Hindsight: HMC's Caustic Environment and the Downfall of Crack

I must first note that I truly loved my time at Harvey Mudd College. I still recommend it as an excellent school, I still look back fondly on my time there, and I wouldn't change what I did there for anything. However, I recently have come to the conclusion that its community is going about things the wrong way.

Arriving my freshman year we were greeted with a variety of things. New roommates. New classes. Tradition and scheduling and alcohol and games and projects that would suck your soul and professors who did AMAZING things.

One thing I gravitated towards was something called Crack in the AC. This is a LAN party held every weekend in the Academic Computing Labs. We played a game called Natural Selection in those days, a very complicated RTS/FPS blended game with Marines and Aliens and tech trees and buildings and jetpacks. It was amazing. The first time I went, I had no idea what I was doing, but I had a blast. I decided then and there I was going to get good at that game and hang out with these people. I even aspired to be as good if not better than a particular gamer Manxome at commanding, to kill Prions repeatedly, and lead my team to victory every game.

I eventually took over leadership of running the event. However, over my four years at HMC I noticed we progressively had less and less people at these weekly gatherings. There was always a resurgence at the beginning of a year, but quicker and quicker people would stop showing up until in the later weeks we just didn't play due to lack of players.

I pondered for the longest time why, and came up with a few reasons.

First, one change I had made was to allow the legendary alums to play with us. I opened up the game server to the internet. While this did provide us with an additional 5-10 players initially, many our friends from years past, it also had the effect of splitting up the people. You no longer were all in the same room, you couldn't shout at the top of your lungs and have everyone hear you. That sense of comradery, the antics that occurred every week, were now missing. Not to mention it was frustrating to communicate with those not in the room via text chat.

Secondly, games moved away from being PC centric. Students would often spend their nights huddled in their rooms around a console instead with their close friends. Why go to a PC LAN party? I don't play PC games!

A really big problem was aging hardware. Trying to play some of the more advanced games were difficult with low framerates, stutters, and crashes. So, some students eventually stopped coming to the labs and just played from their rooms on their personal gaming rigs, and sometimes the effects showed as they curbstomped those actually in the labs.

We lost a core group of gamers to really invigorate others to join in. Without a strong core set of players who were always there and always eager to play until 2am, you didn't have a sense of wanting to join them.

We started earlier and so ended earlier. It became common for people to bow out at midnight instead of at 2am since we started at 9pm instead of 10pm. These short spurts of games instead of epic long streaks hurt the community feeling.


But perhaps greatest of all were the "competitive" gamers.

We began to have more and more players who would practice and become exceedingly good at games. This would be at first glance a great thing. Now you can be on the team of an amazingly dominating player! However, the downsides were plentiful. Complaints about losing due to team imbalance grew exponentially. Getting angry at teammates for doing "stupid" things. The feeling of never being able to get to their level. And the worst was these competitive gamers would usually only play games they were good at, making them sporadic attendees, and often they only wanted to play and not spend time helping others unless it helped them win.

This didn't dawn upon me until later, but I think it highlights something very crucial about the HMC community. It is full of people competing.

Now, HMC's community is actually quite nice in comparison to the majority of schools. It tends to be supportive and helpful and no one is ever cutthroat. Collaborative work is a hallmark of assignments and projects. We are highly encouraged to give aid and ask for help when we get stuck. The Honor Code means we all trust each other with our stuff and even our lives at times.

However, there is an undertone of performance is superiority. If you are not noteworthy in a certain area, you simply are not noteworthy.

This leads to a very strong urgency to prove yourself and perform well. Also, you must be evaluated fairly. So, when you do fail, perhaps it was someone else's fault, and you MUST point that out or else someone might think you're inferior to what you really are.

One of the most common and prevalent ways to do this is to "complain" about how much work you have, the misery you've experienced, and how little sleep you have. In reality, it's more like boasting. I had to work myself through two papers, an all-night MATLAB assignment, AND get thesis done this week. But it's complaining. It's a call for sympathy. It's a call for look at how much my life sucks but I've done it anyways. I am downtrodden, beaten, and so I deserve your attention and respect. Oh my bleeding heart.

Also, if you were an expert, it was your duty to correct others and point out their mistakes. You moron, you don't do it that way! You're smarter than that! Sure you are "helping" correct the mistake and "encouraging" them that they could have found it themselves, but are you really helping? They know the right answer, but feel silly that they didn't realize it. You are so much smarter than me!

It may sound innocuous at first, but I seriously bought into it. It drove me into a very strong sense of cynicism. I was never good enough, look at all my gaping wounds, woe is me. You moron, why'd you do something stupid like that? And only recently was I able to identify it and try to change my perspective.

I admit it was not of my own amazing perceptive powers, nor is the change easy. I have the people at Catalyst to thank, especially M.Robbins who pointed this out to me. So now I continually work on looking not for failures but instead for things I can praise and affirm as being awesome. Positive reinforcement instead of negative reprimand. Affirmation instead of tearing people down, including to myself.

That isn't to say you just gloss things over. Truth in love is a phrase thrown around in church to mean when you sometimes have to tell those you love the hard truth about what's going on and how they have hurt themselves or you or others. But you don't come down on their heads in public with harsh words and censure and make them defensive and unwilling to change. You approach the problem with care, with love, affirmation for what they do right, and guidance on how to change what is wrong. It takes a lot of effort, care, and practice to get right, but you put in that effort because you care about the recipient.


This is not a problem isolated to HMC. I see this occurring everywhere. It's easy to just complain and fish for sympathy from your peers. It's easy to complain about what's going on in politics and the economy. It is hard to do something positive about it. And that is my challenge for myself and for you: to do the hard but better thing.