This is not only beautifully put but also incredibly insightful. We’re lucky that Discourse includes such powerful community tools, but even more lucky to have attracted a community that genuinely cares about the community enough to participate.
Thank you for this perspective.
Similarly, in the vein of “don’t put words in my mouth I did not mean”, I have not said that individual action shouldn’t be a part of this, but when you’re waiting for individual users – who have zero power or authority to take direct action against a player in a game – to somehow collectively directly debate bigots into not being bigots… that’s also the opposite of helping to solve the problem.
Furthermore, it puts the onus on the players for enforcement rather than the real culprits, the people who own the game and have all the money, resources, and power to actually build an enforcement framework where there are actual consequences for bigoted (or sexist, or racist) behaviors in their game.
The answer is of course “both”, but in my experience playing actual videogames is that if you don’t have support from the powers that be, nothing actually changes, no matter how many direct personal interventions of “hey this isn’t OK” you stage. So perhaps we just disagree on priority:
I say the priority should be tooling and enforcement, with explicit support from the people in control, but I’m not saying individual action is not important, just ineffective without this support.
You say the priority should be on individuals speaking out, and this is effective regardless of whether the powers that be support any of this with tooling and enforcement.
Based on years of observing how this goes in-game, you will, however, spend a lot of time arguing with randos, if that’s something you enjoy more than the actual game.
On top of that, most of the time when players do stuff like this they don’t actually care what your response is. They’re just driving trollies everyone. So for you to say to me, “hey Jeff, the trick is to actually reply to the trolley at length, in fact it’s your moral obligation to reply to those trollies”… well, I respectfully disagree that this is a sensible strategy in terms of resulting in anything changing. I mean I build discussion software for a living, and this is overwhelmingly what I observe happening. Especially in a game, the idea that someone is there in good faith to actually listen to me say “hey this isn’t OK” is basically nil, bupkis, nada, zero. They’re doing it for the same reason they’re playing the game: entertainment. So any reply is giving them exactly what they want, like any trolley.
And they are part of it by reporting the behavior, in a fast, easy, and simple way – that actually gets followed up on, with enough automatically attached proof. The mechanics of this are absolutely critical.
In most of these large multiplayer games you’ll basically never see the same player again in subsequent matches. It’d be like me engaging the guy I saw at the Iowa State Fair today in a MAGA hat and a Trump 2020 shirt, in an impromptu debate. (Or imagine some specific racist/sexist/bigoted incident I happened to see at the fair, but thankfully I did not.) It’s a whole other scenario if this is someone you actually know (in any sense of the word) and play with regularly. Most videogames are like the broader internet – you’ll most likely never see any of these players again, no matter what the outcome.
Right, and without your flags he couldn’t do it at all – so that’s already how it works as a team effort in a sane system where reporting is sensible, there are people in power who follow up on those reports, and there’s a dedicated community meta area for discussing how the community should be moderated. Almost none of this exists in modern videogames; the ones that have anything even close to it are extreme outliers.
That’s not what I said. I said make it clear that it’s inappropriate. And as a white cisgendered man in American, you DO have power, far more than some others here. The onus should not be solely on oppressed groups to speak out against that oppression. If you can’t say “hey man, cut that shit out, no one needs to hear it” the person saying it will go on believe that YOU agree and accept that behavior. THAT is a consequence. It’s true that a moderator can back someone up, and administer more severe consequences, but that doesn’t mean that players are powerless in this situation. It’s also signaling to the moderator that YOU (a paying customer) find this kind of behavior unacceptable and it might move them to crack down harder, especially if it comes from a person with privilege.
I’m not saying YOU are responsible for enforcement (although that might vary depending on the community). I’m saying that you are responsible for YOUR actions, and staying silent only reinforces the idea that YOU agree with the bigot, even if you don’t. Letting someone know that you find a behavior to be wrong will let them know that you are not with them on that.
Much like the protests in Puerto Rico and the ongoing ones in Hong Kong, (and however many other historical examples you’d like me to dredge up) if the people who wield enforcement power don’t know what people find acceptable and unacceptable, they can’t act. It has to come from the bottom up. Even a cursory examination of these kinds of historical processes shows that point. Despite being privatized, corporate spaces, these are becoming very much public sphere spaces. We should not let corporations and even governments make assumptions about this kind of thing. Corporations and governments are still made up of people, operating off the same ideological assumptions we all are.
Did not say that. Saying “hey dude, don’t do that” isn’t asking your to give a dissertation on privilege. It’s saying to take responsibility for your social environment.
They can get the idea that you personally won’t tolerate it, and signal to other players that you give a shit about their well-being. And “driving trollies” is never an excuse to act like a bigot. That sort of “boys will be boys” mindset signals to people who see themselves as “just driving trollies” that you think it’s okay.
And maybe if more people just said “hey, that’s not okay” that would help make them understand it’s not cool.
No. Not really.
That’s not the only thing we do, though. You’ve been here long enough to know that. We also regularly call people out, in addition to flagging. We TELL people that their behavior here will not be accepted, which is part of the reason that this BBS has become what it has, because in addition to having a great moderator, we also regularly let others know that certain things won’t fly. Most of the times, the trolley doubles down and stomps off. Sometimes, we get an admission of wrong doing and an apology.
This is not about transforming individuals into better people - only they can do that. It’s about letting others know what you will or will not tolerate.
Wouldn’t a system that emerges from a community focused on creating a healthier space be the place to look/work on the actual features required to facilitate that? Then the onus would be on that community to actually produce that system, which would require it to either form from the ground up from that community, or it would require some critical number of members of that community getting into positions where they could implement those features in whatever system/game was being designed. I understand the need to ask how such a system’s design would function, but it simply couldn’t be designed at all without the consistent social feedback of that community either. IOW the community needs to already be clear about the goals, and the designers then need to be committed to them. Right now I don’t think gaming communities in general are there (though I do get encouraging signs that at least some of them are getting there on the first front). Also, the chances of starting a new gaming community are not much better than nil (though personally I think long-shots are almost inherently worth it). So there aren’t any great systems to look to for guidance (yet). Or are there?
I guess I’m genuinely curious about that. In the meantime, whether it’s a productive use of my time or not, I tend to think the small thing I can do is try to participate in something like that even if it’s just by being there myself and being willing to try to help create/protect that kind of space… even if I can only manage it half the time for myself alone, that’s still some difference I guess.
Right? On top of that, a community can shape and change the way a system works, just by how they interact with it.
Check out https://gamesdonequick.com/ which holds two annual speedgaming fundraisers (one for MSF and one for the Prevent Cancer Foundation) as well as numerous small events over Twitch. The speedrunning community is extremely inclusive and supportive.
I’m not quite sure what it is, I think there’s an element that in speedrunning there is actually no one to blame but yourself, nothing to criticize but your own performance, so maybe it sort of self-selected people who non-toxic ideas about competition and interacting with other people. Also because there is an objective way to measure success, it means that people in marginalized communities have an in - they can’t say your world record Dark Souls run doesn’t count because you are trans. Maybe it has to do with the fact that speedrunning is almost necessarily about setting your own goals and doing your own thing. I’m not really an anthropologist so I don’t have a lot of insight into how I’d analyze this to pick out what makes the culture work. It looks very accidental to me.
But something I find incredible about it is the opportunity to see different cultures that arise around different games. People who run NES games have a very different community feel than people who run Sega Master System games. Some games are extremely technical and require a lot of patience, some are very focused on mastering specific tricks, others are much more heavy on just playing the game flawlessly, and you see it in the people who play them and how they interact.
I’ll look at the youtube channel and find some examples.
Wait. I must be misunderstanding something. How does being white or cis-male give someone more power in an online game where no one knows what sex or ethnicity you are?
Sometimes people share this information and sometimes people harass people based on assumptions about this information (e.g. because someone chose a user name that sounds feminine to them). Social media is heavily integrated into games as well. Further, people with powerful voices in gaming communities are often people who stream or make videos of gameplay, and the expectation of a facecam is pretty high these days on such content.
And of course in many games you don’t have to share that information. Imagine a society where it was totally socially acceptable to walk around in a hooded mask. Consider the argument that such a society cannot be racist because people who are at risk of being targeted by racism have the option of hiding their identity. That would be a pretty stupid argument. It’s hardly a perfect analogy, but if we know that women are disproportionately targeted for harassment, then men have the power to reveal themselves as men, which is a kind of power.
Men listen to other men, more often than not. They respect them more and give their words more weight. How do I know? Because I have a phd, and am constantly talked down to by some men, while men with phds are always given far more respect than I will ever be given.
This is absolutely true in the general sense. I see this when I’m out with my partner in everything from getting our car worked on to meeting our neighbours when we moved. This behaviour was taught at an early age to a lot of people, clearly, and it’s not just a matter of being aware of the behaviour, because those behaviours programmed our responses, and one has to actively resist that programming to change. I think a lot of folks miss that second step.
How that translates into gaming is also clear to me as someone who has spent literally decades now playing multiplayer online games. The male-centric skew of a lot of genres has resulted in the opinions of women being given less weight. This happened in tech, too, and required a lot of mindset change mixed with first being aware the problem existed at all to overcome, to very mixed results. The same with gaming.
The number of times i experienced toxicity from a female gamer that wasn’t a result of being in such a toxic environment in the first place approaches zero. The number of times I listened to a female gamer defer to the judgement of a male gamer, or back down from a confrontation with a male gamer, oftimes because the female gamer knew the male gamer was never going to accept their input, is very much non-zero.
Then you add in racial, gendered, or sexual slurs or slights, even in casual conversation (“hitting like a girl” or “pussying out” on a fight or upteen homophopic or transphobic off-the-cuff remarks there’s no need to repeat) makes it clear to me that gender and sexual orientation play a huge, huge role in the issue of toxicity in gaming, even from my own personal experience.
That’s entirely true. However, part of the problem is that when a woman points it out, and the man has a melt down because they pointed out what they’ve done. Some men don’t do that, recognize their own internalized training, and genuinely care to correct it. Even when it’s couched in terms of social structures that men don’t themselves directly control (but that they do benefit from), some see it as a personal attack. But if we can’t talk about the underlying ideological assumptions of our society, then how are we going to make a better society?
True. The whole women aren’t “real” gamers mindset has gone a long way to causing many of these problems. It’s also why many women on MPGs don’t reveal their gender, because it’s just easier than constantly having to fight against that when all they want to do is have fun. It can drive many women away from gaming communities more generally, because, honestly, it’s fucking exhausting having to fight the whole “I’m a real person, too” fight day in and day out, just in regular life - who also wants to have to do their in their leisure time!
It reminds me of a Trevor Noah joke, where he talks about how silly it is that “pussy” means weak, when in reality the entire opposite is true - it’s penises that are flapping out there, all vulnerable, vaginas give us entire new humans!
But yeah, my entire point to @Aloisius is that it’s toxicity masculinity and how it socializes all of us to behave towards one another that’s the problem. And that problem weights on the daily lives of some of us more than others, frankly.
Not treating you as a peer because of gender is bullshit.
I was more thinking in the context of a game where no one knows what gender you are. In that context, everyone should have relatively equal power to call out bullshit.
Thats not to say that white cis-hetero men don’t have privilege here. They can choose to reveal their ethnicity/orientation/gender and still effectively peer pressure most toxic American gamers. I’m not sure that it makes much of a difference most of the time in general practice. I certainly don’t call out bullshit by first stating that I’m male.
Maybe everyone else is playing games where people don’t gender swap like crazy though?
So here is one that, to me, is very “typical” of speedrunning. A mix of good mechanics and bugs, pretty low key delivery of some puns, detailed account of how it works:
Here’s one of the greatest speedrunners from the soulsborne community:
And then you have the sega master system community, with a zillion people on the couch, shout outs to everyone (including a very memorable one at the end of the second run) and very hyped up:
The youtube channel just has the runs, not interviews with the players and other elements. The channel recently ran a shorter women-only speedrunning event, “Frames Fatales” and at SGDQ they had a panel discussion with some of the women about putting that together, so they are going beyond passively not excluding women and actively including women (including trans women).
Of course people are on best behaviour for the marathon events since it’s basically prime-time TV rules. But the worst I’ve heard on speedrunning channels is casual homophobic comments on one fairly young person’s IWBTG fangame runs (I’m not saying that’s okay, but it’s not emblematic of the community either). I’ve also heard people actively call out people in chat for saying offensive things, and these channels are all moderated for bigoted content.
Anyway, the point is that videogames don’t turn people into shitty people, competition doesn’t turn people into shitty people, and community culture takes on a life of it’s own independent of any easily identifiable factors.
ETA: I realize these are very long videos, to me the most interesting thing is who they invite to their couch. While you usually have a few other people who run the game, Distortion chooses to invite friends from other parts of the world who mostly don’t know the game well, and Dr. Fatbody invites everyone they’ve ever met because it’s a party.
Not all women hide their gender, and when they do, it’s deliberate, because they are aware that it opens them up to a world of shit.
What’s you’re point here? it’s irrelevant, to the discussion of people saying shitting things, and people letting it slide.
Taking the knee? How?
Jingoism. n. Extreme patriotism, especially in the form of aggressive or warlike foreign policy.
Playing the National Anthem.
See previous discussions ad nauseam.
Thanks for the clarification.
In text chat, it doesn’t, because it cannot. For voice chat it could though because you can “hear” gender.
This is a videogame where the entire reason for anyone being there is 100% entertainment, and these are clearly trollies. They don’t actually hold these beliefs, they’re just trying to get a rise out of… well, anyone. In that context, the line of argument that goes
please reply to the trollies, in fact you are morally obligated to reply to trollies
doesn’t make any sense to me.
Furthermore, I’m not convinced that seeing someone quadruple and sextuple down on their original racist / bigoted / sexist statements in videogame chat (which is what always happens, why? because there’s no enforcement!) is going to make anyone feel particularly great. It’s one thing for a racist statement to get ignored, it’s entirely another to see someone say
Yep, totally that’s what I believe, and furthermore here’s a giant heap of more racism slathered on top to prove it! Now argue with me about it so even more people can be exposed to this toxic drivel and perhaps help amplify it as well!
https://twitter.com/Beschizza/status/1162034694428528640
So the answer is to… amplify the trolley’s message, and reply to them, thus encouraging more of the same because there are absolutely no consequences for them?
If this wasn’t a videogame environment where I had any expectation that (some) people were there in good faith to actually discuss issues that racism / sexism / bigotry are relevant to, I’d agree that having normal people say “this isn’t OK” is important. But even then, how many is “enough”? One? Five? A dozen? A hundred? How proportional does it need to be, or is disproportionality even better?
The bottom line is that without any kind of basic, reasonable enforcement, trollies know they are untouchable. And I think that is what’s lacking in most videogames, even the most basic kinds of enforcement:
If the powers that be don’t even care enough to do this ridiculously simple thing, what does that tell the trollies? Certainly nothing that they’d care about from a personal chat argument intervention, which also amplifies their message to a wider audience with zero consequences for them … 
According to this thread on toxic Hearthstone players:
Players will add new friends after matches, only to have the friend requester use that opportunity to use in-game chat to insult the player. Apparently Blizzard then responded to the issue:
