#oneaday Day 863: Trash-Talkin’

It’s not often I feel able to say this and mean it, but there’s a piece over on Kotaku right now that is an excellent read. Go check it out, then come back to me.

I can’t comment on being a rape survivor or anything like that, but I think that article sums up why I feel deeply uncomfortable with the idea of playing online with strangers in competitive games. I hate abuse, particularly pointless, rage-filled, deliberately offensive abuse designed to provoke an intensely emotional reaction out of the victim — and competitive online gaming seems to pride itself on this so-called “trash talking”.

In my own case in the past (and not in games, in the “real world”) abuse I have received has been in the form of hurtful comments about my appearance and my weight. I can’t begin to fathom what must have gone through the minds of the bullies in question as they said those words that lashed at me like a cat o’ nine tails, but they hurt. They perhaps weren’t intended to hurt quite as much as they did — “I was only having a laugh” is seen as a valid defence by many these days — but the fact is that they utterly ruined my day when they burst into my ears, regardless of intention.

If I feel that shitty after some stranger makes some low jab at my appearance, I can only imagine how awful it must feel to be a rape survivor and hear how freely the word “rape” is bandied about to mean “beat” or “defeated”. I feel uncomfortable using the word, given that I know at least a couple of survivors (to my knowledge), so picturing how it must feel to have such an awful thing trivialised by, say, Gears of War players is disturbing, to say the least. Like the behaviour of the bullies I described above, the intention may not necessarily have been to offend or upset, but there are plenty of people for whom such comments could completely ruin an otherwise fun experience — and, really, let’s face it, there’s no need for it, is there?

Lest you think me some sort of prude, I will point out at this juncture that I’m certainly not above light-hearted insults with my friends, which often skate into sexist, racist, homophobic and other generally offensive territory. But that’s something that we do among ourselves in private — we’ve set the boundaries as to what is “acceptable” in our group, we stick to it and, crucially, we don’t do it in public where anyone might misinterpret our words as genuine sexism, racism, homophobia or any other form of misanthropy. Not one of us would even contemplate the prospect of telling a complete stranger that they’d “raped” them — or indeed hurl any other sort of abuse at them, whether or not there was social “context” for such behaviour.

An example springs readily to mind. I was playing the then-new Dungeons and Dragons Online MMORPG, and I was doing my first run through one of the game’s cooperative dungeons with a “pick-up group” of random players. All had been going well until we got to the end and there was an unnecessarily difficult platforming section. The platforming controls in D&D Online were not very good, to say the least, so it took me a good few minutes to get through the bit that the other (evidently more experienced) players had passed with ease. I apologised and made light of it, hoping that they’d do the same. Instead, I was confronted with a torrent of abuse through the private chat channels. I turned the game off at that point and never played it again.

The unnecessary, unprovoked wrath of a complete stranger had ruined the game for me. Whether or not they had intended to upset me that much was irrelevant. It had happened. I grant that I am the sort of person who is very easily upset even by heated arguments, debates and disagreements, let alone abusive words, but being sensitive about such things shouldn’t preclude you from taking part in certain activities. Something like an online computer or console game — regardless of whether it’s cooperative or competitive — should bring people together, not leave them feeling marginalised, or that their own anxieties, issues and mental scars are somehow trivial. There’s no excuse for it, and it’s something which gaming culture really needs to clean up if we want our hobby to be inclusive to all.

Therein lies part of the problem, I think, though; some people don’t want that inclusiveness. Some people want to feel powerful, to be the top of that little clique, to feel like they have achieved something important and are therefore “better” than others. And they go about that by lashing out at the weak spots, triggers and hot buttons of others. Anything goes in the quest to make them feel like The Big Man. (Or Woman. But let’s face it, it’s significantly more likely to be a male person.)

It feels like such a futile question at times, but why can’t everyone just, you know, get along?