My friend has a solution for dealing with maga-hatted fuckheads in CoD and other team games: team kill. While I don’t play those sorts of games it seems to me that if enough people started doing that, eventually they’d get sick of playing? IDK. Gives me a chuckle whenever I think about it.
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First of all you don’t know that, and it doesn’t matter. These behaviors STILL contribute to the marginalization of REAL LIVE HUMAN BEINGS. Minorities and women are not fucking jokes to be laughed at. FFS. Do you not understand that we are NOT HERE FOR THE AMUSEMENT OF OTHERS. WE ARE PEOPLE, TOO, AND WE DESERVE RESPECT, TOO.
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Nobody is saying otherwise.
And yes, in the videogame public chat scenario they are trolls who love to have people argue with them and amplify their message so more people can hear it.
I’m arguing for actual in-game consequences for these people that engage in these behaviors.
Also did you see the hearthstone example two posts up? That’s nuts!
“There isn’t a way to report chat of this nature” 
and we wonder why videogame communities so frequently become toxic??
(note that even the profanity wasn’t auto-blocked out here, at least Battlefield 5 does that.)
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I wonder what the in-game chatter is like in the NFL/NBA/NHL/MLB compared to the pro-vidoe-gamer chatter.
Which I’ve never argued against. I’m saying we all need to be part of the solution, too. These are social communities, and that means that we are also responsible for ensuring that those spaces are safe. Like we all do here.
Most online communities are frequently toxic. News site are toxic. Other cultural blogs are toxic. Reddit communities that are not well moderated and where the user base that accepts that kind of behavior is toxic. That’s what makes here so unique, that we all participate in ensuring that that doesn’t happen here. But “gaming” is not the problem. There have been plenty of other subcultures that have been imagined to be toxic, and rarely is it the actual case. Metal did not cause kids to commit suicide in the 1980s. D&D did not lead people to satanism. Punk didn’t make kids take drugs. Gansta rap didn’t turn kids into drug dealers. This is no different than those cases. The people who are toxic would be just as toxic if they were identified by the type of music they listen to, or the sports that they followed, or by their fraternity. THEY are the problem, not gaming.
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It is rather different, since videogaming (at least modern videogaming) is a communal mass worldwide participatory environment only possible since the advent of the internet. One angry white dude listening to 1980s skinhead punk in his bedroom – and maybe in the 1990s photocopying a 'zine at Kinkos that he has to distribute via postal mail – is a bit different than the one angry white dude typing skinhead punk things into every videogame he plays, and posting links to his skinhead website into game chat. Or, y’know…
Many people come to the politically incorrect boards of 4chan and 8chan from video game communities, where players looking to laugh at an abasing joke or chat about violent games without offending anyone can find friends
… links to 8chan, same difference, less work for him.
And when videogames don’t bother with even the most rudimentary kinds of enforcement, those toxic individuals can expose themselves to thousands of different people per night with zero consequences. How would someone listening to a skinhead punk song – or even a skinhead punk band – be able to accomplish that in the 1980s or 1990s, heck even in the 2000s? What’s different in 2020 is that individuals are now weaponized through the virtue of massively multiplayer broadcast connections that didn’t exist back then in any form.
Well yes, but with regards to the current sad state of near-zero videogame enforcement or player consequences – this is akin to saying that even in the complete absence of a court system, a police force, or even any kind of codified system of laws whatsoever, it’s entirely up to us to mete out and deliver individual vigilante justice.
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My 10 years of historical research disagrees. But hey, what do I know…
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I didn’t read all the above comments, so apologies if I’m repeating, but the average video game community is:
- Predominantly young males
- Operating with anonymity
- Engaged in a purely competitive venture
It’s a perfect recipe for toxicity.
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I don’t think very many (any?) people predicted, based on history, the influence Facebook would have on the 2016 election, for example. Or a single phishing email to John Podesta.
There’s a limit to what history can predict. As Clay Shirky once said
We’re kind of in uncharted waters here in some ways. Humans have literally never been this massively connected 24/7 before, for good and bad.
It’s not about that. It’s about decades of transnational identity formation. You’re mistaking the tools of connection for the connections themselves. People were bridging the distances for years prior to anyone even dreaming of something like the internet. Marx talked about it in the mid-19th with regards to shared class interests across national borders. White supremacists and anarchists had transnational networks in the late 19th and early 20th century. Labor was also internationally connected. Let’s not forget the women’s rights movement was globalized around the same time. Consumerist identities related to youth and youth culture started to be a factor in the interwar period, with translocal communities of jazz fans, among other subcultures. The 1960s saw an explosion of youth-led protests (on both sides of the iron curtain) as did hijackers and terrorists of various kinds, often working together (anti-zionist movement, youth-led revolutionary groups like the Panthers and RAF, nationalist movements looking to take down various communist regimes, etc) or at odds with one another. Punk was very much translocal from the mid-to-late 70s on, by the 80s, with their own transnational networks of distribution for music and publications. Underground metal globalized in the 1980s, and hip-hop was really global from the get go, because of the origins in the sound system movement out of Jamaica, who brought their cultural forms with them to NYC and London. And the white power neo-nazi skinhead movement was globalized by the 1980s as well. All the internet did was intensify and make it more accessible to people not all ready hooked into these globalized networks. Globalization in the modern form is a process that began in the 19th century, and continues today. More intense and easier to access is not novel.
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I’d argue that it is, in fact, quite novel – basically thanks to the rise of every human carrying an always connected smartphone in their pocket, small groups of extremists can now recruit, grow, and share ideology to a degree that is completely unprecedented in human history.
For example. One thing that continues to blow my mind is the whole flat earth thing. Sure, flat earthers existed in the past, but now they’re… weaponized. And that makes them suddenly and surprisingly effective to a degree that they never were, at least in the last 50 - 100 years.
If the patently, obviously crazy idea that the earth is flat can thrive on the Internet, then … literally anything else can too. That’s scary.
We are completely unprepared for how to deal with this because “infinitely connected humans” is a condition that has never existed on Earth before.
“But most of all, beware of each other.”
I guess it’s like taking a bunch of bacteria that were living in a relatively inhospitable desert (the skinheads with 1980s/1990s media & comms, etc) and suddenly transplanting them into a nice, fat plate of unrestricted growth agar (the 2010s internet). Yes, perhaps growth as a general concept is “not historically novel” but the exponential growth results you’re about to observe will be … resoundingly… novel.
The only way to counter this is systemic deplatforming, ala Alex Jones, and you saw how excruciatingly painful that was to achieve!
(TL;DR systemic deplatforming is also what I think videogames need to embrace. Starting with typing the n-word, or anything like it, in chat.)
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I’d usually try to avoid threads like this but a professor of video game studies said it’s mostly a product of much larger problems that happened to also manifest in gaming communities
Deradicalization is the common question on educators’ minds, but some say steps need to be taken preemptively. It’s easier to circumvent poisonous thinking rather than scramble to find an antidote after the fact. “The issue is that they have a preconceived way of interpreting information, which then shapes how they interpret that data,” says Wilcox. You can’t just combat bigotry with stats or hard facts; you have to address the larger social and cultural factors that make them an issue in the first place. “If we started teaching students the basics of feminism at a very young age,” Wilcox says, “they would have a far better appreciation for how different perspectives will lead to different outcomes, and how the distribution of power and privilege in society can influence who gets to speak in the first place.”
Even at its worst, the educators The Verge spoke to believe change is possible. These are still young people they’re teaching, who deserve the chance to learn and grow. “The behavior and games culture is this sort of microcosm of behavioral and larger culture,” Vossen says. “Gamers are not inherently sexist. Gamers are not inherently racist.” But much of the issue as an educator comes from the battle with what she calls living in an anti-intellectual time. “People will say [education is] brainwashing,” she says. Figures like Peterson or Lindsay Sheperd will pose human rights discussions as one with two sides, rather than accepting that all people deserve basic rights. To combat this, Vossen will play leftist videos in her class from channels like Innuendo Studios. “I think that sadly, at the end of the day, we can’t actually change anyone’s mind,” Vossen says. “But we can present alternative options.”
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Except that these groups existed prior to the internet, in pretty well connected ways… but hey… let’s not let facts get in the way of ideology…
Are you kidding?
Yes. My whole entire argument. These networks existed long prior to the internet. Just because it’s intensified, doesn’t mean it is novel.
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Check out these facts, though:
The issue is not only with teacher safety, but points to a greater crisis in how the education system must fundamentally rethink how to instruct students. “How much of our classroom time do we dedicate to, rather teaching and learning, but unlearning?” Wilcox says. “Helping people unlearn the biases and prejudices that essentially that they’ve learned from the internet, all the way up to the age of 18, or whenever they enroll in university.”
The conventional model has always been to treat students as a sort of blank slate, using education and information to inform them and teach from point zero. The combination of Gamergate hubs like subreddit KotakuInAction and unchecked alt-right personalities preaching harmful ideologies have changed that. An educator’s job is no longer just about teaching, but helping students unlearn false or even harmful information they’ve picked up from the internet.
What was the equivalent of reddit, 4chan, 8chan, and alt-right youtube in 1995? Newspapers? 'zines? Fax machines and telegraphs? Party telephone lines?
Deplatforming is the only thing that works. We can’t yell this into submission. (Well, we can, if we yell at the platforms to remove them loudly enough.)
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Or maybe they learned it by living our in our racist, sexist, homophobic society. They are SWIMMING in that shit on a daily basis and that PREDATES the internet.
FFS, can’t you just accept that this shit isn’t caused by gaming, but is a much bigger problem?
Do you seriously think that false information DID NOT EXIST PRIOR TO THE INTERNET. None of the disinformation that gets promoted via the internet is new. None of it. It’s baked into modern western culture. It’s been circulating globally since the beginning of the modern wave of globalization, in order for western powers to justify their murderous streak across the world.
Yes, actually. Many of these were globally circulating media well before the age of the internet. On top of that is person to person interactions. People before the early 90s didn’t sit around not having any clue what the rest of the world was like. We were already fairly globalized well before the internet.
You are just wrong. if you look at both cases where free speech was the norm (the US) and places where pro-nazi language was supressed (postwar Germany), BOTH HAVE RIGHT WING MOVEMENTS TODAY. Some of the key white power record labels were German, where nazis were specifically “deplatformed” for the entire postwar period. Both here and there, right wing, fascist thinking found a home in various subcultures, years before the internet.
We have to actually work on rooting out these ills from our society. These are systemic and far reaching. The only way to end this is for people to actually take it seriously on a social level.
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As someone who was always interested in the more kooky end of things there was plenty out there for UFOs, Atlantis, Bigfoot, etc. pre-internet and not that hard to get if you just bother to look. I imagine the same went for finding a copy of the Protocols of Zion and other such ‘fun’ racist stuff then.
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No, no, no… that was only a problem with the internet… I mean, after all, that’s what set off the nazis… /s
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Never said that, nope. But you can compare, as a historian, the difference between the reach of the flat earth movement in 1990, and the flat earth movement today with 2010-era always on, every human carries a smartphone, internet. (I personally like this one because it’s so obviously insane that it’s a good benchmark for “getting people to believe literally anything”.)
And yet, per the article, teachers are saying that somehow students are coming in far more radicalized than they were 10, 20, 30 years ago. Why do you think that is? Just random chance? What changed between now and then?
So you don’t think that removing Alex Jones from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube made any difference at all? Any solution below 100% total and complete effectiveness is not worth pursuing?
I never said otherwise, nor does anyone (at least, not in here) believe otherwise.
It’s the difference between “why haven’t you fixed racism?” and “why does Battlefield 5 still allow you to type the n-word in text chat with absolutely zero repercussions whatsoever?” The former is a problem that I’m not even sure how to begin to address, whereas the latter is a clear, actionable step that definitely moves us toward the goal and should be used as a new baseline for all videogames – among other things!
So to me, “take it seriously” means less “pursue people and individually yell at them one-on-one until they stop being bigots” and more “systematically kick bigotry off every platform in existence”.
I guess you know my job better than me. Probably explains why I am low paid adjunct…
I’m done. you’re right and I’m wrong.
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