What is said is less important to these guys than being heard saying it.  It’s all about saying something offensive enough to be heard above the din of a million other anonymous users, freed to be jerks without suffering any consequences for it.

Anonymity+Audience= idiot. There’s a great Penny Arcade comic about it.

Informis is onto it. If you step back and look at the big picture, the people (it’s not always teenagers) who head immediately for the racial and sexual terms are a tiny, tiny minority. It’s “empty can rattles the most” syndrome, the ones who are so angry and unfulfilled that they feel the need to take out their frustrations on strangers in virtual worlds. It’s the reason a lot of people will habitually type “/leave trade” the moment they take their new World of Warcraft character into a capital city for the first time. Normal people can only stand so many “Anal [Attack]” jokes. And by “so many,” I mean “anyone who does it gets reported for spamming.”

Although I admit that I did giggle a bit the one time someone did “Anal [Skeleton Finger].”

Anonymity+Audience= idiot. There’s a great Penny Arcade comic about it.

yeah, that was the first thing I reached for upon reading the topic.

this, by the way

this is true. I know it. I do it all the time, if in less racist ways.

Call me a weirdo but I happen to think it is less about anonymity and more about a a cultural shift in the way we deal with failure. All forms of failure be it simply losing a life in a game. I have seen more and more people fly of the handle when it comes to games then ever before. I remember when games use to be ridiculously difficult. Yet I never use to see my friends get so visibly upset. They viewed it as a challenge to overcome. About the question of anonymity it reminds me of a question I once overheard: Why is it that when I go to a restaurant even when it is one out of town I still always leave a tip?

I think one of Wow’s saving graces though—when it comes to “Online-enabled voice chat”—is that in basically all scenarios you are never ‘chatting with the enemy’. The complete separation of faction communication greatly improves the quality of interaction in what are essentially antagonistic settings. The only time you’re voice-chatting in Wow, even when it’s with anonymous strangers, is in cooperative settings.

Contrast this with any of a wide variety of Xbox or PC FPSes. The level of abuse is a whole order of magnitude beyond what you’d hear in a Wow pug (or even trade, at least on my server). Election night was really bad though, and my ignore list grew by five or six that night. That’s a win for me though, because it means I won’t ever accidentally communicate or help those players. I can’t even imagine what Xbox live must have been like that night when the race got called.

This is kind of why the extent of my online gaming at this point is Wow and Mario Kart (where the most offensive communication you have is whether your Mii has a big pointy nose).

This makes me think of the people who think the only reason not to kill people in real life, is the fear that God will punish them. I guess the only reason that they don’t spew whatever nasty words come into their heads at any minute is fear of social punishment.
Whereas, many—I’d like to think most—of us act good because we want to be good people in our own evaluation. If I do insult someone on the Internet, well it’s a way of bringing the social punishment aspect of interaction against someone who has trespass community standards, like telling a troll they are failing the stick test.

And now that I’ve brought up trolls, or in this case a psuedo-troll… RuggedinMontana should have a doozy of a response to this.

Beyond just the faction communication in WoW, there is a kind of sense of community.  On my server, at least, word gets around.  People know who you are and what you do.  It’s crazy how I will run into the same player many times over.  I’ve also found that most of the asses are guildless.  Seems the society on WoW tends to weed those jerks out, and they eventually leave my RP server for a PVE or PVP server.

I have been on voice chat and guild chat and party chat with some real jerks.  I have found that if you call them out, tell them that kind of talk is not acceptable and do it with saccharine, they shut up for the rest of the night.  Which is fine, but I think it’s proof that these people are complete idiots who have nothing else rattling around in their heads.

The biggest truth here is the one that’s already been acknowledged, the Greater Internet Dickwad Theory is absolutely true.  I’ve seen in action every day since the early nineties.

Second truth, most people are, well, not all that bright.  I (don’t) hate to say it but stupid equals stupid and most folks aren’t all that quick.  We can ignore that and pretend that everyone has a latent rational and civilized genius inside them and hope it will come out but what I’ve seen is that is wishful thinking (at best).  I think the best we can do is create strong social taboos against acting out in public.  And make no mistake, things like mccain’s recent campaign make acting out in public a good thing for the neanderthals.  All this bullshit talk his campaign mainstreamed set us back, as a society.  To what extent that is true I won’t say but civilization comes from marginalizing those xenophobic, tribal tendencies.

In the end the good news, a whole shitload of us elected a man that might be go a very long way to setting back some of this primitive bullshit.  I realize it’s wishful thinking on my part but there it is anyway.

mluqwtkm on 11/23 at 05:14 AM
Is this a cool new way to disemvowel trolls? What am I missing here?

/tangent

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that on WoW, the worst offenders for the type of jackassery that Jesse describes are on PVP servers.  I’m on one, sadly, ‘cuz that’s where all my (IRL) friends are, and in my experience, the nature of those servers encourages people to be jerks.  It’s one thing for a Horde player of my level to engage me in combat (even though I’d rather just ignore him/her), but the habit that players on both sides have of deliberately going into lower level areas, just to harass those who are lower level than they—it’s douchebaggery.  And people brag about going to Area X and ganking the low level players.  Ugh.  I don’t get the appeal of being such a jackass.  /tangent

I wonder, though, if such talk is really absent in real life.  The poor little angsty teenagers wouldn’t say such things to someone else’s face (well, the n word.  Calling someone “gay” or “faggot” is still a pretty popular insult around my neck of the woods), due to the aforementioned social sanctions and risk of that someone else handing out an ass-kicking.  However, it wouldn’t surprise me that when angsty teenagers talk among themselves, this sort of crap comes flying out all over, and it’s sooo edgy, too, to break the social rules about what to say to people.  I have no data to back me up—just the way that I remember un- or under-supervised kids will act in the 11 - 14 age bracket.

Stir in the anonymity of the internet, toss with low self-esteem and white, male entitlement, and presto!  One mini-Hannity pissing all over strangers on the internet/voice chat, preening his dominance to prove to himself that he’s the shit.

(Thank the universe that we only have to be that age once.  And pardon my rambling—I’m not fully caffeinated yet!)

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that on WoW, the worst offenders for the type of jackassery that Jesse describes are on PVP servers.

I think there’s definitely some truth to this.  I play on a PvE server, and when waiting in line to get my copy of Wrath, someone asked what kind of servers everyone played on and I got soundly mocked for saying I play PvE and not apologizing by saying something mealy like “oh but I just play there because my friends do”.  There is definitely an extra feeling of superiority amongst a lot of people who play PvP.  Alternatively, I have found my occasional forays to RP servers to be a breath of fresh air.  It’s like RP players know they’re at the bottom of the social totem pole so they are somewhat less inclined to be jackasses towards each other.

That is, of course, unless they are there to grief RP’ers :-D

But PvE servers definitely have those people.  The first raiding guild I was in was a moderately successful one on my server but was full of these kinds of mouth-breathers, most of whom were actually adults.  Every single female NPC was a “bitch”.  Succubus mobs in Karazhan?  Bitches.  Tyrande in Hyjal (who is your ally)?  Bitch.  People called each other niggers and faggots all the time.  Nigger-faggot became a popular insult.  Jew was less common but a favorite among our resident misguided 14 year old.  We had a black woman in our guild briefly, but she left because she was offended that an officer was discussing in guild chat how black women’s vaginas make him want to vomit.  Her leaving was soundly mocked by the rest of the officers.  I put up with it (much to my shame) because I was under the impression that this was just what happened in raiding guilds.

That guild eventually broke up and I ended up in the top raiding guild on the server, where that kind of language is not at all acceptable.  Apparently ugly racist, sexist, etc language isn’t actually required for performance in a video game.  Unsurprisingly, our guild has a reputation for “censoring” its members.  But I couldn’t be happier.  I felt much more censored in a guild where it seemed that every other comment was a slur against myself as a woman or my conscience as a decent human being.

These kids reach for the racist-ass abuse because they want you to know that even though they’re social inept pencil-necked geek IRL and you’ve just defeated them in the one arena in which they think they’re, like, way awesome, they’re still totally superior to you.  Forever and ever, amen.

And yeah, I doubt this kind of talk stays in the game.  These kids say the exact same things when playing D&D;in their parent’s basement on a Saturday night.

When they grow up they’ll be libertarian Nice Guys on the internets.

This struck me as somewhat funny because I have played shooters mostly against teenagers in Scandinavia (for what reason I have no idea) and their go-to epithet for Americans is “redneck.”

Now I see why.

APS

I think this is a sign that there really are fewer and fewer safe places for this shit anymore.  Girls fight back and are taken seriously when they press charges or demand disciplinary action.  People have to go to school with and avoid conflict with those they have been raised to consider “inferior” by parents who never had to deal with uppity women or minorities in their daily life - or consequences for spewing bigoted ignorance as a power trip.

It isn’t just the threat of legal action or punishment at school or in the workplace, either - there is a great deal of peer pressure growing up around these justice issues, at least in my son’s mixed population school system.  Kids who constantly spew shit are marginalized and made fun of and outright baited into screwing up in front of authorities.  Kids who spew the occasional bit of bigotry are challenged by their peers to explain themselves.  Even if the jerks stick together with their own to avoid these sanctions, their garbage inevitably lands them in some sort of trouble, likely serious and legal.

In short, there is no place to go and hide, and no help from parents who have never lived their reality and don’t get why their birth privileges don’t work anymore.  So they go on videogames and namecall as they were taught by their daddies, because they won’t get detention, won’t get the shit kicked out of them, and won’t get flushed by their peers.

Cola, as a bona fide pencil necked, D+D playing geek, I object to that stereotype. 

My reaction to all those insults (racial, religious, or sexual) is to ask the person nicely to keep it clean.  If they refuse, I tell them I’m leaving the game, and why.  Then I leave.  Admittedly, that tends to work better on things like Warcraft where leaving messes up a game that lasts an hour or so, as opposed to World of Warcraft, where leaving doesn’t really hurt them.

I am the person who reports stupid sexist names.  Yep, I’m that person.  What idiot names his female toon Vahjayjay?  I also report peeps being sexist/racist in General or Regional.  Barrens used to drive me insane.  Warhammer is better overall since it’s done by Mythic (and Mythic tends to come down hard on that stuff).  Peeps tell me just to ignore it, but I feel that if you don’t call people on it, then you’re just condoning it.

My husband used to be a major Halo addict but eventually left because the sexist and racist language got too bad. I could never stay in the same part of the house while he was playing because it was so infuriating. I think for him the final straw was when a male player told the one female player in his group that he was going to rape her (who IRL was had been raped recently). And couldn’t understand why my husband laid into him.

When called on it, so many just go “It’s a game, dude.”

a fourteen year-old’s desperate insistence that I’m a.) a faggot, b.) a nigger or c.) a faggot-ass nigger

If I was playing with someone who said that to me, I’d friendly-fire his ass straight to Valhallah.  (I’m not gay or black, either).

I have played shooters mostly against teenagers in Scandinavia and their go-to epithet for Americans is “redneck.”

Hahaha!

Obviously, the point of the slurs is to reduce anonymity, to alert your audience to the privileges you have hidden by your avatar—-that you’re white, that you’re straight (or at least that you claim to be), that you are not the person hurt by these slurs.  It runs much deeper than the Dickwad theory.

I don’t think that’s the case. They have no real care if the words actually apply to the target in any way. they simply reach for the most foul language they have, and having the vocabulary of a 2 year old leaves them stuck with the small pool. American English has something of a dearth of vulgar insults that don’t play power politics.

anonymity is freeing, but cowards remain cowards. their use of such slurs is utterly removed from the actual meaning, and they just see it as an expression of hate. If they thought for a second it made them any more identifiable they wouldn’t use them. It’s where these worthless dregs are told nothing they do has any consequences. So they do what any hate filled turd does when protected from consequences.

I don’t do online gaming at all.  It’s just not something I have time for.  I wish I did, it seems like a lot of people enjoy it.  So this memory really didn’t until I read through some recent contributions.

Awhile back I did some work for an online prodigy of sorts.  He did some development in online gaming early on and had some money to blow on a quasi-related brick and mortar enterprise. So here I am working for this highly intelligent, possibly gifted young man in his early twenties and what’s his office entertainment?  rush limbaugh and the rest of the mouth breathing talk radio asshats.  Which, for a dope smoking, young entrepreneur seemed out of character.

I called him on it one day.  He said he liked the fact it was discussion on the issues that wasn’t limited by PC language.  He claimed he thought of it as comedy.

I think I see some connections now I didn’t see before.  This is really same species of Cheeto stained bigots that have their own blogs, the gamers are just a different sub-species.

I don’t know.  It always surprises me when I hear someone twenty years younger than myself popping off with some mindless bigotry or sexist remark.  I had high hope for this next generation.  It seems like a lot of them just want to act like their parents, or grandparents.

That’s too bad.

Dan - I don’t mean to tar all pencil necked D&D;playing geeks with the racists-looking-to-prop-themselves-up-by-being-assholes brush.  Some of my best freinds are pencil necked D&D;playing geeks. 

I don’t think that this dynamic is confined to people on the internet, either.  It is the exact same dynamic that compels dudes to yell horrible shit at women walking down the street.  They’re having a little power trip by getting away with demeaning random people.  There’s a reason they use these specific words instead of yelling something more generic like ‘asshole’ or ‘douchebag’.  Basically they’re trying to pull rank, lording their whiteness over everybody.  It sad for them and enraging for the rest of us.

Agree about the voice chat. When I play those games online, the first thing I do is go to the Audio Settings and turn that stuff off. (I play with my brother and use a telephone to communicate with him)

Some is has to do with age. I remember watching 14 year old school boys try to play volleyball in a PE class once (I was in college). They couldn’t do it. They put far more effort into insulting and bickering with one another than the did into playing the game. They couldn’t cooperate to the level required to make volleyball work.

Dust - should your player be holding a sniper rifle at the tunnel perch?

As a PC gamer, I steer clear of games that are particularly attractive to this demographic. Basically, if it’s based on a real world conflict (historical or present-day), I avoid it. Generally, I find that the more removed a game is from reality, the less douchebaggery I encounter—although there are some exceptions for highly popular games that tend to have younger demographics.

I find this interesting because the stereotype of the empty, angry geek plays fantasy games, not realism games…

Anyway, I broke my rule a couple of months ago and played Company of Heroes for a while because it got such great reviews. It really way a fantastic game… but the in game chat was just beyond anything I’ve ever witnessed. It was like being in a neocon/neo-nazi chatroom, basically. I ended up /ignoring like 50% of the people in the room.

Weirdly, the number of people I’ve found calling eachother f-word or n-word or whatever word playing Team Fortress 2 is actually pretty low. I’m not sure why but for some reason that particular shooter seems to attract the non-moron segment of the FPS audience.

dickwads in junior high school and high school freshman year (‘81-‘84) talked like that all the time, as I recall; I’ll the serious video-war-game pubescent goons do likewise today

Heh, at a D & D table, there are opportunities for payback. Besides which, most gamers pride themselves on fantasy-based racial insults. “Orc-wipe”, “Troll Brain”, or, “Did you roll Ogre Eyes on your stats?” The only problem I ever saw someone bring to the game was a sort-of-fried who always was rude about anything other than vanilla heterosex. So the group decided to deal with him by bringing in new characters who were sure to offend his “delicate” sensibilities.  To this day, he hasn’t realized my cross-dressing Drow he salivated over was really a dude!

Denise

That guild eventually broke up and I ended up in the top raiding guild on the server, where that kind of language is not at all acceptable.

I have a feeling this is not a coincidence. The people who are there for the gameplay (sorry to be vague, my knowledge is limited to “WoW exists” and a vague notion that computers are somehow involved) are both more willing to accept if not embrace certain language being unacceptable and are more apt to have some level grinding under their belts. Conversely, and not mutually exclusive, people who suck at combat are going to say “well, at least I can abuse people” and do that, so the people who are unwelcome in this guild are deadwood.

A third possibility that occurred to me as I was typing this, also not mutually exclusive, is what encephalopath said: people who aren’t hurling insults at each other work together better.

Denise:

I play on a PvE server, and when waiting in line to get my copy of Wrath, someone asked what kind of servers everyone played on and I got soundly mocked for saying I play PvE and not apologizing by saying something mealy like “oh but I just play there because my friends do”. There is definitely an extra feeling of superiority amongst a lot of people who play PvP.

I also play on a PvE server (Garona), and we’ve actually had people transfer into the server just to sit in trade and attempt to mock people for playing on a PvE server. They tend to get roundly shouted down in very funny ways. But even on PvE servers, the people who spend most of their time in battlegrounds tend to be dicks about it, which is kinda pathetic, because when you dig deeper they’re usually the ones who wanted to PvP but were too chickenshit to roll on an actual PvP server.

I do almost no PvP, but I’m still very proud of the time I was questing with my paladin in Tanaris while PvP-flagged and a Blood Elf pally tried to gank me when I was busy with some npcs. I finally took him down with a well-timed melee swing at the very tail end of his Lay on Hands cast.

Seldom have I been so glad that the most advanced gaming system I own is a Super Nintendo.  Admittedly, it’s full of racist stereotypes of Italians.

I played WOW last year and one of the reasons i gave up on it was because i heard “faggot” and “nigger” used so often.  Those words were used as rather generic insults even when the orientation and race of the player was unknown.  And these insults were hurled at fellow raid members.

I don’t think that’s the case. They have no real care if the words actually apply to the target in any way. they simply reach for the most foul language they have, and having the vocabulary of a 2 year old leaves them stuck with the small pool.

I’m not so sure. Here’s an exchange I saw in some online FPS a few years ago, from memory-
1st guy:“How come there aren’t any black soldiers?”
2nd guy:“I smell ape”
3rd guy:“LOL i think you mean N1GGR”
2nd guy: “lol”

Weirdly, the number of people I’ve found calling eachother f-word or n-word or whatever word playing Team Fortress 2 is actually pretty low.

Isn’t it funny that the only black player in Team Fortress 2 is a Scotsman? I suspect that this was a decision made to defocus his racial identity and thus discourage people from calling him a n——. Especially since his class, Demoman (bombs), is probably the single most powerful in the game.

Since the characterization in Team Fortress 2 is dependent on wildly overdrawn stereotypes (Spy = sneaky smoking European, Heavy = dim grossly overweight Slav, Sniper = lanky stock Australian, Soldier = bonehead American grunt, Scout = smartass American poor city kid), one can see why they didn’t dare put an African-American in there.

And I think team balancing does a lot to keep Team Fortress 2 civil. It’s dumb to insult people when the server may put you on their team in two or three minutes, and you’ll be depending on them to get anything done.

And keep an eye on the way the social dynamics works out in Valve’s latest, Left 4 Dead. Left 4 Dead is a conscious and consistent attempt to make team players behave as a team, because you are dead in an instant without your team. In other words, it’s instant suicide for assholes, quite apart from the fact that griefers can be kicked easily and friendly fire is always turned on .

I think one of the reasons you see somewhat more civil players in Team Fortress 2 is that it’s not a traditional grime-and-blood super-realistic first-person-shooter with a fairly steep learning curve like CounterStrike or any of the Call of Duty games.  The characters are cartoony and brightly colored (if you’re unfamiliar with games, it basically looks like an animated Saturday Evening Post cover) and has relatively simple gameplay, so it turns off a lot of the asshole kids who think “baby games” are beneath them.

“Isn’t it funny that the only black player in Team Fortress 2 is a Scotsman” http://www.gametrailers.com/player/26152.html

He is black Scottish cyclops according to his decripstion of himself from

Oh btw Pyro according to the developers is a female.

The Pyro as female is another example of half-hiding the identity of a character, since the bulky flame-retardant suit she wears and the gas mask make it impossible to see from the outside (or to hear, since the gas mask muffles the Pyro’s audio responses). But if you look carefully in the spawns, in one of them the Pyro has a handbag with a big flower on it in her locker.

The TF2 official blog has an article on the development of the Demoman that makes it clear that the decision to make him black was very much last-minute. He was originally intended to work the drunken Scotsman stereotype to the hilt (his melee weapon is, after all, a broken whiskey bottle), but they felt there was “something missing” and decided to darken his skin.

it’s not a traditional grime-and-blood super-realistic first-person-shooter

That’s why the reaction to Left 4 Dead is going to be so interesting. It’s a traditional grime (LOTS of grime) and blood super-realistic first-person shooter where you HAVE to work seamlessly with your team members or YOU are dead very, very quickly. Valve is trying to house-train its clientele, lol.

I think you’re playing the wrong online games.  If you find good servers in good games (like Day of Defeat:Source), you never have any problem.  My favorite server, I can’t even CUSS, and they definitely come down on people hard and fast for racial, sexist, or stupid comments in general. As in perma-bans.

I think it’s probably correct that most of the people spewing this bilge haven’t consciously thought through the power-dynamics of the insults they’re using, and in most cases it’s true that they’re only using the most powerful/hateful/dirty language they know because they’re protected by anonymity.

But that doesn’t change the fact that - as Amanda said - the insults themselves depend on / enable the identification of the insulter as straight/white/male/“normal.”

And in their minds, *of course* they’re straight/white/male. Having the insult identify them as such does not diminish their anonymity. *Everyone* is straight/white/male. Everyone who counts, that is.

My only personal experience is in WoW. And as someone else said, five ignorant loudmouths in trade chat can give you a bad impression of the community as a whole.

But the reason they give that impression is because nobody calls them on it. It’s a bit of a catch-22: the people mature enough to think that kind of talk is unacceptable /leave trade instead of sticking around to call the brats out, simply because they have better things to do with their leisure time than getting into arguments with morons.

That being said, my experience suggests that - because of WoW’s ultimate dependence on teamwork - the idiots don’t tend to have much success in game. The reason they’re sitting around spewing bilge in trade chat is because they’re not raiding or instancing or doing arena, because nobody wants to play with them.

Every successful end-game raiding guild I’ve known of has been mostly comprised of mature adults, and *everybody* knows who the immature morons on the server are.

“It’s striking how much the politics of cultural resentment resemble the feelings of constant victimization that accompany puberty.” This is bang-on imo, and certainly reflects some of the crap that came out of my mouth at fourteen.

Then I grew up.

I quit playing WoW, in part because it’s so hard to find a good raiding guild that isn’t full of assholes. Templar Knights, the top guild on Mug’thol, doesn’t accept women.

I used to play a lot of PC-based FPS’s and never encountered trash talk while playing BF2142, CounterStrike, TF2 or Day of Defeat. People would talk, but it was usually about tactics, getting your teammates to the right point, and making it a better game- I found it valuable and rarely offensive- people who trash-talked got shot down or kicked with speed.

Then I got an XBox.

It’s difficult to describe my first experience with in-game chat (GTA4), because it was English, but nothing comprehensible- just a constant, unending stream of words. No meaning, just the worst words you can think of, all crammed up into a neverending sentence. It wasn’t offensive, it was just annoying. I’d like to think that was the point, but I honestly think that would be giving the guy (who was on my team, I should point out- his words weren’t reaching his opponents) too much credit. I just think he had a specialized form of tourette’s. In theory, the barriers for entry XBox live are slightly higher than those for PC (because you need a credit card to play on XBL’s servers, whereas with a PC all you need is a net connection, and if you get banned on XBox for bad behaivour, you’re screwed, where on a PC you just jump servers).

Since then I’ve had pretty much no good experiences using the headset with strangers. CoD4 is particularly awful- I basically have to mute everyone who is not a friend. And what’s awful is not that there are people being offensive (I don’t care, mute), it’s that they are taking up the channel. If one team is using voice-chat effectively to coordinate movements and let the other players know what is happenning, they will absolutely pwn any other team that has some asshole making everyone hit the mute button because they don’t want to hear their ranting. Communication disappears, tactics go out the window. They’re not just being offensive, they’re ruining the game.

And I think a lot of 12-year olds (and people who haven’t matured past the intellectual age of 12) feel that as ‘wielding power’- which is why they do it.

How about an alternative? We invent, right here, right now, words and insults of such filthy provenance that once we’ve created them we won’t dare say them in our dreams—words that insult people based on characteristics not protected by the 14th Amendment?

WoW and other on-line games are already spawning new insults… for example men who always play female toons are called Lace-ies (don’t know how to spell that) and manginas.  Not that I approve of those terms, as some of the people in the guild have pointed out that they make female toons so they don’t want to have to look at a male’s tush all day.  After I told my friend that she made up a male Highlander in DAoC just so she could watch his man skirt (she had a lot of fun with that, and it weirded the guys out in her guild as an added bonus).

In my experience? It’s mostly the middle schooler -> frat boy demographic.

They really do do it just to get a rise out of people. You don’t necessarily have to ignore them, but if you do react it has to be done with contempt, not anger.  Ideally the person is just kicked or banned immediately without other reaction.  Servers heavily policed by admins are good for this.

Good servers ban people who abuse the voice chat—teamspeak is good for that, too.  Depending on what game you’re playing(or how you’re doing voice chat), you can mute specific players.

Also, someone posted about playing against Scandinavians.. Not only do they call Americans “Yank” or “redneck”, but every sentence they utter is littered with and punctuated by “fucks” and “bitch"es.  I don’t think they’re trying to be especially crude, though.

“Fuck, fucking yank fuck, bitch. Fuck,” as they might say.

The offensive language is bad enough but really the treatment of women is downright deplorable. I’m glad some platforms are allowing for the creation of girl guilds by locking in gender identity on the platform. More needs to be done. Typically after the the “holy shit a girl” phase people goes into sexual innuendo phase (even on my pretty well moderated servers). The few maintained female players I’ve seen get positions of authority quite quickly. Somehow there’s less sexism against female admins than against female players in general (and much less admin abuse by female admins). I’ve seen a pretty large sample size and I’ve never seen JGGIFT apply to female players. I suppose you could simply pass as straight or white, but you’re clearly excluded as a women and your behavior is somehow restricted to reasonable.

Usually there’s a computer solution to computer problems, but raving 14 year olds with potty-mouth and seriously problematic undertones lacks a solution other than whatever punishment can be dished out by vigilant admins.

The only games I regularly play multiplayer with strangers are TF2 and L4D, so it’s not really a problem for me.

It’s really rich seeing Kotaku, which has faithfully catered to the lowest common denominator, pretending like it gives a damn about improving the discourse online.

They’re just a hair above SomethingAwful, IMO.

I’m sorry, but I still maintain that Microsoft should beef up its abuse department. This isn’t like the internet where tracking down trolls is difficult because there are so many different servers and ISPs—people playing on XBox Live go through central servers where their account (which is usually tied not only to a credit card but to a console) is logged. When an abuse report comes in, just observe the person who had the report filed. If they are abusive, cancel their account for abuse. If they’re not abusive, observe the person who made the charge to see if they’re using the abuse option as a form of bullying and then cancel THAT asshole’s account. Yeah, it will be huge undertaking—at first. But I have a hard time believing that Microsoft won’t be able to find people who want to make money playing videogames, and once people figure out that this shit really will get them kicked off of live, they’ll learn to clean up their act.

And send a discrete letter to the person whose credit card is being charged to inform them exactly why the account has been canceled so that, if necessary, mum and dad can have a talk with junior about appropriate online behavior.

But Microsoft is not interested in fixing this problem. When confronted with the shameful “Halo 3: Homophobia Evolved,” video Major Nelson (the big enchilada of XBox Live) basically shrugged his shoulders and said (not in so many words) that if you’re anything but a straight, white male, you shouldn’t dare to poke your head into voicechat because you’re just going to be harrassed. So lacking the will to better the environment, I doubt that Microsoft will take any steps to do so.

I have a feeling this is not a coincidence. The people who are there for the gameplay (sorry to be vague, my knowledge is limited to “WoW exists” and a vague notion that computers are somehow involved) are both more willing to accept if not embrace certain language being unacceptable and are more apt to have some level grinding under their belts. Conversely, and not mutually exclusive, people who suck at combat are going to say “well, at least I can abuse people” and do that, so the people who are unwelcome in this guild are deadwood.

I do think that my guild’s relatively pleasant culture helps it a lot.  For instance, WoW recently released an expansion pack, and in the run up to that a lot of guilds gave up on their raiding and/or broke up entirely.  But our guild kept going on because a large proportion of us were there to have fun together, not just reach a goal of killing Boss X.  So the other guilds, when faced with the fact that killing Boss X will be meaningless soon, just stopped playing together because they probably can barely stand each other.

However, there’s a stereotype that raiding guilds in WoW are sexist, homophobic, and hateful places because a lot of them really are.  Another commenter said that the top guild on their server doesn’t allow women, and that is not uncommon.  A very famous raiding guild, Nihilum (I can never spell it right) famously doesn’t accept women into the guild because they “cause drama”.  [I love how its always women “causing drama” in guilds:  when I joined the guild I’m in a certain male member immediately began hitting on me, knowing nothing about me but my character’s name and that I’m female.  This didn’t result in any interesting drama, but if it had I bet people would have said that I “caused” it despite the fact that he pursued me aggressively right off the bat.]  The very top of the WoW world is very competitive and some people who play WoW will put up with anything in order to be in a top-100 guild.  My guild is tops on our server but out of hundreds of servers it turns out that overall our guild is just mediocre

Heh, at a D & D table, there are opportunities for payback. Besides which, most gamers pride themselves on fantasy-based racial insults. “Orc-wipe”, “Troll Brain”, or, “Did you roll Ogre Eyes on your stats?” The only problem I ever saw someone bring to the game was a sort-of-fried who always was rude about anything other than vanilla heterosex. So the group decided to deal with him by bringing in new characters who were sure to offend his “delicate” sensibilities.  To this day, he hasn’t realized my cross-dressing Drow he salivated over was really a dude!

I do recall one guy with… issues… during the weekly roleplaying sessions at a pub.  I was with him in a group during rolling up Cyberpunk characters, which involved generating some lame background details via dice (think WoD wankst done at random).  He rolls up a “past relationship”, and the GM rolls some characteristics for this NPC, including a male gender.

Cue said guy with issues - “Eww, you mean my character is a rump ranger?!?”

And this is a bit I love - the entire bar stops.  And just looks at him.  There’s this two-beat, and then everyone goes back to their games.  And he kept real quiet during the rest of the night.

It’s striking how much the politics of cultural resentment resemble the feelings of constant victimization that accompany puberty.

A not insignificant number of adults are basically just overgrown children.  As I entered adulthood, I was dismayed to find out how childish so many adults are.  But I really shouldn’t have been surprised.  When I was a kid, I was bullied almost as much by adults as by my peers.

“I’m sorry, but I still maintain that Microsoft should beef up its abuse department”

A microsoft rep in charge of the xbox live department dealing with abuses did give a statement to Kotaku explaining how they did the complaints. http://kotaku.com/362810/the-xbox-live-police

Somebody flashing their junk to other players especially children in Uno matches , or engaging in illegal sexual acts with minors or other illegal acts are a huge concern. Apparently it happens with frightning regularity if you listen to some of the right wing media outlets whenever they decide to do a story about video games.

As for the credit card comment there are xbox live trial cards that can be gotten for free from various places. People often got dozens at a time. There are ways around the bans. Also there is the silver service.

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“If you’re asking whether or not this means the Corner is a glorified reliving of the angry kids in your high school who read the first hundred pages of The Fountainhead and refused to smoke not because it was bad for them, but because it was the vice of their intellectual inferiors (read: people that were actually liked by others), then yes.  Yes, it is exactly that. “

jesse, i have a blog-crush on you. awesome.

Oh my god! I realized what the prevalence of racial epithets (&c;) in these situations means! We’re winning the culture war!

Think about it. These kids don’t give a crap about your actual racial background (&c;), they’re just looking for the most offensive word—ie, the word relating offensively to the concept the culture holds most taboo. Candian cursewords used to be based on the Church. Older American cursewords (fuck shit bitch) are based on the idea of “polite company” in the presence of which sex, excretory functions, and (I’m reaching here) marital relations were not discussed. But the new curse words: f*****, n*****, and c***, are all about breaking the taboos against racism, homophobia, and sexism! Which means, in turn, that those taboos are entering the culture.

It’s time for a hearty well done for all of us. Sex is cool. Droppin a deuce is alright. Whiny women are fine. But racism, sexism, and homophobia are the coming states that dare not speak their names. :D

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