5 Heartwarming Times That Gamers Stepped Up

5 Dad Becomes The Full-Time Protector Of A Minecraft Realm For Autistic Kids

All forms of autism belong to a complex spectrum that media tends to either lazily use as comic relief or mischaracterize in all sorts of horrendous ways. Many people suspected of being on the spectrum by experts from the University of Fortnite get bullied or instantly cast aside because that's how "normal" people roll. Such behavior is especially troublesome, as a lot of actual autistic people really do thrive in games.

Stuart "AutismFather" Duncan said, "screw this well-paying web development job," and decided to dedicate his life to mining. Not to a lucrative mining business, mind you, but in the sense of creating a Minecraft server to play with his autistic son, numerous other autistic kids, and basically, anyone else who isn't into harassing vulnerable people. The result is Autcraft, a server where users can still indulge in high-octane activities -- in Minecraft terms, at least -- like survival mode but aren't allowed to harass or steal from other players. So, basically, what should probably be the standard for any kids' game.

When you think about the surprise hit Valheim, you think more about mining and crafting during Viking times, less about going God Of War on innocent villagers -- like actual Minecraft. But, though designed to be a calm and soothing experience, Valheim is still home to some respectable dangers. The game features a number of enemies who might not simply kill you but kill you, then kill you again when you come back to life and try to get your gear back from your pwned corpse. 

It can be a bummer … unless you happen to ask for the help of the "Body Recovery Squad," a team of freelance e-Vikings specialized in entering the servers of fallen Vipeasants to retrieve their stuff. 

The Body Recovery Squad even has a Discord server that anyone can join where you can even press a neat SOS button to readily access the BRS's completely free services.

VRchat is a game/surrogate for human interaction during a pandemic where people mostly just pick a bonkers avatar and set out to goof off in one of a myriad of different VR chat rooms. Doesn't ring a bell? Okay, it's the game that gave birth to that racist meme where a weirdly shaped Knuckles inexplicably spoke with a Ugandan accent. Strangely, however, it's also home to some of the most heartwarming interviews of modern times. 

A player and YouTuber named Syrmor sought out to find the real people hiding inside the bones of anime waifus and underneath the skirts from the skeletons of Undertale, and the result was weirdly emotional as opposed to the regular kind of weird one would expect. Syrmor finds random people and listens to their tough real-life stories, touching upon serious issues, such as time spent as a homeless person, witnessing a person close to them being diagnosed with terminal cancer ...

... and Anakin Skywalker aptly dealing with PTSD ...

It looks just like Ready Player One and feels just like Ready Player One would if it, y'know, had any sort of emotional core.

2 Gamers Rise Up Against Scalpers

Scalpers are the common enemy of anyone wanting to play games during the pandemic -- as you probably already know, in case your living room is suffering from a sore absence of a PS5. 

Instead of using all that precious lockdown time to reflect on the effects of greed in the world, many got busy buying every game console and graphics card available just to either resell them at absurd prices or to mine weird Internet moneys. Luckily, a few heroes have taken a part of their newly gained time to reflect on stuff, and the rest of it to take the fight back to the scalpers. Various members of this new resistance got on Internet stores such as eBay to create bonkers listings of fake graphics cards.

And if you don't consider doing away with your made-up card a cost-effective sacrifice in the effort to make the world a better place, you can do like Bird Respecter, and tell two different scalpers you want to buy their console and get them to meet each other instead:

When Konami first released MGSV, they gave all players the chance to own their personal arsenal of nukes, then challenged everyone to come together and shut down every last one of them. No small task, as it would have required for players to A) accept the disarmament of their own nukes and B) forcefully disarm the arsenal of nuke hoarders. Yeah, though disarming your nukes would allow players you to flex on the older generations who're still tightly hanging on to their real-world nukes, places like 4chan instantly started creating armies with the sole objective of preventing the world from becoming a less awful place.

Everyone thought it just couldn't be done, but PS3 players managed to make use of the PS3's conveniently neglected status as a "dying" system to get it done without anywhere near enough pro-nukers noticing. It was such a remarkable feat of actual "tactical espionage action" that even series creator Hideo Kojima nodded in approval.

And then the world of MGSV became a good place … for a few days, that is, as it didn't take the bad guys too long to get dozens of nukes back on.