While admitting this risks damaging my “cred”, I do not game that much online. Indeed, my experience with online multi-player is limited to only a handful of games like Mario Kart DS (which I quickly abandoned due to rather egregious cheating) and a very brief stint in World of Warcraft (once I got to more populated areas of the game, my aging G4 PowerBook just couldn’t keep up. I got lucky.) That said, like so many others, I’ve played a lot of Halo 3 online. In general, the random people I’ve played with have been alright; not offensive but not people I’ll become bosom buddies with. Playing online is like hanging out with any group of strangers. It’s civil and awkward. On heavily populated nights though, when Microsoft’s servers strain under the weight of hundreds of thousands of players, that’s when you get a taste of the horrific behavior that keep many people from playing online at all. Racist, moronic, misogynistic rambling from a multitude of pubescent men with no sense of irony, humor, or decorum. No description, no recording can do it justice, you have to experience this sort of dumb hostility yourself to truly understand it. Though you don’t have to play online to witness it at work in the community. Just look at the Kotaku comments section during last year’s Resident Evil 5 debacle.
Angela from Lesbian Gamers and Michael from Brainy Gamer have written up an essay that succinctly states the problem and elegantly asks what’s to be done about it if discourse on games is going to grow:
How can we constructively address members of our community who use the public and anonymous nature of our forums and comment areas to attack or berate others? Is banning specific commenters or IP addresses the best solution? We can moderate and filter, but is there something meaningful to be gained by allowing such people to publicly have their say? Can we nurture a community that responds to these situations in a useful and instructive way? Can we engage a critical mass of gamers willing to model respectful disagreement and thoughtful discourse?
Or are we wringing our hands about something only a relative few of us care about? Is it unlikely we can do anything substantive to create a more civil environment among gamers? Should we simply do what we can as individuals and hope things improve over time? We'd like to make a positive contribution, but are we being hopelessly idealistic?
As Angela and Michael say, it’s a difficult problem to tackle. The real problem is the anonymity of all online interactions as illustrated by the John Gabriel Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Anti-social behavior in physical communities isn’t tolerated because anyone behaving badly is dealt with immediately, either by overt punishment or ostracizing the guilty party. But there’s no such thing as internet jail and, even if there was, escape is only a new screen name, a new persona away.
Not to be flippant but the simplest answer is for people to just stop being stupid. The complicated answer, however, is a mystery to me. What do you think readers?
Big thanks to N’Gai Croal at Level Up for pointing us to this.