It is some sort of social thing. When I play communal games, part of the fun is actually making sure everybody is having a good experience. I am really not that extroverted or gregarious but I have always enjoyed that sort of dynamic and I enjoy the duties of a host/dungeon master/etc. I was playing a game and the entire combat system was just too fucking hard for me, but I could still be kinda useful to my teammates by grinding at gathering some resources. It was all I did all night long. But then my teammate got a tool that let them gather resources faster than me. See logically in my head, they should have given me that tool to allow me to be more useful to them, and then they could do other shit that I can't participate in. But instead they kept the tool themselves, gathered enough resources for everybody and made my task redundant, and yelled at me for not having good gear and that I needed to go fight for it myself like everybody else. Literally said "I just made your work useless." Why would you say that when playing a game with your buddy? Like a real trooper I actually did go back to combat, immediately died repeatedly, asked if anybody could come babysit me through the area to get back to base, and when they said no I just logged off to avoid saying anything butthurt in the moment.
Yeah like it sucks that I suck at a video game. It would be trivial for my friends to help me to have fun by letting me do the things I am competent at, and it would also be trivial for them to take 5 minutes to fight monsters to let me come back to base. Imagine if you were playing chess with somebody and accidently knocked some pieces on the ground at the end of a round, and asked if they could help pick them up and they just went.... "No."
I have had a couple talks with all my freaking autist buddies about my vision loss, but their reactions have really been uninspiring. It has basically always boiled down to, "We have no intentions of ever going out of our way for anything.... if you can't do something or have challenges, we're just going to leave you in the dust. We're just going to stop hanging out with you and stop telling you about our plans so that we don't have to invite a blind guy." They are overall totally normal people. On a surface level they have always been nice and not mean about anything. But it's such a "fair-weather friend" betrayal sort of feeling. "The second you inconvenience me I'm just not going to be friends with you anymore." I have even pushed them on that, asking, "You know, is that how you'd want to be treated if you went blind?" And all of these autists answered the same way: "I would want my friends to put me down like a dog."/"My life would be hell and idk what I'd do, yeah I wouldn't blame my friends for distancing themselves."
I do agree that it's normal to want to avoid "complicated" people or getting close to complicated people who might be needy. But (imo) my "needs" have been so fucking minor. Like just keep me vaguely involved in the conversation even after I die 20 minutes into your 90 minute game, instead of pretending I've vanished from the table. Let me do your busywork for you, even if you could theoretically do it 20% faster, because otherwise I cannot contribute at all, and this is actually a video game for fun and not like a factory where we need to maximize production. I'm not asking anybody to drive me to the airport.
