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.

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.

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.