Let's be less arbitrary.  There are 124 people in the bar of an LRP event.  Of those 124 people, 58 are drinking from their own IC containers, 62 are drinking from the plastic cups supplied by the bar, 2 aren't drinking at all and 2 are drinking from lager cans.  Of the people in the bar, 3 are seriously annoyed by people inconsiderate enough to drink from cans, 5 find it affects their suspension of disbelief but let it lie, 31 are mildly annoyed and the rest don't really care.

Who is more inconsiderate - the person disrupting the games of two people by politely asking them to at least get a plastic glass from the bar or the people disrupting the games of 39 others to a greater or lesser extent by ignoring the request?

That's what I mean by letting the social standards be set by the players.  Is this the tyranny of the majority?  Damn right.  I also firmly believe we should be encouraging people to do what they can to increase immersion and to put social pressure on those who think their own laziness is more important than the immersion of large numbers of other people.

You're entitled to your opinion as long as you realise it's wrong.

Let me give another point of comparison. A tankard is like an authentic reproduction hand-woven wool tunic, a plastic glass is a tunic of the correct shape made from plain coloured modern fabric, a can is a Metallica T-Shirt.

You're entitled to your opinion as long as you realise it's wrong.

  Technically speaking, they're both equally anachronistic, but that isn't really relevant- it's more useful to consider which is more *visibly* anachronistic when used in a public IC area.

  Cans are specifically designed to have eye-catching logos on them.  Plain glasses aren't.  Furthermore, a plastic pint glass looks quite a lot like a *glass* pint glass from a casual glance- if we were really being historically accurate, then I'd imagine that pint glasses are a pretty modern invention too, but a glass looks less obviously modern than a metal can does.

  This means that if I glance around the tavern, I'm not likely to notice plastic pint glasses, and those that I do notice are easy to blank.  Whereas cans, like white trainers, actively attract attention and are harder to ignore.

If I mean "is an equally bad anachronism" what I'll say, rather than "it's easier to pretend that it is acceptably in genre", is "is an equally bad anachronism".  You see, what I was trying to do was explicitly point out the real and tangible difference between things which are jarringly out of genre to the extent of ruining immersion and things which are merely not historically accurate.  Hence my analogy between drinking receptacles and pieces of attire which, whilst being equally anachronistic, have a marked difference in the damage they cause to immersion.

Reading what you're replying to is usually considered good form if you're going attempt to hold a reasoned debate.

You're entitled to your opinion as long as you realise it's wrong.