At the time of this writing, the PlayStation Network has been down for 2 1/2 weeks. With no end in sight, and only vague promises from Sony, fans have taken to the internet to well voice their opinions. At first, it all just seemed like random shooting into the wind, but after seeing an article today asking which was worse, Red Ring of Doom or PSN outage, it finally dawned on me. Fans weren’t randomly complaining, they were actively going through the 5 Stages of Grief.

For those who don’t know what the 5 Stages of Grief are, its the common process that a person who lost a loved one goes through after their death. The five stages (and they tend to follow in order) are Denial/Isolation> Anger> Bargaining> Depression> Acceptance. Now while these words won’t mean much on their own, join me on this minor journey.

Denial/Isolation: This one is fairly simple, and really was kind of bought on by Sony’s silence for the first week or so. This was simply people believing that it was only a temporary bump in the road. The service will be back online in no time. They would just go trophy hunting while they wait for the service to return. Sure, it lasted for a few days, but then things started to wear on…

Anger: This is the emotion/stage a lot of people seem to be stuck on. Now anger takes a lot of faces, but in this case it really manifests itself at finger pointing. Do we blame Sony for havingÂ incompetentÂ security? Do we blame hackers/Anon for breaking into the service? Do we blame “ignorant” fans who don’t know the full story? Do we blame the people who make fun of PSN when their system isn’t as secure? And if not finger pointing, there is always overt anger. “How could Sony do this? I’ll never trust them again. I’ll never buy another Sony product!” Yeah, you got anger in many different forms. And you still do to a big degree.

Bargaining: Now this stage may be a bit of a stretch if you know the actual stages of grief. In this sense, I think the bargaining is more trying to rationalize the outing. “Oh Xbox Live was down for 2 weeks back in 2007, and people got over it!” “Isn’t the RRoD worse than this?” The idea is they are simply trying to justify the length of the outage as something minor… a bump in the road in their head. And for some it works.

Depression: This one is fairly simple as it seems to be the stage a lot of people are currently stuck on. “PSN will never come back.” “Sony won’t have it running until e3.” “Sony will continue to lie to us.” Yeah, as Sony takes longer to put the service back online, fans begin to worry more and more. And its to be expected, they still don’t have a date to wrap their head around.

Acceptance: This is a stage that is still in progress. But acceptance seems to take on two forms. Accept the service is currently down and focus on single player games or another console. Or the more extreme version is buying Xbox Live Gold and getting you’re feel of online gaming that way.

I’m sure most won’t agree with my observation, but not trying to pass it off as fact. Just something I’ve noticed from observing various reactions on Twitter, n4g.com and forums to the whole PSN situation. Let’s hope the service is back online soon.