I was playing the game World of Warcraft in a group with 39 other people around 23.30, nothing serious just some fun. I planned to go to bed soon when someone first mentioned the attacks in the groups chat. As the scale of what had happened and how many had died became more and more clear to us some of us left and didn't feel like playing anymore.
After leaving I ended up in the games "capital city", where the most people are. Probably about five hundred or so, I think most players had gone to bed. There I learned that someone had started a gathering at the citys cathedral to show compassion with France. I went there and expected to see fifteen people or so, I saw more than a hundred. All were showing their respect while talking about and trying to comprehend what had happened as the tragedy played out and the number of deaths became clear to us.
There are always trolls on the internet, people who just try to get attention while doing stupid things and this was no exception but for every such troll there were twenty people who just wanted to show compassion. Someone asked if there was any french people in the city chat and one person said yes. That person immidiately got invited to join us at the cathedral. I send a message to him/her - Hard to know if it's a woman or man in a game - asking how he/she felt. I got the reply that it really warmed seeing how much people cared.
After a while we decided to move to another place as some couldn't join us at the cathedral. The reason is that the game is actually split in two factions fighting each other, or well, that is the plot in the game but of course the players behind the characters don't hate each other. We all decided to go to a neutral place where the factions can't fight each other. Getting to this zone required some work, yet many came. It was now 02.25 and people should be in bed, yet many stayed up to talk about it. I counted to 121 people from my faction showing respect at our chosen place, and there was probably the same amount from the other faction.
This was just on our server, the game has a total of 5 million players and about 300 servers. Mine is one of the largest but I know that several servers did the same thing we did. A game is a "good" place to be rude to other people as it will rarely have any reactions in your everyday life as noone knows who you are but so many showed their sympathy for France in the way they could at the time, I'm really impressed by humanity. I ended up talking to many different people and having really good conversations in different ways. When I finally decided to log out it was 04.30, yet many people were still there talking about it and mourning.
Before going to bed I decided to make a Facebook post just writing "All thoughts to France". Today I noticed a friend of mine who is a very nice and intelligent guy that I have a lot of respect for had made a post of his own about the events where he criticized people for only making a Facebook post instead of "real" actions, like writing to a politician or so. Of course he does have a good point but I'd say a Facebook post is better than nothing. I've talked to some french friends as well and they have said that they are happy that people show sympathy in any way.
My friend also made another point in his post where he said that we care so much about France yet nothing about other countries where similar attrocities happen. For example Lebanon Thursday night or the ongoing disaster in Cameroon and other contries with Boko Haram. People simply care more about events close to us geographicly, it's how we work. That also means that journalists write more about that. There was a large earthquake and a minor tsunami in Japan last night as well, many people have missed that. Thankfully I don't think there were any casualities but there could have been.
To clarify: I don't discourage people to think about France, I encourage people to think about other countries.
One thing I've been thinking about: How do you fight terrorists? A war can be won by defeating the enemy army but it feels like every strategy for killing terrorist only creates more hate and terrorists. Creating better standards for living is one possibility, but how? You can't have good standards for living in a place where you risk getting killed.
Lebanon: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/11/isil-claims-suicide-bombings-southern-beirut-151112193802793.html
Boko Haram: http://www.news24.com.ng/Tags/Companies/boko_haram