Playing League. And I’ve noticed it’s just something we brush off. “Oh, they’re just kids,” things like that.
But that’s the thing - while I could be acerbic as a kid, I wasn’t a little sociopathic asshole. I did not respond to every comment I heard with something dickish. I didn’t wish cancer on people. I didn’t even think those things to myself (so it’s not just an issue of, “The internet allows people to say what they think, because it is anonymous”).
In talking with my friends (I know, anecdote, the singular of data), they have said the same thing. I don’t really think this is “kids these days”. There seems to be something wrong with a lot of people online, and we seem to just be ignoring it as a culture and it is festering.
One possibility is that online games attract sociopathic assholes, because sociopathic assholes are allowed to be sociopathic assholes in online games without repercussions. Also, because said online games run rampant with sociopathic assholes, people who are not sociopathic assholes are less likely to partake because they don’t want to play with sociopathic assholes, which just makes the ratio of sociopathic asshole to non-sociopathic asshole that much worse.
Most young people are just repeating phrases they heard somewhere else on line (aka “meming”) and don’t really have a clue what they are even saying. Most of chat is just a broken photocopier with an attitude.
part of the problem, is it is very difficult to give someone a hard time online, without coming across as an ‘asshole’
in real life, with human facial contact or voice inflections, you KNOW when i’m joking, or being sarcastic or giving you a ‘hard time’ all in the name of fun…I know, because there are times I do this and people that KNOW i am joking reply with a LOL…the highly sensitive assholes think I’m serious…see, who has the problem?? the sender or the receiver?
food for thought…social media and the inherent autonomy of the internet will be the death of human bonding/civilization.
I wonder if part of it is because games are a constant source of carefully calibrated frustration. I know I get pretty pissed against single player games at times. I start cussing like the typical anonymous 13 year old.
It took 6 replies to get this posted, this thread is a fail.
Ok to stab at @SlyFrog’s question. There is some kind of mutual synopsis betweeen marketing, attitudes, and community. It’s been building for a lon time, but think back to how long term sorting can effect things.
The ‘Xtreme’ attitude portrayed and marketed in the 90’s and onward, the rise of acerbic sarcasm as a marker of online gaming communities (I know many of you were Old Man Murray fans), plus the affordances of anonymity.
Is it any surprise that in unmoderated spaces it devolved to this over time? You start with a few assholes, and it slowly drives the more targeted individuals out. Non straight white males would be less likely to participate because who needs to have slurs shouted at them in their recreation time. It also would slowly drive others who are not targets but just don’t like that garbage.
It may start limited, but over time the proportion of those spewing garbage to non garbage would skew. And it starts to become a part of the community identity. And then CoD multiplayer just becomes this toxic mess that those not already into that culture look at with disgust and, even if the game may interest them, they would now stay away from multiplayer.
As one of the folks (I’m sure there are many here) who was online a long time ago, way back in the BBS and dial-up, pre-HTML WWW days, I can definitely say that in my personal experience it’s been a long, slow but accelerating downward slide. Initially, anyone who was connected at all was in a small, relatively select and technically proficient group, and it was more like a nerd club than today’s come-one-come-all rave.
I remember, too, the debates over pay by the hour vs. subscription;; the pay by the hour supporters were adamant that the quality of the community would suffer without a substantial pay gate. They were in some small degree correct, though experience also shows that a means standard doesn’t screen out idiots or assholes either, just insures they have more money. As the Internet democratized, the race to the lowest common denominator began…
All in all, though, I’d rather have a democratic, widely accessible Internet than some closed gated community open only to the same people leasing BMWs and shopping at Whole Foods exclusively.
I think there’s a few different factors coming together.
the absence of nonverbal cues stripping nuance from communication, as mentioned above, making it hard to parse the other person’s intent.
A higher percentage of people being assholes in their heart of hearts than you’d assume just from casual social interaction, because in the real world there are social norms and consequences for breaking them that encourage people to tamp down on that shit, whereas online you can easily evade them if so desired.
Some people are prone to take competitive games waaay too seriously.
Some people get a huge kick out of ruining other people’s days and PvP games, especially open sandbox ones, make this easy and hugely enticing.
And of course, the more people who are just there to enjoy things with other humans (as opposed to at their expense) have to deal with the assholes, the less they’re going to want to play and the more likely everyone else is to get matched with an asshole instead.
PvP by definition is a zero sum game and therefore does not foster social behaviour. If you want to play with social people you probably want to play PvE or coop.
It’s always been this way I remember very distinctly getting called various terrible things while playing Quake2, UT, and Half-Life mods. Then a little after that all the terrible sprays that showed up in multiplayer Half-Life games.
The only things that’s changed is the volume of people playing multiplayer games online has gone up.
Also in-game voice chat has overtaken text chat, and people are much more likely to just run their mouth than take the time to type things mid-action-game.
I don’t play any multiplayer games with voice chat. In league, people claim that “If only we had voice chat, people would be less toxic!”, under the assumption that when you can actually hear someone respond, you tend to be less of a jerk because it feels less anonymous.
Which game are you playing with excitingly toxic voice comms? I don’t own an Xbox, but I’ve heard rumors the voice chat there is incredibly civil and everyone is exceedingly intelligent and well mannered.
I don’t play competitive multiplayer. I’m just saying, it’s easier to talk to people while playing than it is to type and play at the same time, which I would assume leads to more communication and thus, if the players are typically toxic, more toxicity.
Also, my understanding is that voice chat might feel less anonymous but it also reveals things about your identity - gender, for example, and any accent you might have - that people will particularly seize upon in gross ways. Or so I hear from my female friends, at least.
