AttentionSeeker

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Someone who seeks attention. No, really. Quite a few people want to be in the spotlight - folks who do behavioural studies call them "extroverts" and say that they make up 40% of the population.

For an attention seeker, it's not enough to do good things: one must also be seen to do good things - not for them the low-key way of the UnsungHero. Still, the amount of attention isn't enough to go around: the demand for RewardReputation outstrips supply. Hence we have an AwardRitual and BarnRaising to help increase supply, and satisfy their unholy appetite for attention. Still, if you keep them well-fed, an attention seeker makes a solid member of the community, happy to accept the group's SuperordinateGoal if doing so will get them a little small-scale fame.

The dark side of the attention seeker comes when they seek attention by being anti-social or hostile. This can arise because the group focusses more attention on bad things than good things.... such as a community of communities that keeps talking about the dark side of things. Nobody's perfect. If an attention seeker is starved for too long, they can become frustrated and look for less productive ways of attracting praise, such as a GoodBye, for instance.

When we focus attention on the attention-seeking troublemakers, we hurt not only ourselves, but those around us (conversely, sometimes we will be hurt when we have done nothing wrong). For in time the troublemaker will move on to some other place, but they will learn the lesson with them that misbehaving is a good way to feed, and they will use that lesson in AnotherPlace. This is why in this case we try to DissuadeReputation, rather than PunishReputation.

The inherent contradiction is that we seek to educate those fallen attention seekers. We hope that they will learn the lesson that, while it takes more effort to become famous for good deeds, the fame one acquires is a more satisfying meal: Infamy is the junk food of the attention seeker's diet. Yet we cannot go to them, and tell them this, for to do so would be to feed them, and one must not feed the trolls. Instead, we write pages like this, and trust that in due course they will find their own path to redemption.

FlameWarriors lists this as the [Ego] type.

Above text is PrimarilyPublicDomain

CategoryRole, CategoryTrolling, CategoryDifficultPerson... but only some of the time.

AttentionSeeker

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