Sure. One could always move both the reporter and the reported to new servers. driving trollies would only have the effect of them eventually quarantining themselves.
Sort of, but there is a biiig difference between NFL and NBA. This points to the difference that cultural influences within the sport make, which would be analogous to my âSlime Rancher versus Counter-Strikeâ example. The design & culture of the game itself profoundly affects the community in so many ways.
Incorrect, you can mute this topic just fine. Try it if you donât believe me. Iâm not sure why this misinformation keeps getting repeated, but it needs to stop. Thanks!
Well yeah this is what Iâm getting at. Really aggressive competitive sports tend to cause this, as pointed out in one of my absolute all time favorite comedy bits
How do I get through to you boys that football isnât about rape?
Itâs about violently dominating anyone that stands between you and what you want.
You gotta get yourself into the mindset that you are gods, and you are entitled to this!
The other team ainât just going to just lay down and give it to you! Youâve got to go out there and take it!
⌠which brings me to violent, competitive videogames where you play as gods.
One thing thatâs frustrating to me in Battlefield 5 is that they have a Q*Bert filter that converts naughty chat words like âfuckâ into $%^& which I think is called a âgrawlixâ ⌠but guess what happens when you type common racist terms in? Sigh. Nothing. So painful, and that is such a tiny, easy thing to do.
Another mechanical thing, same game, thatâs super frustrating. Reporting bad behavior, from âclearly cheatingâ to âblatantly awful racismâ is about 10 clicks involving bringing up a special overlay, manually typing in the username, waiting for that web UI to load, selecting a drop-down at the upper right⌠itâs unbelievable the amount of effort it takes to report anything and that is just dumb. Even if you didnât care at all about racism, which is morally bankrupt, SURELY you care about cheating and the same mechanics can carry forward under the banner of preventing cheatingâŚ
I dunno, Fortnite is hella inclusive and always has been even before they glommed on to the Battle Royale cash machine. Even that kinda meh âSave the Worldâ mode that existed before had amazing, racially diverse, shape diverse characters to choose from with stellar art and not one tiny bit exploitative like ugh League of Legends.
Honestly from an art and style and tone perspective Fortnite the game is basically a perfect model of an inclusive all genders all ages all backgrounds fun game. And yet⌠and yet⌠there was not one single woman competing at this yearâs Fortnite World Cup.
That bothered me. Especially since I almost donât know how you could do it better than Fortnite in terms of inclusive visuals, being âfunâ instead of aggro competitive, and running (with cross-device play!) on every platform out there.
As far as in-game communication goes, Riot found (unsurprisingly) that turning off cross-team chat had a huge effect. That makes sense, right? You trash talk the opposing team. But they still have big problems with negativity expressed toward teammates in intra-team chat, which I can⌠also kinda understand. One reason I donât like 5 v 5 games is that at any competitive level beyond âwho caresâ, having one person perform very poorly (or not even poorly but at a much lower âamateurâ level than everyone else) on your team can literally determine the game outcome every. single. time. So this kind of tension is built into the game model, whereas in a 64 player game if you have 3 players doing basically nothing on each team, statistically itâs no big deal.
The solution is to turn off chat (obviously including voice chat) altogether, and only allow people to use predefined emotes and callouts that donât offer anything negative. This works much better.
Now, that does indeed make misbehavior much harder, but humans will always find a wayâŚ
âWe spent several weeks building a UI that used pop-downs to construct sentences, and only had completely harmless words â the standard parts of grammar and safe nouns like cars, animals, and objects in the world.â
"We thought it was the perfect solution, until we set our first 14-year old boy down in front of it. Within minutes heâd created the following sentence:
I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny.
Or, more accurately stated, 14 year old boys will always find a way to grief you.
Not directly, no. But there has been a lot of talk about how the problem is specifically men. And while a lot of the time that may be true, for various reasons, I think thereâs some danger of focusing on the âmenâ part of âtoxic menâ.
(To get even more tangential, many of the people I follow on tumblr are part of the various queer communities on that site, and one thing Iâve noticed is that there are a surprising number of young gay, lesbian, trans etc. people who end up in abusive relationships because theyâve so internalized the idea that straight people are the abusers, that they donât look out for, or be prepared to deal with, abusive behavior from fellow queer folks.)
Anyway, my point was that while in this specific case, the toxicity in video game community comes mostly from men, itâs not axiomatic always and everywhere, and that people should be aware of abuse and toxic behavior coming from women, or PoCs, or queer folks too.
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The problem is toxic masculinity and patriarchal power structures. The behaviors that it encourages can also be engaged in by people who are not white, straight men, yes. No one said otherwise.
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My pet theory is that gamer as an identity has been cultivated to be nominally white, male, and a certain age range. Marketing in this regard made the gamer one kind of thing too, those who play anything but the most popular PC or console titles arenât âreal gamersâ as marketing spiel would imply or just outright say it. So the rest of us whoâve been playing MUDs, CRPGs (western and their Japanese variants), and anything by Nintendo are just âcasualsâ or otherwise ânon-gamers.â Now, how does that work itself into being so toxic? Well identity has boundaries and if you cross boundaries thereâs bound to be someone who will police them. Iâve seen this not only on 4chan but on web forums well before 4chan existed. This persists for years to present and other groups such as fascists found a way to use this to their advantage. Thus, gamers are or are becoming synonymous with anti-social, violent, and fascistic behaviors.
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Yes you can, and should say something. But that canât replace actual moderation.
Or revenge. A Destiny clan I am in went through an edgy name or two, âYouâve got Harpiesâ was one. I forget the others, but nothing too bad.
Nobody cared until the periodic competitive PVP stuff came around. Weâd get flagged for the clan name after we won a few consecutive matches, and the clan name would revert to its numeric ID.
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No of course not. Giving a platform for people to be shitty on wouldnât be a problem if there werenât shitty people. But if youâre making a buck by giving people an unrestricted space to be awful in, youâre contributing to the problem, and so one facet of helping the problem would be if we could⌠you know, stop doing that. Iâm not trying to say all the worldâs evils are capitalism. More like all the worldâs evils are a complex interaction of shitty things, and we shouldnât ignore this shitty thing just because thereâs other shitty things we shouldnât be ignoring also.
That being said, Iâm going to revise my statement, because you are, in general, correct, and I can feel myself starting to creep away from my original point, which maybe wasnât clear enough.
I donât think this response is a great take on this specific problem. Saying âJust say to that person, âstop doing thatââ is not a good response to this issue. You should tell them to stop, but having an easy to use reporting system, as well as a team who cares enough to actual ban people who violate the community standards, is important. It may not have been your intent, but I felt like your reply somewhat glibly ignored what I see a very reasonable complaint about a needlessly broken system, and instead implied that the original poster shouldnât be concerned or annoyed about the difficulty in reporting bad actors, because they should just call them out instead, and hence why I found it objectionable enough to be worth commenting on. That may have been the furthest thing from your mind, I donât know. Broadly though, I think you are correct, and that nothing is going to get solved without active and consistent contribution by men to make things less shitty.
Also the boardâs automated systems are yelling at me for having too much back and forth with a single user, so I should probably stop here.
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I have and that doesnât work. Then they argue with you, etc and bring more attention to it, often doubling and tripling down in the process. Try it yourself in these games if you donât believe me. (I also think violent, competitive games implicitly encourage people to argue by the nature of the game, so that is part of it as well)
The only thing that works is reporting it, so there are (at least in theory) consequences.
Alternately, do away with chat altogether, and allow only predefined emotes â which I think is the better solution.
This is a distinct topic, and it can be muted regardless of who started it. If you need permanent global post suppression across all topics, there are browser extensions to inject CSS you can use to do so; feel free to take advantage of them. Hereâs the tiny bit of CSS you would need
.topic-post article[data-user-id="1234"] .topic-body {
max-height: 70px;
opacity: 0.2;
}
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Thatâs fair, though I think my words have been distorted into âyou said donât ever address racism when you see it in text chatâ. I did not say that. Iâve found in the types of (admittedly hyper-violent, aggressive) games I like to play, addressing it in text chat does not work in practice â they are far more likely to double and triple down because they know there are no consequences.
Therefore, I think itâs smart to focus on making the reporting tools easy to use and accessible, which can be a âyes, andâŚâ improvement.
Nobody is saying donât try, though I believe itâs a good idea to think the entire scenario through across thousands or millions of players and games. In my experience, what systems can be made to work is a more useful structural question than what can I do, personally.
Thatâs intentional, though. The idea is to target the subset of the problem thatâs easier to achieve. Not grawlix-ing clearly racist terms in chat, and having readily accessible reporting and moderation tools are crazily simple to solve compared to âfix toxic masculinity everywhere in the worldâ.
On top of that, itâs much easier to hold people accountable when an easy path wasnât taken. If I said to these developers âwhy havenât you grawlix-ed these racist terms in addition to curse wordsâ or âwhy havenât you made it two clicks to report a racist player instead of twelveâ thatâs a clearer, simpler call to action which implies more missed opportunities for actually doing something than if I said to them âwhy havenât you fixed toxic masculinity?â
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Let me add a personal anecdote.
I mentioned in another topic that I briefly played Call of Duty: Blackout (their battle royale thing) which has always-active voice chat. And you sorta need voice chat to do well in it because it requires pretty good squad communication to even survive, much less win. I was already apprehensive because⌠voice chat⌠random players⌠call of duty⌠not exactly a winning, risk-free combo in terms of interacting with other human beings.
It actually wasnât as bad as I thought it would be, which sort of surprised me. I mean I am voice chatting with random people, overwhelmingly dudes of course (I think there was a female player in the squad maybe once across a few dozen games), and itâs ⌠yâknow⌠Call of Duty. However, the (maybe two?) times when it got bad ⌠it got really bad.
In one random squad match, at one point this guy sounded like he was smoking, so another player asked him what kind of weed he was smoking ⌠a conversation about âsmoking these treesâ ensued. I am a super square person when it comes to drugs so I had nothing to add, but itâs fine, I donât care. Anyways, after a minute or two, something went kiiiiinda south in that branch of the conversation to the point that the one guy said the N-word to the other guy. I think it was about song lyrics and weed? It wasnât necessarily a namecalling thing.
The other guy didnât like that, so he pushed back â not in an aggro way but something like âyo, youâre gonna have problems if you start using language like thatâ. Well, the other guy immediately â and I mean immediately â escalated to the point that he was ⌠ok maybe not shouting⌠but definitely chanting at a higher than usual volume ⌠the N word, over and over.
At that point I disconnected from the game. I think I alt-f4âed out I was so ⌠uh⌠desirous of leaving.
I feel a little bad about this because immediately after disconnecting, I realized I wanted to speak up (and should have spoke up) and say âwhat youâre doing is not OKâ to defend that person and also reinforce that saying this kind of crap to another person isnât acceptable. But at the time⌠sitting on a voice chat with this guy just saying it over and over and over â again not quite yelling but definitely at a higher volume than normal speech â I seized up and wanted the hell out of that whole situation ASAP.
Now, what would you have done in my shoes?
Itâs one thing to describe it, itâs another to be sitting there, essentially minding your own business, and then in the heat of the moment with people aggressively arguing, clearly on the verge of yelling at each other, decide what to do.
I donât play that game any more, obviously, I quit shortly after that incident. I guess if that happened daily Iâd certainly have more âarmorâ for dealing with it and would have been better equipped to speak up. But itâs also super unlikely I would continue to play a game where stuff like that happened with any regularity.
Sadly, Iâm not sure I reported that player after the game because I didnât know how.
This also reminds me an important part of reporting tools is not just âcan you find the reporting toolsâ, but also offering a quick menu of âyou last played with these playersâ that you can send a report on â ideally with predefined templates for common misbehavior and problems. Imagine if, after this, you had to remember the player names in your randomly matched 4 player squad like 420forevakill3r or whatever. (Also, who was speaking? It would be horrible to report the wrong player in this case!)
Ideally the end of match screen would present a âreportâ button with these kinds of convenience functions. Not sure it would have helped in my specific case since I exited all the way out of the game, but itâs absolutely the right thing to do if you want people to report misbehavior and offer a systemic solution. I mean⌠assuming they follow up on the reports, which is an open question tooâŚ
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Iâd argue that asking what a person would do in a given situation is exactly the same excercise as just passively describing it.
But you know, every second of every day you have the chance to choose something else than you had in the past. None of your choices in that situation were wrong, but they also werenât the only possibilities. Maybe if you had kept playing you would have found out how to report. Iâve done it before and will surely do it again, because I play with my family and I have an interest in changing the culture. I have been threatened, insulted, and made to feel like shit. It sucks, but I like games. Iâm not going anywhere.
If you or someone else arenât motivated in the same way, thatâs your business. But you donât chsnge things by waiting around for someone else to do it.
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Thatâs not an accurate statement for me â Iâm interested in improving the systems most of all, because I believe thatâs the most effective and realistic way to achieve systemic, large-scale change.
(Iâve recently been convinced that violent, aggressive videogames are themselves part of this systemic problem, though, and thatâd be part of the âimproving the systemsâ. Less violent, less overtly competitive games, more cooperation + building.)
Discourse, in its way, is a manifestation of that desire, but completely outside the videogaming sphere. How many clicks is it to report misbehavior here? How difficult is it to find the reporting function? How do you know if anyone saw or followed up on your report? What tools does the community have to address misbehavior?
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Perhaps there is more peace to be found in single player games, or in games wher one is given very few tools to generate a multiplayer community.
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I think itâs absolutely within our purview to ask that tools be provided, and raise the standard of tools provided across the entire ecosystem.
Furthermore Iâd say this is the most effective place to invest your effort as it helps the most people, and raises the standard for all future games.
In the same way that âhey Fortnite, why donât you have player reboot stations like Apex Legendsâ is a valid request, so is âhey Call of Duty, why donât you have easily accessible after-match reporting tools pre-filled with squad player names like Fortnite doesâ. And thatâs so much easier to take action on, itâs a very specific and clearly defined thing that even has precedent in other similar titles, etc.
Compare with âwhy havenât you fixed toxic masculinity yet?â Er⌠uh⌠I dunno? Iâll try harder I guess? 
âremove all voice and text chat, replace with predefined emotesâ is a better path IMO. Still doesnât stop players from doing stuff like building giant dongs out of minecraft blocks, or swastikas out of walls in fortnite, of courseâŚ
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Doing the right thing is rarely easy. Making a better world is rarely easy. History shows us that change does not happen, itâs made. The arc of history must be BENT towards justice, and you can either be part of that or not. Thatâs your choice.
Well, then you actually ARE ignoring it. Change is not just made from the top down.
Once again, history shows us that change is made from below most effectively. If we donât fully purge our society from the ground up of these ills, they will persist. They HAVE persisted. We have actually evidence of this. The civil rights bills of the 60s did not end racism. Legislation supportive of womenâs rights did not end misogyny. Legalizing gay marriage did not end homophobia.
This is not about me, since I tend to not issue rape and death threats to people while online⌠but yes, I suppose me being a loud mouth bitch is as much of a problem as people who do that. I might make a man have a sad⌠I would respond by asking what I did to give offense, and apologize if I felt it necessary. Which Iâve done here on the BBS before. Sometimes the person taking offense is simply pissed that Iâm âboorish and self-righteousâ because I refuse to shut up and let the men speak. Theyâll have to live with that, I guess, because I have every single right to be here as anyone else.
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Mod note:
Iâve removed a bunch of inflammatory or combative posts from this topic. Apologies if your reasoned responses were lost as a result.
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If you cannot post within the community guidelines, do not post. We have zero tolerance towards attacking other members here.
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You are setting yourself up for failure if you cannot accept that some people on the internet are going to disagree with you.
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And I would counter that individual vigilantism is no more realistic than expecting a bunch of individuals to play Batman and suplex the bad guys into submission.
You need systemic solutions to systemic problems.
Absolutely nobody is talking about legislation here, to be clear. Weâre talking about behavior reporting tools in software that are easily accessible, convenient to use, and actually result in people being held accountable for their racist, sexist, bigoted actions â across dozens or thousands of online games.
You can look up what AirBnB did as an exampleâŚ
⌠or you could ask why the individual AirBnB users did not use all avenues of contact (email, Facebook, Airbnb messaging) to directly argue with the racists who cancelled their reservations and convince them that they should no longer be racists. Is that their job?
Furthermore, does arguing even work? When was the last time anyone argued with a bigot such that the bigot eventually said, âyou know, youâre right, youâve convinced me bigotry is unacceptable and Iâll stop being a bigot.â
In the absence of meaningful in-game consequences, I canât see anything working. And sadly Trump has normalized so much of this now that consequences basically have to exist. Expressing outrage no longer works, because the president does it with zero consequences already⌠doesnât he?
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Which is not what I was suggesting, and you know that. Donât put words in my mouth that you know I did not mean.
In a democracy, that includes the actions of individuals, who are the ones who make change from the bottom up and demand action from the top down. History tells us that itâs not an either-or kind of thing, but rather works in tandem. Systems donât change until the people in them work for it, and demand it.
Telling someone youâre playing a game with not to issue death and rape threats or to throw around slurs isnât an argument. Itâs you letting someone know that what theyâre doing isnât acceptable. No one is asking you to completely transform a personâs world views, but people will act different if they understand that their behavior isnât acceptable, and if you (or me, or whoever) stays silent, they wonât understand that.
Iâm saying that individuals be part of that. If the person continues that kind of behavior, then you stop playing with them.
And again, I have not said that moderation shouldnât be part of this, but rather that if youâre waiting around for an authority figure to make your social space safe for everyone, then thatâs the opposite of helping to solve the problem. If you donât think youâre responsible for your social spaces and act accordingly, then youâre going to have shitty social spaces. Itâs taking responsibility for what is partly yours, ensuring the safety and welfare of your friends. Thatâs precisely what many of us do here, on a daily basis, we donât just wait for @orenwolf to do it all. Heâs an important part of keeping this a safe space, but itâs not only his responsibility to do so.
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