forgery, but the idea of street punks selling their wares spliced with eye-of-newt and wing-of-bat was too much to resist.

All in all, when people argue with me about issues being politically incorrect I have only one thing to say: it's not me doing it, it's the crazy people you get arguing in the issues!