Damn. I finally got around to reading the article. That’s a hell of a story.
I can believe either main possibility though. It’s possible the dude just has a type, and a lot of really strange coincidence in his life. Unlikely that so many perfect coincidences exist, but not totally impossible (I’ve seen some weird shit in my fifty years).
It’s also totally believable that someone would create alternate identities for any number of reasons, some of which aren’t necessarily bad, though the degree to which it went is out of line if that’s the case. But I kinda doubt it was done fully benignly if that’s what the truth is.
And, I guess there’s always the possibility of a mix of those, with one or more of the three dubious people being real, and the rest fake.
But dude nuking everything online is super suspicious.
But that game was my thing back in the eighties. And I wad good at it. Maybe not national best tier, and definitely not world tier, but it was not unusual for me to keep high scores on it that never got beat. The one actual arcade in town, I was never bumped off at all, nobody in town came close. I can’t recall the gap but it was enough higher that there was an extra digit between me and the next highest.
The arcade over in the nearest city, the gap was nowhere near as big, but it was there.
Even when I visited my cousin in Charlotte one summer, I took top spot on the machine there, though it did get beat later on. But I never went below third, at least at the time my cousin stopped going there.
There wasn’t much I was good at that was showy back then. I wrecked shit in spelling bees, and was a decent beatbox (though only decent). Nobody gave a shit about those. I’d play pacman and have a crowd watching. It was fucking awesome for my confidence at the time.
Wasn’t too bad at centipede either, but I would hover up and down in top ten at the two arcades I could visit regular, which isn’t that impressive if you know the game.
So, yeah, I’d go and watch pacman players if the event was close enough. I’d even try my hand at it if I didn’t have to go up against kids with their rassafrassin better reflexes lol.
Eh, never hated Wesley back when the show was airing. When the episodes where he’s badly written (and there are many) are spread out over weeks or months, he’s not annoying enough to hate, and he does get some okay writing here and there.
If anything, having a younger crew member helped teenagers and kids find a more relatable character to have an in to the show if they weren’t already fans of TOS and the movies. So in that , even though he was poorly written most of the time, he’s still a valuable character.
Honestly, even back then my impression was that the writers were just crap at writing a believable “gifted” kid. That Wesley was supposed to be even more than gifted didn’t help because getting the kind of personalities that form around kids that really are that much smarter than those around them isn’t exactly a common experience even among gifted kids. The kind of genius that Wesley was described to be is just too rare for even the mensa set to have a lot of experience talking to.
That’s what I think the problem was. You had adults that weren’t used to the kind of intelligence Wesley was supposed to have, and didn’t really remember being Wesley’s age trying to write him. They just used tropes and guesswork to turn him into what amounts to a DMPC, a free check to make bad writing choices via “super genius saves the day” vs “teenager fucks up” mismatches.
I dunno, I’ve always made whatever struck me as cool in the moment. No real pattern to it other than wanting the character to look cool on screen while I’m making it. If it turns out later that something in game makes it not look cool, I might not make the same choice on a new character, but it’s still about having something neat to run around on the screen with.
Like, playing Neverwinter back a few years ago, I had one of every class, and between three accounts, some duplicates of a class in different races. I spent a ton of time on that game while I was recovering from a chain of health issues lol.
Anyway, the rogue class was always fun to play, but male dragonborn looked goofy as fuck in higher level armor for that class, so my main rogue was a female dragonborn. My paladin was male human because cheese. But when I was setting the character up, I would just flip back and forth until I was happy with what it looked like.
But, that even applied in table top games in a way. I’d pick sex based on the cool factor rather than playing what I am.
There is zero point to that beyond the looks. You can get mice with better ergonomics. maybe if it had some ability to be used like a gun in fps games, it would make sense. But as just another mouse? It isn’t even a good gimmick.
This is exactly how things should be done. If anything, him doing it this way succeeds at making me overrated interested in the game, which isn’t one I’d usually go for. Just because he’s doing it the right way.