Why I will no longer tag my secrets, and You Shouldn't Either: An Essay

[Ravendesk]

No, sorry, I'm not going to change the way I map just because a particular part of the audience of a particular streamer doesn't find it fun to watch the map played in a particular way :)

 

Besides, I already include both marked and unmarked secrets/optional areas in the maps, and I think it's fun to have both.

 

13 hours ago, Maribo said:

Wormwood IV - The Final Chapter

  Reveal hidden contents

From Map07. Sector art only visible by acquiring a time-sensitive key and opening the door it goes to. No other reward.

 

Wait, I was absolutely sure there was a

Spoiler

dude from map 04 in that room.

Am I losing it?

[xdarkmasterx]

 

[treulosetomate]

When I like a map, I want to see everything it has to offer. The kill and secret counters are a useful tool for this. They tell me that there is still stuff to find and to kill. Why would you take these tools away from the player? I know that many maps also have untagged easter eggs on top. But if they're untagged, that tells me they aren't worth my time anyway (like some meme, or inside joke, or initials of the creator). And what does it matter how decino plays the game? I was watching the stream, too. He knew halfway through the map that he wasn't going to enjoy the secret hunting, but he did it anyway. That's his problem. He did give you feedback about the secrets, though. Or maybe he did secretly enjoy it, who knows? There are plenty of other streamers who don't bother with 100% completion.

This reminds me a bit of what ribbiks tried to do with Magnolia, where he withheld UV difficulty because players were "too stupid" to play his maps on HMP like the txt file suggests. I know he (and you) probably don't mean it like that. But this was my gut reaction. In Magnolia's case, it's not that bad, because if I wanted, I could still play it on UV if I sent him a HMP demo. But if you untagged all secrets, they're just gone.

 

 

I was thinking about posting this in the Unpopular Opinions thread, but I think it fits better here. This isn't specific to Grey Dwarf, but a general observation.

 

Most secrets are bad! Listen, I played Doom and Doom 2 for the first time in 2018, so I'm assuming that I'm relatively new to the game compared to most of you here. And I am already sick of humping walls for medikits or similar minor rewards. If I notice a WAD tends to do that kind of secret often, I just won't bother. It's like Doom players have been conditioned to hump every single wall and suspicious looking texture, just in case there might be a secret. They start imagining seeing misaligned textures everywhere. Hidden switches and waterfalls are also getting old fast. Is this supposed to be the pinnacle to secret design in Doom? Surely not. But the vast majority of secrets I've seen in Doom maps are like this. Even my favorite WADs aren't exempt from this (Sunlust). Some maps seem to have an inflation of filler secrets that have been added because map's gotta have secrets.

 

I want to play more Doom maps that take their secrets seriously. My favorite example, so far, is Fractured Worlds. I don't remember any other WAD that had motivated me to look for secrets as much as FW did. Just knowing that every map had a secret key hidden somewhere that gives access to a secret fight made me want to find it, because I wanted to see the secret fight. They are usually unique and gimmicky or just look cool. I'd rather have just one big secret in a map the creator has put a lot of effort into (puzzle, challenge, reward, visual design), instead of 10 filler secrets of the wall-humping variety.

I feel like there is so much more you could do with secrets. Sometimes they don't even have to be hidden at all. Just present them to the player outright but put them behind an extra difficult fight, or a complex puzzle, or a platforming challenge over a deathpit, etc. Let the player decide if it's worth their time. Or make it a long puzzle the player has to solve with the help of clues all over the map. Finely Crafted Fetish Film did some interesting experiments with puzzles. Like the secret where

Spoiler

you have to use a Mancubus to block an elevator. And while the Mancubus is getting crushed, you have time to run to the secret.

Rewards could also be more interesting than just health or ammo supplies. They could add more cover in an upcoming fight with AVs, or change the level geometry in some other way to make the fight easier. Or harder even. Want to get 100% completion? Then you have to raise the difficulty by tagging the secret first.

And yet, here we are, still humping walls.

[MS-06FZ Zaku II Kai]

4 hours ago, Omniarch said:

As a descriptive claim, this post would have just been an interesting read - one with which I would partially agree, having considered the effects of secret / kill-count tallies on my own experience of the game. As a prescriptive statement, though, I categorically disagree.

 

To jump straight to the root of the issue: mappers are under absolutely no obligation whatsoever to cater to the needs of players, especially ones who engage to the point of their own frustration. Doom wads are not products, players aren't customers; no money changes hands, and the ability and / or motivation to engage in deceptive marketing on the part of mappers is almost nonexistant, as are the consequences of such on the player.

 

Tangent: I despise exploitative mechanics as much as anyone, but a little score count at the end of a level is not even in the same category as, say, a skinner box, differing as it does in both intent and effect. Given the time period in which the game was made -- an era which emphasized replay value due to the relatively high expense of software -- I think it is fair to assume that the scores at the end are mainly informative, letting players know that there's content they have yet to uncover. It's only in the modern, hyper-consumerist and over-monetized gaming space that such extrinsic "rewards" (if you can call a score tally that) take on a sinister tone.

 

Back to the main point: IF and only if mappers wish to please the completionist segment of their audiences specifically is this prescription applicable, as in: "given that you want to cater to this crowd, as you are free to do, then here's my advice [prescription]". Otherwise the statement encoded in the thread title comes off as a moral proclamation, which, in this context, would be quite silly.

 

 

While I'm at it, I might as well comment on the Doomtuber part of the equation.

 

On a personal level, I enjoy and respect the output of both decino and MtPain (those two being the most well-known and influential DTbers around here), and generally consider both to have a positive effect on the community by exposing the hard work of mappers to a wider audience than otherwise possible. Annoying -- or, more charitably, unacclimatized to forum etiquette -- as younger players can be, the influx of new blood is overall a boon. Hell, I discovered Doom through a Karl Jobst video (though YMMV on my pretentious presence being a net positive, heh).

 

However, if a large enough proportion of mappers start to take on the design priorities implicitly or explicitly favoured by folks like decino or MtPain, then I will have to reevaluate this position. The idea of "Doom mapping influencers" is one so utterly repulsive that it pains me to consider it, elevating as it would the opinions of a handful of people to undue heights, and indirectly imposing upon waddom restrictions born of the pressures of YouTube content creation. A Doomtuber's insight is no more intrinsically valuable than anyone else's, obviously, but their status can cause their preferences to be reflected in the public consciousness as "good design", since the followers of such figures are often quite young and impressionable.

 

Some degree of the above is inevitable, of course, and doesn't really differ qualitatively from the usual mechanism by which ""good design"" conventions* are established, though to me personally the idea of wads becoming more "YouTube friendly" is vomitous beyond words, especially since that would mean catering more to viewers than players. I am not terribly concerned about this trend, though: the kinds of maps that I tend to enjoy most are made by mappers who don't seem to care much about public approval, judging by their design choices *cough* No End In Sight *cough*. That said, I do believe that mappers would be better off disregarding common wisdom and creating what pleases them most, cheesy as that sounds. That's the only prescription I would be comfortable making, at any rate.

 

^{*I am not referring to genre conventions, such as those introduced by Scythe 2 or whatever, but instead to the mess of contradictory ideas held mostly by non-mappers about what constitutes 'good design'.}

This is such a great post and realy highlights the danger of giving influencers and their audience too much input into into your work.

 

Similiar thing happened to modern competetive shooters like COD and Battlefield and modern examples like battle royales or ESPECIALY fighting games, where the devs were listening too much to the pros and their audience which ended up alienating a large part of a general audience.

 

Feedback is important, of course, but you need to gather data from a larger part of your player base not just the pros and their audience (that parrots their opinions) who only consist a small percent of population.

 

[Ravendesk]

To elaborate a bit.

 

There are quite a few benefits to having tagged secrets (and secret revealed messages):

1. Congratulating the player on finding the secret.

2. Marking which areas are optional and not part of progression. Although you can have non-secret optional areas as well, it being marked as secret explicitly tells you that it is not really needed to beat the map, or the secret sector can tell he player that the secret area lies ahead.

3. Marking which map exit is secret exit and which is normal exit. The former is usually surrounded by a secret sector.

4. Differentiating between max/tyson/nomo/nomo100s speedrunning categories.

5. It's fun to have both marked and unmarked secrets for easter eggs and other bonus stuff.

6. It's fun to know how much optional stuff did you find in the map and how much did you miss.

 

And at the same time, solution proposed in OP does not really seem to be a solution.

 

Some players are going to still hunt for items anyway, does that mean that we also should make all secret rewards not count to item count?

What about monsters, should we never put monsters in secret areas as well? Or always make them not count towards kill%?

[Astronomical]

I think the answer is a lot simpler than what you might think; your map is fine, the context is wrong. Map 31 having 13 secrets is fine if it was in something like “Stewboy’s amazing adventure” where all of the maps have a similar design ethos, but ancient aliens has a far more slick feeling, where every moment where it was even possible for there to be tedium has been swapped out.

 

The real answer is to be consistent rather than permanently adjust your mapping style to meet the expectations of other people. 

[Gez]

The secret map slots are there for maps that deviate from the rest of the set, though.

[Human Being]

I want to mention, is your music is a huge & important part to the soundtrack of my life @stewboy

Now, this has already been said many ways, but I'd like to contribute some thoughts as well.

 

Andrea already made the majority of my points perfectly & succinctly:

15 hours ago, Andrea Rovenski said:

aa31 is awesome. it's a SECRET LEVEL, so expecting it to cater to everyone's needs is even more silly on top of it. 

 

100%ing should be for people who already know the map or have already beaten it. This notion of needing to cater to someone who wants to 100% a map in one try is absurd. Just my take :)

 

#1) It's a secret level. They're supposed to be different than the rest of the set. Otherwise what's the point of putting it in 31 or 32?

#2) IMHO not tagging secrets yet including secrets in maps would irritate me personally 1000x more than not seeing 100% secrets completed on the intermission screen. All that would change, is players & runners that want to know where the secrets are, or if they found all of them, would have to open up an editor and scour the map... no thanks. THAT is the opposite of fun.

#3) It's a fucking YouTube video/stream, by one person, with one play-style, and a specific type of "audience" that complain about plenty of things. (And with his subscriber count by sheer math alone it's statistically likely plenty of people will not be happy about [insert random thing here].)

 

The Kicker: decino is almost exclusively the only person that consistently plays maps as "Blind UV Max" as a challenge to himself. And often, it's enjoyable. Sometimes, not so much. It's essentially his form of FDA, but taken to an extreme. He has self-implemented self-imposed rules, which don't apply to the entirety of DooM. Then once he got on the latest Nightmare! kick, "as an extra challenge" he started the "100% items" addition then started adding that on top of the blind UV-Max runs.... He's had MANY other videos over the years of maps where he spends time (10, 15, 20+ minutes) looking for secrets during blind runs and his viewers always complain. But he does it anyway; His choice. NO WAY is this nor should this be a reflection on the mapper or the map. "A" plus "6" does not equal potato. They're not related.

 

Again, in my opinion the viewers were butthurt b/c decino chose to run the map in his self-imposed format: Blind, UV-Max, Collector. No one forced people to watch. No one forced him to play Blind UV-Max. If I was playing AA Map31 for the first time, alone, not streaming, I also enjoy the challenge of finding secrets without cheating or opening an editor, or referring to the DooM Wiki. But it sure would be boring for someone to watch me do that, b/c I take my time, play chill & relaxed, and not in any hurry - you know, to have fun. The point of video games.

 

This is just one thing that happened. I don't feel like you should second guess your past decisions based on people complaining in the present day. NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO, people will complain. Period. In DooM, and in life. And I would argue that in the time we live in, people are LOOKING for something to complain about so they can keyboard warrior the shit out of someone or something.

P.S. Watching Daerik's d2all run of this map is a thing of beauty.

[Fiber Wire]

I find it fascinating that people can turn any little thing about Doom into something like this thread. 

 

I’m waiting for the nuanced discussion on which cyberdemon asscheek is more impressive and seeing the 1500 word essays on why it is the right sided cheek being argued against with 3200 word essays on why it is the left sided cheek. Oh and let’s not forget the both cheeks side with their 7200 word essays. 
 

I don’t get why people can’t just do what they want, and who gives a shit if someone that makes YouTube videos likes your map or not. Most of their audience doesn’t actually play any of the WADs they’re watching anyways. To many of them, watching the video is the equivalent of playing it so why would they bother? To cater to that specific audience sounds more like desperately wanting approval from a hot shot YouTuber vs making something you yourself would want to play. 

Edited April 4, 2023 by Fiber Wire

[yakfak]

I sympathize with most of the op post tbh. i think live LPing without any prior info damages how maps are perceived; i think feedback from one-and-done 100%ers is next to useless, and I support any outlandish response to the trend, from hiding all the secrets to putting a voodoo belt on a 35 min conveyor belt that pushes it through an exit. giggle. it's important to let people play how they like but it's even more important to protect yrself from the adverse effects of having to hear people justify their dislike of yr shit. lol it's just miserable and i get sensitive to it

 

edit - everyone saying "Who gives a shit?" - I do!

Edited April 4, 2023 by yakfak

[Fiber Wire]

It only damages the perception for people who can’t be bothered to try stuff out without having to watch a video first. How many people do that vs people that actually download it based on screenshots, descriptions, word of mouth, etc? Is it enough of a difference to make a difference? Does the YouTuber remarks hurt more than a forum member saying they didn’t like it? Is it just critique in any way that bothers people or is it just simple “this sucks”-like remarks? I’m one to think critique be it positive or negative is important feedback, and “this sucks” is to be ignored as useless.

Edited April 4, 2023 by Fiber Wire

[Human Being]

3 minutes ago, Fiber Wire said:

Does the YouTuber remarks hurt more than a forum member saying they didn’t like it? 

Absolutely it does. decino videos can gain 10's of thousands of views. You're not getting that many people reading forum reviews of wads. That's an issue.

 

YouTube comments can have a blatantly skewed toxic affect. And since our society has the attention span of a gnat on meth...

 

 

"Squirrel"

[Not Jabba]

Just gonna shoot out some random thoughts:

 

-"Grey Dwarf" is around my third-favorite map in Ancient Aliens, and my favorite thing about it was the secret hunting. Ancient Aliens is one of the best megawads partly because it was a great role model for the "guest map" trend, which hits a good balance between all maps having a consistent style (like a one-person megawad) and having variety of styles (like a community project). It is really cool that not every map in it plays like a skillsaw map.

 

-Designing maps to revolve around other people's playstyle feels like it's a way to make yourself a second-rate version of whatever mappers those people like, not a first-rate version of whatever you wanted to make in the first place. Designing maps purely to thwart another person's playstyle is on the same level as designing maps purely to cater to another person's playstyle.

 

-There are playstyles and map styles where having no tagged secrets would make a lot of sense, but treating it as an unbreakable rule is about as useful as treating anything else as an unbreakable rule.

 

-If what you're concerned with is player anxiety or frustration, then blanket not-knowing anything about what you have or haven't found is also going to be anxiety-inducing or frustrating for a lot of people -- possibly just different people than the ones who were anxious or frustrated before, or possibly the same ones. As someone who likes to find things but isn't a strict 100%er, having a secret count at least gives me the option to consider how much more I want to look around. It seems like it's beginning to be more common for mappers to tag most secrets but selectively leave untagged a few that are more "easter-eggy" or super obscure. That seems like a solid balancing decision, but it would be weird to see it as an obligation.

 

-I'm so glad I'm not a streamer, because then people would see my in-the-moment reactions to things more than my actual considered opinions about them. What feels weird about people who are purely streamers is that a lot of them must not sense the difference between the two.

 

-It's really hard to imagine myself watching an entire playthrough of a map I haven't played yet. Like Fiber Wire said, those can't be people who actually intend to play it themselves, right? 

Edited April 4, 2023 by Not Jabba

[Fiber Wire]

But why let it bother you? Decino is not an authority over Doom modding or level design just because his videos get lots of views. If you think he is then you’re the one giving him that status in your own mind, and that is unhealthy. 
 

Youtubers that say mindless crap vs forum members (and anyone else on the internet, the doom community doesn’t just include DW after all) that actually play the WADs… hmm, I think the ones who actually play are more important to take their thoughts into mind than a bunch of kids parroting their YouTube idol. 
 

I understand people have different tolerance levels over harsh responses on their work, but… YouTube comments have always been awful, most people don’t actually play the WADs before commenting, and not everyone actually watches streamers. I sure as hell don’t and know plenty of others who find it boring to watch someone playing a game and talking through the whole experience. 

Edited April 4, 2023 by Fiber Wire

[GarrettChan]

I feel it's very strange that, X decides to play UV Max, saveless, and X's audience found it annoying and boring. Then the mapper reacts like this... That's a problem for X to deal with. Honestly, I don't understand why play like this for the long maps etc., to show off your blind play skill or whatever? Or to watch X suffer? Then more secrets should be placed to make X suffer more.

 

However, I found it very strange that mappers would react to any of these because it doesn't really matter, and X's audience's opinions don't really matter either. Honestly I feel there should be more secrets in order to make them complain more :)  Play Devilution Map19.

 

I really agree with Xaser in most. It's not a good way to look a map like this, or criticize a map because the secrets are hard to find either. That's why playtesters need to do the test properly instead of playing it however you like and just throwing out how you feel WITH YOUR OWN PLAYSTYLE. Just like, BtSX E2 has quite a lot of long maps, and you want to play Max/saveless, then expect to be frustration. However, if you did this and say the map sucks, then that's your own problem.

 

As the sole tester of D2ISO, Map21 didn't have any secret at the start, but all the maps have secrets. Since it's a vanilla set and maybe people are playing it with Doom 2 v1.9, then no secret will result in 0% in the intermission screen. Later I reported this so there are 2 useless secrets in it now. Honestly I don't feel bad about it. Sometimes people would be upset if the secret is a joke, but I honestly think, mappers can, and should do whatever they like.

 

I, being a tester for quite a few projects, never criticize an experienced mapper for doing anything because everybody has their style. When I found a secret that I don't like, the first thing I do is talk with the mapper and see whether this is what they want, and express the potential issues of this setup. Then if the mapper knows what they are doing, then I'll respect their thought, even I may not like it, or potentially somebody else doesn't like it.

 

BTW, I personally like Grey Dwarf. It's a pretty fun map to play, and I really like the DN3D Ep2 feeling of it.

Edited April 4, 2023 by GarrettChan

[Fiber Wire]

I wish there were more review format style videos kind of like dumptruck_ds has done for quake maps. They are far more useful for mappers and can be informative for new mappers, too. 

[Misty]

Easiest way to secrets is not to include them in map, it's how I do most of the time - my reason is that I lack creativity in this area to execute it well. Still, don't feel pressured to change your ways just because someone more known isn't fond of secret hunting, it's on them, not you. 

[MFG38]

56 minutes ago, yakfak said:

putting a voodoo belt on a 35 min conveyor belt that pushes it through an exit.

 

I want to play the map where this was done.

[Fiber Wire]

I haven’t made a map in a long time but I always put the secrets in last most of the time after testing for completion to see if the map can be completed without finding any secrets from pistol start. Though, most of the maps I did make were Deathmatch and didn’t have secrets besides hidden bunkers so I could mess with my friends. I wish I still have the map files from back then, but I sure as hell don’t miss DEU when there’s stuff like UDB now. 

[msx2plus]

awesome thread with lots of good food for thought. i may very well be in the "don't tag secrets" from here on out. i'm trying to imagine any other style of game telling you that you've uncovered a secret and it's just making me realize how much of an outlier DOOM is. the best secrets reward you with an interesting experience, and i think there's a good argument to be made for not only not telling the player those things exist ahead of time, but making it unceremonious as well.

 

the obligation factor is a huge point and can outright stop people from leaving a map because they "need" to see it all. seeing first playthroughs of things get hurt by the player's "need" to 100% things is rough. i imagine most of us can just ignore things and move on, but some people are just absolutely incapable, and the psychology of it is worth taking into account when designing.

Edited April 4, 2023 by msx2plus

[ipecacodemon]

1 hour ago, Fiber Wire said:

But why let it bother you? Decino is not an authority over Doom modding or level design just because his videos get lots of views. If you think he is then you’re the one giving him that status in your own mind, and that is unhealthy. 
 

Youtubers that say mindless crap vs forum members (and anyone else on the internet, the doom community doesn’t just include DW after all) that actually play the WADs… hmm, I think the ones who actually play are more important to take their thoughts into mind than a bunch of kids parroting their YouTube idol.

 

On one hand you are kind of right, on the other hand these kinds of content creators also act as gateways for people to get into Doom and start playing/participating themselves, so it's not quite as disconnected as you're making it out to be. Ideas and opinions do spread memetically through communities though, and people on the internet are prone to simply repeating opinions they've heard without having verified them themselves (remember AVGN completely trashing certain games back in the day that people still claim to this day as some of the worst games ever made, even though the guy has since gone on record saying his videos were greatly exaggerated and he thinks they were actually pretty decent for the time).

[Gez]

47 minutes ago, msx2plus said:

i'm trying to imagine any other style of game telling you that you've uncovered a secret and it's just making me realize how much of an outlier DOOM is.

Plenty of platformers had secret areas.

 

For obvious reasons, a game is only really going to feature secret areas you have to discover through exploration if it's a game in which you are free to explore. This doesn't mean that there are no secrets in other genres, though. For example, I remember the space sim TIE Fighter featured "bonus objectives", specific mission goals (such as inspecting, disabling or destroying specific ships) that you were not told about. You failed to accomplish them?  Not a problem, as long as the primary objectives were met. The bonus objectives were a way to get an extra shiny medal, and you had to be both clever enough to figure out what they could be (or look for a list of them on the Internet/a gaming magazine/a strategy guide) and skillful enough to actually accomplish them without jeopardizing the more important objectives. Fighting game like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat frequently featured secret extra combatants you could unlock through more or less convoluted means.

 

Nowadays most games come with "achievements", and quite often, this includes... secret achievement that the game doesn't tell you about until you fulfill its conditions.

[dasho]

1 hour ago, msx2plus said:

I imagine most of us can just ignore things and move on, but some people are just absolutely incapable, and the psychology of it is worth taking into account when designing.

 

Why? Why change what you want to do with a hobby you are presumably doing:

a) in your spare time

b) without compensation

c) because you enjoy it

Because a greater than zero number of people in the world might not care for it?

[msx2plus]

5 minutes ago, Gez said:

Plenty of platformers had secret areas.

that's not what i meant at all. i mean things with noted secrets. plenty of games don't tell you that you've uncovered a secret in a particularly meaningful way. it's just a thing you discover.

 

5 minutes ago, dasho said:

Why?

because the psychology of game design is fun to play with. i make things for me, but to completely ignore that other people are going to experience it is foolish. why tag secrets in the first place? you seem to be implying that this is about making things more "agreeable" but in my case it is actually far more about making things more obtuse and inaccessible lol; ditching any concept of noted secrets makes it all the more fun.

Edited April 4, 2023 by msx2plus

[Ludi]

Let's just do secrets the way NRFTL MAP01 does, k? <3

[akolai]

stewie's 100% spot on, if you're mapping with the player experience in mind you need to factor in the strange mindset some people have towards secrets. if 50% of your target audience gets bummed out on your map and there's a fairly simple way to fix it, it's at least worth a try.
it's absolutely a player issue, but the only way to change that is to condition your players out of it, which is a longshot.
besides, poogers map13 is the objectively correct way to handle secrets

Edited April 4, 2023 by akolai

[dasho]

16 minutes ago, msx2plus said:

 i make things for me, but to completely ignore that other people are going to experience it is foolish.

 

I didn't say to ignore other people, I said to not base your design decisions based off of how others might receive it if, in doing so, you are deviating from a method that you enjoy.

[msx2plus]

1 minute ago, dasho said:

I said to not base your design decisions based off of how others might receive it if, in doing so, you are deviating from a method that you enjoy.

the opposite is happening here - for me, at least. this thread offers a simple and often overlooked suggestion to achieve more freedom in designing maps that can mystify the player. if anything, tagging secrets has been an automatic reflex "because DOOM" - but doing things just because it's how you do things is always worth being critical of.

[Catpho]

1 hour ago, msx2plus said:

I'm trying to imagine any other style of game telling you that you've uncovered a secret and it's just making me realize how much of an outlier DOOM is

There's Tomb Raider 1 IIRC, complete with a tally and sound notification. Of course, that was a much more exploration focused game than the in-the-middle Doom.

[mrthejoshmon]

1 minute ago, msx2plus said:

that's not what i meant at all. i mean things with noted secrets. plenty of games don't tell you that you've uncovered a secret in a particularly meaningful way. it's just a thing you discover.

Say, that sounds familiar... Sounds like a game I play called "Doom" or something.

 

7 minutes ago, msx2plus said:

because the psychology of game design is fun to play with. i make things for me, but to completely ignore that other people are going to experience it is foolish. why tag secrets in the first place?

Yes, but also why would I conform to such bizarre unconventional non-issues? There is a point in which conformation to a fringe group of people that has sensibilities which do not align with my own becomes counter intuitive and intrusive to what I am actually doing.

 

Or I can skip the rhetoric and just say how it actually is: I do not hold these people's stance in high regards, I find it absurd, kinda dumb bluntly.