Why are so many online gamers sociopathic assholes?

“L’enfer, c’est les autres”

And yet, as a pathological extrovert, I start to wilt if I can’t be surrounded by other humans for more than a day or so. . .

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On the other hand, the barrier to communicating is slightly lower with voice than with text, both in effort, and because you tend to think more before typing. Thus you’re more likely to see reflexive abuse, swearing, racial slurs, etc. in voice chat than text based chat.

Voice chat has the potential to be better than text, but when grouping up with randoms, my experience is that it’s worse. It’s also possible that’s a platform divide though (console-voice vs. PC-text)

This is the reason I despise the trend for not offering dedicated servers. My friends and I used to run our own and could manage this behaviour. You could actually attract regulars by keeping the games civil. Since everything is so random now and servers are not a “home” anymore I just play less and less MP.

Maybe Jack Thompson was right, and video games turn people into sociopathic assholes.

I started Destiny a few months ago and did the tutorial area alone. Not a bad game. Then I was spawned into a starting hub with the other players. I had to take care of something in the kitchen and saw another player sitting down so found the button to do that and left my character sitting, overlooking a nice cliff view.

When I came back some other player was forcibly miming oral sex on my female character’s mouth. Just sitting there moving back and forth, casually raping a stranger.

So I turned off that game and deleted it. Back to a single player game. If people can ruin an online experience at your expense, they will. The human race is a terrible animal sometimes.

Now I’m a hardcore, experinced gamer so just shrugged off this experience. But imagine someone new to the world of multiplayer gaming experienced that. They’d never go back, and thus only the toxic and terrible are left.

I think Penny Dreadful had it pretty much right, up at the top of the thread.

But one other thing to consider. Alzheimer’s seems to change peoples’ personalities, but I have read that what it really does is unleash stuff that the dominant, more civilized self long kept in check. Pretty much everyone has some horrible thoughts and impulses, it’s just that sociopathic assholes act on this stuff a whole lot more than normal people do.

Gaming allows an outlet for acting on those horrible thoughts and impulses. Which, for a lot of people, probably releases the tensions and aids in keeping their inner asshole in check. But it doesn’t surprise me that it can work the other way around, where the opportunity to say and do heinous stuff on a screen attracts people brimming with sociopathic assholery, and, in fact, unleashes it.

In this way, it’s not so different from sports like football. Great outlet for lots of guys, but also a higher concentration of violent criminals, as you know if you follow the NFL or even college.

Since you mentioned League specifically, my best advice is the following: If someone goes negative on you in chat, mute them and move on. That negativity is a sign that either the game is going back and you’re going to lose, or that the game is going badly for them and they aren’t going to be in the right place to contribute some magic winning strategy to turn the game around.

Mute early, mute often, but on a case by case basis. If you wind up muting your whole team, then that’s fine. You’re playing to improve, so ask yourself what you can do better to win the game, and just execute on that. You can define success not by winning or losing any one game, but by doing something better than you have previously. That can be looking at the minimap more often, warding, avoiding ganks, etc.

those were probably things that if you HAD been caught the consequences would have been bad though. Even if you get caught being a dick online there are no real repercussions that people care about.

Anonimity is a key factor, but it’s not the only place where you find that. I think in all fairness that I’ve seen much, much worse in terms of road rage than regular gaming rage, where I’ve seen a few people go dangerously close to homidical anger for relatively small driving offences.

The worst I’ve seen in gaming is in League of Legends, but it almost seems that the game was designed to create rage. Games are long… sometimes more than an hour, but the result is often but not always a given, so there are bitter conflicts between those that want to surrender and those who don’t. Add to that the tension of losing ranking, the obsessive emphasis on making sure everyone had the perfect “build”, the fact that teams aren’t big enough that losing a player isn’t automatically a disaster… and you have a great recipe for people going nuts.

Anyway, gaming has always been and still is an underdog culture, so there’s a dual current of both letting loose and self-flagellating for the community’s wrongs.

I think you’re agreeing with me? :p

I would also add that it’s not just that there are fewer consequences to assholish behavior online, but you’re also much less likely to care about the people you’re possibly affecting. Having spent the better part of a decade here and gotten to know many of you to at least some degree, your opinions of me actually matter to me to at least some degree. But some random in a WoW dungeon or a MOBA match or something? Chances are I will never interact with that person again and whether they like me makes no difference to me at all.

On top of that, competitive games just attract a certain kind of player. League, in particular, is well known for having a toxic player base. It is riddled with players that will tear you a new one because you didn’t carry them properly and (themselves being utterly incompetent) they died 20 times, never stopping to ask themselves what they could have done better. After all, they are godlike.

Not to discount anonymity and audience which are almost certainly intensifiers, but it feels simpler.

Young men are the bulk of who plays these games, and young men are fucking assholes. And then, of course, quite a few older men who never quite mature out of being a young asshole. It has always been thus. I assume it always will be.

I think it’s important to use the term young men too. I don’t mean that because women aren’t involved, they are but probably not at the same percentage, like not even close… it’s because these are not 9-13 year old kids, they’re 20-30 year old men, and they’re assholes in life too. The kids are there but, seriously there are grown ass men in this group still behaving like sociopaths because they can, apparently.

Like others said, the non-PVP games seem to draw the adults with adult brains better.

I think this is right too. Young men are overwhelmingly the assholes in online gaming.

90% of this is young men who have too little actual human contact and an underdeveloped sense of empathy. Anonymous voices over the internet are not ‘human contact.’

Not to be that guy, but it’s almost like we are creating a generation of sociopaths because it’s so easy to be socially isolated by videogaming all the time. When you never leave your Mom’s basement figuratively, perhaps being allowed to socially isolate yourself creates problems. You can retreat into your videogame world where you have power and are in control, you feel terrible about yourself, and it manifests itself in terrible behavior.

John Lithgow thought similarly about dancing in Footloose.

Kids are assholes, kids will always be assholes. Every generation tries to find the reason why and settles on whatever the kids are up to that particular year.