As for the title of the topic, Why are videogame communities so consistently toxic? my TL;DR summary is definitely
- primarily aggro dudes
- playing largely competitive videogames
- at a very advanced state of technological adoption relative to most other groups
for sure, I acknowledge all that, but also
- videogames barely do the absolute minimum of setting rules for allowed social behavior
- videogames don’t set a baseline of minimum expected technical features around policing social activity, such as “gee, maybe typing racial slurs in chat shouldn’t just go through automatically?” and “gee, maybe there should be an easy and convenient way to report problem players in-game?”
- videogames don’t deplatform bad actors aggressively enough, e.g. ban game keys from problem players when they get reported {x} times – without followup and actual consequences, even the best tooling doesn’t matter.
The funny thing is as bad as Twitter and Facebook et al used to be on this, they’re improving to a state where they are finally edging ahead. For example, Twitter now does primitive sentiment analysis on all tweets, and will suppress stuff that doesn’t pass. In the bad old days of … er … 3 years ago … that didn’t happen at all, so anything rando person X typed into a tweet addressing person Y – no matter how vile or horrible – would always show up in person Y’s feed.
Which is really kinda profoundly fucked up, if you think about it. Like how was that ever OK?
