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?
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I think that feeling superior to others is part of the online culture at this point. The most popular online console games, shooters like COD and Battlefield, are built around the idea of you being better than the competition. You gain points by killing them in numerous ways, unlocking new weapons to kill them in even more ways. And the devs certainly aren't doing anything to stop it. Things like the mentioned kill animations in Gears of War just reinforce the "I'm better than you" mentality. It's half the reason I can't play games like that anymore.
And yeah, Gabe's dickwad theory holds true across the internet at large. I'll give you a great example. A while ago, I was featured as the Xbox Live Gamer of the Week. It was pretty cool, but the amount of hateful messages I received in the next two weeks made me wish I had never even gotten an Xbox. I stopped keeping track after a certain point, but it was up to 200 at that point. That's maddening. Luckily, I don't take much stock in the opinion of XBL gamers, but it could have caused someone a lot of emotional pain.
As to the Kotaku article, I hope I'm not coming off as insensitive, but it made no sense to me. I'm supposed to feel bad that a rape survivor used the word rape and she freaked out about it? Nope, sorry. Her friend had the right reaction, instant horror. There's nothing good about that word, no matter who you're talking to, but I imagine it's so much worse for survivors of rape. The fact that she used the word while playing an online game just shows you how twisted the culture surrounding those games are.
No, I think you took away the right thing from the article — I think she was just shocked at how much "rape culture" had got into her mind from gaming, despite the fact that she, of all people, "should" (arguably) be offended or upset by it.
Ultimately, though, different people deal with trauma in different ways. Some people try and blot it out and never deal with it, others use black/gallows humour to trivialise it, others still are open and honest about it. People need to take into account these varying possible reactions when saying something potentially upsetting.
Know your "audience". If you're playing with your clan of teenage CoD fanboys, you can get away with saying shit you wouldn't want random strangers to hear — much like the example I give about my friends above. I would be mortified if anyone heard the shit we talk to each other while playing board games, but we enjoy talking smack in that way because we set those boundaries and are comfortable with doing so. But, crucially, we know not to spout crap like that in public or to people we don't know well.
You're right, I think it is all about the setting, but does that excuse the behavior? No. There's nothing wrong with some smack talk, like you said while playing board games. But, my stance is, Don't say anything you wouldn't say in front of your mother. My mother is a little more liberal than most, so it may not work for everyone, but that keeps me from uttering a lot of the nastier things.
You know, the shooter community gets brought up a lot in conversations like this, but I think the fighting game community is another really good talking point. But there, there seems to be much more sexism in their taunts than anything. The game store I go to has fighting game tournaments sometimes (they're put on by one of the guys who runs the store, the store is mainly board/card/table top games) and sometimes those guys are really upsetting. And me being in there, a guy who loves to have verbal altercations, sitting across the board from my visibly shaken wife is not a very comfortable situation to be in. Luckily, it's never gotten really bad, but I imagine that's due to the fact that the guy who runs it keeps them in check, but I avoid that place when they have tournaments now.