Hazing. (Sentence fragments.) Freshmen in many high schools suffer from it. Newbies on many less civilized message boards suffer from it. It is irrational, rude, and offensive to all. So why has it infiltrated the RPG community?

FF7, without a doubt, caused a huge number of people who had never played an RPG before to pick it up. However, 80% of these new RPG players were not addicted to RPGs by FF7. They thought things like, "It sucks, there's no blood." or, "Too much reading." These people would never make good RPG players. They occassionally annoy people by making inane, stupid posts on assorted message boards, such as "GIVE ME C0D3Z! FF& R001Z", etc. However, there's another 20%, who would have always liked RPGs, but had never picked one up before. These people don't make moronic posts. They stay on message boards both to learn more about the series and to communicate with other FF fans. However, these people are getting flamed for the sins of the other 80%.

I've talked to many of these people who first played/have only played FF7. Most of them are really nice people. They don't understand why so many people hate them, and talk about "old-school RPG players", etc. Yes, these people can't recite, like many of us can, all the characters in FF4 and 6 within 1 minute (Cecil, Kain, Rydia, Rosa, Edge, Yang, FuSoYa, Tellah, Palom, Porom, Cid, and Edward for FF4, and Terra, Locke, Edgar, Sabin, Cyan, Gau, Celes, Mog, Setzer, Relm, Shadow, Strago, Umaro, and Gogo. Ok, so that took me 1 minute and 13 seconds.) However, these people are perfectly capable of acting like intelligent people. Just because they started off later along doesn't make them worse.

A large portion of the backlash against FF7(though not ALL of it) has been due to its popularity, where people don't get the feeling of being "outside the mainstream" anymore, plus they are annoyed by the 80% of the new RPG players who make stupid comments. Thus, they hate FF7 and anyone who likes it. They say, "If you consider FF7 the best in the series, or even really like it, you're not an 'old school' RPG player." First of all, who cares when you start off playing RPGs? Second of all, I consider FF7 my favorite FF game, yet my first console RPG was when I played Dragon Warrior 1 in 1989. If that's not old school, then what is÷playing D&D when TSR first released it? Seriously, I like FMVs and consider them a great addition to the game, love better looking graphics, think that the lesser challenge in RPGs is a good thing (though I DID think that FF7 could have been a PINCH harder...), don't care about technology or fantasy one way or the other, and are totally content with the way the RPG world is going. Yet, apparently, according to some people, if you believe this, you must be an RPG newbie.

Hazing is pathetic, infantile, and immature. We're punishing a group of people who could become RPG players like ourselves due to the fact that many people bought FF7 just for its FMV filled ads. Apparently, people assume that anyone who liked FF7 is like this, and that these people are still driving the RPG industry. Maybe these people should remember their early RPG days, and wonder how they would have acted back then if they had been treated like this.

Daniel Seltzer