If you have played any recent popular multiplayer game like Overwatch or Siege then you will know that while those games are capable of displaying fun and competitive matches, they can at their worst be pretty miserable experiences. I'm all too familiar with how demotivating a bad game in games such as these can have compared to when matches are completed without a hitch. This has lead to the phrase "X community is the worst" or "everyone in this game is toxic" been thrown around by gamers who have had enough of being stressed over their hobby.
It's an understandable way to react but when I have sat down and thought about how often toxicity actually happens in games I play I don't think it's as big of a number as I would have thought it would be a couple of months ago. The problem is how much of a negative one game can have against a whole bunch of good games. I've for the most part have been of the opinion that in a game such as Overwatch that maybe 5%ish of the playerbase I would class as toxic with everyone else ranging from helpful to annoying but not a problem. Of course that was just a very rough estimate from anecdotal evidence but is it really fair to write off a whole community of players because of a small faction of toxicity?
It's still something that developers need to keep working on to minimise the change of ruined games for it's player base but making the implication that the problem is a lot more widespread among players who are probably just as annoyed about toxic player like we all are isn't that helpful, it's basically the outcome the most dedicated troll players want is to ruin the game for as many people as possible.
I'm intrigued to know if anyone would concur with these points or whether I'm being naive and actually there are a lot of toxic players and is a more serious issue than I'm making it out to be.
I have no idea what online multiplayer is like other than the create-a-team modes of NBA 2K and MLB The Show. I have reported numerous Nazi and Confederate symbols as team logos on both platforms, as well as teams with names like, CITY NAME: FUCK N****** TEAM NAME: WHITE IS RIGHT (that, with no sense of irony, run a team of all black athletes onto the court) more times than I care to count. Sometimes they are more subtle, like a Pepe team logo (in an absolute vacuum, innocuous enough, I suppose) and a City Name like "South Boston" and then a team name like "Jigaboo Jumpers" where the thing just progresses from a question mark to an exclamation point.
That's all excluding all the other randomly troll-y things those communities do, particularly in the 2K community where it's almost an open competition to see who can create the most aesthetically disgusting basketball court on the planet rather than something cool and owing to the fantasy that you're actually owning and running an NBA team. The image below would, by the standards of that community, be something I'd consider objectively "good", despite it's readily apparent awfulness.
But...whatever. I'm a 30 year old man playing games - and particularly, modes - dominated by high school seniors and college underclassmen. I get it, and who knows what silly, ugly things I'd come up with were I in their shoes today. Hell, the clan I was in - the clan I started - in the SOCOM II days was VMJ - Victims of Michael Jackson. Because the five of us that started it were 8th graders. (By the end of it we were 10th graders, and had a couple Navy members clearly in their 30s on our team as well as some college kids and some new middle schoolers, but still. I would hate myself for thinking of that now.) Obviously that wasn't racist or nationalist or political in any way that the Trump, Pepe and Nazi symbols that flood these sports games I play now are, but it wasn't many steps removed from that sort of intentional firestorm. I can understand, on some level, that it's as much kids being kids as it is hate speech/
Where I really agree with pundits who speak lowly of gamer culture is when it comes to all the ways that stuff bleeds into regular conversation about things. I don't feel that people who self-identify as "gamers", rather than consider gaming a facet of their many-faceted lives, engage with people in rational ways. Or, rather, they often speak to others as though they were the only one having rational thoughts, and that the rest of the world were slighting them in some small way by at the very least not understanding they're right about everything. This manifests itself in all kinds of ways, from small complaints about Giant Bomb taking incredibly small political stances in incredibly fraught political times to massive scale complaints about how if "Jessica" Price had been "Jeremy" Price instead there wouldn't have been any uproar over the situation, unless of course "Jessica" had transitioned from "Jeremy" in which case it'd obviously be even worse of an outcry! I find "gamers" to be people who often cry (in the "cried wolf" term, not literally shedding tears) about "context" while often conveniently neglecting any "context" that doesn't suit their opinion.
I understand that these are fractional and anecdotal truths, but this is something I encounter both online and in real life. I have no problems communicating with people who play games among other hobbies, and who enjoy games as a part of their various pursuits. But I have a lot of problems communicating with people who seem to have defined themselves by being a gamer, who is a male, who feels entitled to women, and feels threatened by so many video games continuing to remain the same but one or two video games becoming different.
I'm not much of a Reddit user, but I did frequent the Bloodborne subreddit for a time after the game (effectively) re-launched this past Spring because I really, really sucked at it early on, enjoyed sharing the stories of my first true effort to play a Souls game with others and, eventually, got really sucked into the lore. I still visit that forum from time to time just to see what people are talking about, which led to this relatively civil exchange (in that I made my point, and it ended there because he had no counterpoint to make) with someone over the culture of the game. I find the almost unconditional environment of support and kinship among that community frankly astonishing, especially compared to other subreddits I check in on from time to time. So when I came across a user who was expressing frustration over his inability to troll Bloodborne streamers on Twitch due to the niceness of that game's community, I felt the need to respond. Below are links to both the entire thread, and my single discussion with the user.
Too Many Friendly Streamers? (Note: This post dates nine days prior to this post; apparently the OP has been deleted, though many of his follow-up comments remain. He is "Ssstentacion", for the record.)
How that resolved is another thing I find all too often with "gamers" (again, not all people who play video games). When presented with a thorough and logical counter argument that addresses each of their grievances, one is often met with either a defeated shrug but no admission of guilt, change of mind or even a rebuttal befitting a proper debate or, more commonly, a doubling down of the prior arguments that presents no substantive acceptance that you said anything at all. Or, in its most radical form, that by even responding you are suddenly the one who has a problem, whereas the "gamer" is just pointing something out that they think should change. I could write a rebuttal for that person right now, on the grounds that I don't actually want to make the streamer feel bad, I just want to watch a Bloodborne stream where myself and the other viewers can make fun of the guy with taunts about how much of a "cuck" he is when he lets the two dogs on the bridge kill him on his NG+2 run. It's not an argument I'd buy myself, but hey, it's a start.
I understand that this is not just a "people who play video games" thing, as I said before. Hell, here I am on a damn video game forum! And neither do I think this is purely a "gamer" deal; think of any toxic conversation you can muster and you'll likely find a body building forum willing to talk about it for 900 posts. I get that this is an internet thing as much as a video games thing, but I think much in the same way that bodybuilding can engender a kind of attitude that suggests, "once I get bigger they will have to listen to me / respect me / employ me / have sex with me", so too do I think a similarly insular hobby for lonely boys like gaming can foster an attitude of "once I've whittled away at their emotional/spiritual HP enough, they'll have to admit defeat / succumb to my will / listen to me / respect me / employ me / have sex with me".
Anyway, I've said a lot on this subject, but it's really been aggravating me lately in a way that it hasn't since the Gamergate days.
In short, yes the culture sucks, but it doesn't suck because of the culture. It sucks because of the sorts of people who, to their fantastic error, feel the marginalized are marginalizing them.
@nodima: Have to say I wasn't expecting as detailed of a response and you bring up some other points worth elaborating on. My intention with the question "Are gaming communities as bad as some people make out?" was mostly about specific games and how a few bad eggs can make someone write off everyone involved playing the game even if a lot of the players are nice and helpful. That said when you look at "gamers" in a more broad term then it isn't hard to find particularly disturbing examples of how shitty some people will be to developers/reviewers/other gamers and that paints a more more negative attribute on gaming culture.
Also as you later mention is isn't necessarily anything gaming is specifically doing that nurtures this kind of behaviour (although they may be some examples of that being the case that I'm not too familiar with) but possibly it's more so when someone is really passionate and "into" a hobby which in some cases brings out very negative aspects of that person, it makes some sense when you think that a lot of the time when people are toxic in a game it's mostly driven by the fact they REALLY want to win the game and when things aren't going their way they don't like it.
I really didn't intend this to be a "stop hating on gamers" type of thing and bad shit is happening in gaming circles but I don't think it's as representative to all people who enjoy video games.
I haven’t used non-party chat regularly in years. It’s usually garbage when I do. Sometimes there’s that one person chatting who’s alright, and that’s always cool.
Early Xbox Live was pretty awesome though, there was a sense of community, and very few folks could be classified as a bag of dicks. People would introduce themselves, talk strategy, BS, and exchane friend requests regularly.
@craigieboy: I realized as I was replying that I wasn't completely speaking to your original line of questioning, but I think all of what I wrote feeds into what you're talking about as well. Back to the Victims of Michael Jackson, our entire M.O. was to frustrate the other players in the lobbies to the extent that they were so annoyed by us they'd be desperate to dominate us once the match started. Obviously this is a quirk of SOCOM and the push-to-talk era in particular, but we didn't act that way amongst ourselves in-game or in free play. It was just an attitude we carried into the lobbies before, during and after clan matches.
So while I can relate to the concept of "trolling" players in online competitive games in a sense, I've never played that way in the game itself whether it was SOCOM or NCAA Football 1-on-1 or my brief time with the first Modern Warfare...outside of a small window of specific games on PS2 and a brief period at the onset of the PS3, I've usually avoided competitive online gaming because I'm just not good enough for it. So I wound up just sounding off on another aspect of gaming culture that's been really nagging at me lately because it's been over a decade since I've seriously engaged with people in online gameplay.
Obviously I gave those sports game examples from current day, but nobody uses a headset anymore in online sports games because everyone has moved to watching sitcoms, listening to albums/podcasts or smoking weed with their boys while they play online sports games rather than headset chat.
I think it depends on how you're engaging in the community. Every community has toxic people, without fail, all of them. Usually these toxic people make up an extremely loud minority. But for every loud asshole, there's someone who is quiet but friendly. If you're going into random online matches with voicechat on, you're mostly gonna find assholes cause they're the ones that talk, and it only takes a small portion to dominate chat. If you go to a forum, subreddit whatever looking for help, sure some jerks will come out of the woodwork, but most people will be well meaning because ultimately the people at these forums are invested in the health of the community, making it grow and keeping it alive. You can't do that if you scare everyone away.
However, if you get into social issues, that's basically a beacon for assholes to flock to, so you've got to watch out. All this applies to pretty much any community, gaming or not.
I haven’t used non-party chat regularly in years. It’s usually garbage when I do. Sometimes there’s that one person chatting who’s alright, and that’s always cool.
Early Xbox Live was pretty awesome though, there was a sense of community, and very few folks could be classified as a bag of dicks. People would introduce themselves, talk strategy, BS, and exchane friend requests regularly.
Man, I miss the early days of Halo 3 where you'd play for like 3 hours straight and end up in all sorts of crazy custom games and private chats with strangers just cause you know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy that's hosting some sick new gametype. No one knew anyone else in real life, you were all friends because you liked playing these weird modes with each other. No server browsers like PC games had meant you couldn't just look for it yourself.
I'm at the point now where I don't have the patience to deal with any kind of toxic environment when i'm playing games - I deal with that shit when I'm moderating and that's enough. If I'm in a multiplayer game with chat enabled, as soon as someone says any kind of hateful slur or toxic comment then i'll just mute the entire game. It's not worth the hassle, it's much easier to use private discord channels now which are much better moderated than any of the games themselves.
On a more positive note though, a few months back I joined a group of PUBG players and, after playing with them for a couple of weeks, one of the players who I quite liked randomly started shouting ethnic slurs into the mic on their private discord. I protested a little and then, when it was clear that he wasn't going to stop, muted the channel and left. I sent a message to the admin of the discord explaining what had happened and, being the newest member of the group, explained that I would rather leave the channel than upset whatever friendships they had in place. The next day I received a message from the two admins saying that they had talked to the guy and told him that despite the fact they were good friends who had known one another for years, and knew each other IRL even, if he was going to be racist then he was the one who would have to leave and not me. The guy actually apologized to me and, months later, admitted that since then he'd stopped using ethnic slurs completely even outside of our discord channel.
So gaming communities can be a force for good, sometimes.
Does anyone else play online with the voice chat disabled? That should speak for itself. Otherwise, I don't know, but I'm guessing there's just enough vitriol going on that it's not worth listening to people online. As for specific game communities, I think it's with every game. There are people that just want to have fun, and there are those that can't handle the competition or just aren't nice people. I don't think one can simply say a said game community is the absolute worst.
@brackstone: That was cool, but the community around day one Xbox Live on the OG Xbox was just...comfortable and homey. Everyone was just happy to be playing online with voice chat. People were friendly and cool.
It was a bunch of enthusiasts just getting together and geeking out over Mech Assault or Return to Castle Wolfenstein or whatever.
Every game was like running into old friends. It’s a really weird thing to think about.
Halo 2 was cool, too. Lot of people just excited for the digital couch Bungie delivered on. By Halo 3, I was running into a lot more people telling us how much we sucked (when we lost) or how badly we cheated (when we won). Lots of tea-bagging, too. We played ranked...5v5 if I remember right, so that may have had something to do with it.
There were cool folks for sure, but the assholes stand out, I suppose.
I eventually just started being SUPER nice as soon as party chat opened. “Hey guys, great game! That was close. I hope we get matched again soon!” It disarmed folks and led to more (reluctant sounding) “good game” comments than comments about my mother in compromising situations.
@nutter: Yeah I think it was hard for folks to be salty about the kinds of goofy custom games and maps you'd get in private matches. Ranked, though, where everyone cared about their KD ratio and winrate, things were much worse. I feel like many games would be much better if they never displayed things like that. It just brings out the worst in some people.
I remember back in the mid to late 90s/early 2000s I'd always participate in in game chat with whatever multiplayer game I was playing. It felt like servers actually created their own communities, you'd get to know the regular players and were able to talk about all kinds of things.
Now, for almost a solid 10 years the first thing I do when launching a MP game is hide chat and ALWAYS disable voice chat because, 9 times out of 10, it's an absolute garbage fire. I'm not entirely sure when the turning point was, the rise of social media or perhaps the widespread appeal of online console playing, buy in my experience gaming "communities" barely exist anymore. It's just people revelling in online anonymity to spew vile bullshit.
Anecdotal - I tried out CoD Black Ops 3 recently after it was given away in PS+. Jumping into the first online match I offhandedly said to my girlfriend "How long do you think before I have a preteen shouting profanities at me?" .... Less than 5 minutes into the first round someone that couldn't have been 10 was throwing around the N word and describing how he violates everyone's mothers.
@ntm: I never use voice chat anymore, a far cry from the early days of the 360. This is anecdotal, but in my experience the amount of people using it amicably/purposefully has absolutely dwindled. Sucks looking back to old issues of EGM when there was so much optimism in regard to Xbox Live and all the community features and interactions that were touted. We definitely got those moments, but we're long past the days of Modern Warfare or R6 Vegas, when I could tolerate the public lobbies.
May just be because everyone's in a party or Discord, or just a consequence of mass market adaptation.
When I first started Titanfall 2, the chat was almost universally positive. More than just 'GG' at the end of every match, people told jokes, everyone was excited when someone managed to drop a titan on them (usually the person who got killed was the most excited). But less than 6 months later, as the player base dwindled, things got worse until I had to turn off chat altogether, and that's about when I lost interest. I spent a little time with DOTA 2 when the tutorial stuff was first introduced and went through that, and when I tried the limited heroes mode, specifically set up for new players and people who wanted to play with them, it was nothing but people who knew the game really well screaming at the new players, to the point where I caught myself applauding someone who was a passive-aggressive jackass because he was the first person that bothered to just tell me what to do instead of screaming at me. Played two games of League years ago, and was called the worst things I've ever been called on the internet in both. I've spent a ton of time in Battlefield, and had to go look up how to set the voice chat to muted because I spent one match being constantly whined/yelled at by a dude complaining that I wasn't playing right, and from the sound of his voice, more than old enough to not literally whine at someone on the internet.
In contrast, I've spent 400 hours in FF14 and have less than 5 bad experiences, and all of those were because someone was bad at their job and was screaming at everyone else and blaming them. I've had fantastic conversations with randos in dungeons, I've had whole aspects of the game patiently explained to me by random dudes who saw me struggling with some raid mechanics, I've traded jokes while dead, tons and tons of fantastic experiences. Some of that might be their accolade system (I don't think that's what its called, but can't remember offhand) where the game incentivizes you to both reward other people for good behavior and gives great rewards for lots of people saying you did great. But that community in general I've always been super happy with.
I think some communities are vastly worse than others, especially ones that don't have any real incentive to not just scream and be racist. I would play more social-oriented games if the communities were better, I spent so much time with Titanfall 2 and FF14 because everyone was having fun and not just trying to beat the shit out of each other and then rub their noses in it. But the vast majority of the time, anything like an open chat window will immediately get filled with the worst things someone can imagine, and even worse when its competitive.
It's certainly impossible to prove that one community is the actual, literal worst. It depends on the metrics used, obviously. And things like voice chat aren't exactly monitored the same way that text chat can be.
That said, the communities of some games have a reputation for being worse than others. In that thread on the recent bans in Rainbow Six: Siege, one person did comment that the game has the most toxic community they've seen in some time. Fighting games and MOBAs tend to have the reputation for most toxic communities. Empirically, who knows? But in a general sense, it wouldn't take an outsider long to find many, many examples of bad behavior from the communities in those scenes. I can see how the normal members of those communities might find the "toxic" label tiring.
Edited for spelling/grammar and to add: It's worth noting that certain people will experience toxicity at different frequencies and different levels than others.
@brackstone: Yeah, the tone of the game impacts things for sure. I think I played one game of Injustice 1 online. I got beat down pretty badly.
I didn’t have chat on, but the dude was kind enough to send me a message about how bad I sucked. I get the anti-toxicity stuff going on right now, because that one jackass was enough for me to say “this isn’t a great use of time” and ditch Injustice for something else.
Playing as the only tank on the team with no healers and you ask someone to heal? "Lol it's just casual calm the fuck down"
Go to competitive but don't want to play as one of the 8 "meta" characters for this month? "Way to throw the game you dumb fuck"
Siege has its awful A-holes but I find Overwatch so much more frustrating because two people on the team choosing to throw the match will actually make the match unwinnable most of the time whereas in Siege you can still sort of manage if the rest of the team is good enough.
The Rainbow Six: Siege chat ban thing has received a fair bit of discussion lately. It has made that game's chat less toxic, sure, but... well, I wrote a fair bit about it in this thread. Short version - I think it's great that someone's cracking down on toxicity but I think Ubisoft's implementation is bad and doesn't take into account several different factors.
Even before the chat bans started happening, I didn't have much of a problem with Siege on PC. Voice chat almost completely consisted of people relaying information about the match (e.g. "Ela's coming down the stairs", "Ash is outside that door", "Watch out for that Frost trap", stuff like that). Turning off voice chat was a great way to be a bad teammate, in my experience - you wouldn't be able to hear what anyone else is saying about the match. Text chat was a different story - I don't see much chatter about the match on text chat but that is where I saw the most toxic language. And even that wasn't too bad, at least not compared to the CS GO I used to play. And the people being shitty in text chat were rarely the people giving information in voice chat.
But then again...
I usually play Siege with a group of 2-4 other people. When I'm in a group of five, I can't hear anything the other team is saying and can only see the other team text chatting everyone. When half the game consists of people I know, the chances of coming across a shitty person in matchmaking are lowered by a whole hell of a lot. Those of you saying Siege is one of the most toxic communities out there - which system are you guys playing on? I'm on PC and so far as I can tell, it really wasn't so bad before chat bans and after chat bans, a lot of bullshit toxic language has disappeared.
I barely play any other multiplayer games. I used to have spurts where I'd play CS: GO, but that seems to have disappeared now that I've played Siege rather consistently for most of this year. I own Overwatch but haven't played that in ages - maybe one match since they introduced that sniper healing lady? My interest in MOBAs amounts to "oh yeah, that's right, MOBA's exist". I play Halo: The Master Chief Collection off and on (it actually works these days, guys!) but that's with everyone muted and by myself so I honestly have no idea what the people playing the game are actually like. This means that Siege on PC is the only online game community I have any interaction with and it's been fine for me.
Depends on where you go, and who you talk to, I suppose. The internet in general is a growing haven for hate speech.
The Steam community for one, in my experience, is pretty toxic. Was searching online for a instructions on how to make a Steam group, and instead came across this depressingly true article.
I think I lasted 4 games of Dota 2 with random players as teammates before I quit. I had only played with someone I knew from work and her friends for a fair number of games so going from that to random horrid people made me quit the game.
I didn't even bother buying Overwatch after hearing how bad it was. I was going to buy it but I have heard nothing good about the community.
Starcraft 2, since going free-to-play, has had a lot of new players, but sadly also a ton of troll accounts. I faced one person who I found in their history would throw 10-20 games in a row to drop their MMR then do troll strategies while being fairly rude. They were one of the few people I've reported in SC2. I never saw that type of behaviour back in the day. There'd be the odd person being an idiot playing unranked but never people being actively malicious like that.
Battlefield 2 had an amazing community back in the day. You could go into almost any server, squad up and at least have co-operative teammates who would do their best to help you. People were rarely rude from what I remember. But that was a different time compared to how multiplayer PC games are now.
For the most part I would say that yes they are. I mostly avoid almost all game communities these days and any time I attempt to bother trying I find it's more disheartening than anything to properly communicate with people online like an adult. Honestly any games that are online only or focus only online, I tend to just avoid as I just never have fun with the people I'm playing or the game itself.
I play a lot of league, pretty much the ARAM (all random all mid) mode exclusively, which is a mode where there is only one lane, and is entirely focused on quick combat and ramping up engagements. Its basically LOL lite, and the main reason I only play that mode is because I have never played a solo game without a player turning toxic. Once that happens I just start muting people as I really do not have the patience anymore to deal with children calling me racial and homophobic slurs. With team members muted, the main LOL mode becomes very difficult as communication breaks down. I avoid this outcome altogether now by playing ARAM, where it doesn't really matter if you mute someone. Even still, ARAM has started to turn toxic as with its increase in popularity, plenty of players are turning toxic and taking it way too seriously. You just cant get away from this shit.
At this stage, no matter what mode or game I am playing, I just mute everyone. I am getting too old for arguing with kids who worship toxic gamers/youtbers/twitch steamers and who dont understand the difference between joking around and being an ignorant twerp.
Yeah I've pretty much stopped playing with mics on in any multiplayer game. If I have to play I just play with all of that muted. Whether that means Overwatch, or CoD or Fortnite or whatever. Eventually people complained about the toxicity enough and I'm not nearly social enough that I went "well this isn't a good use of my time." I still voice on those games with dedicated people to play with whom I either know in person or have known online long enough that I don't have to worry about that sort of thing.
Some really good detailed posts in here though. @nodima Just want to say that was a very detailed and thorough post that was a very interesting perspective to read up on.
WoW's community is pretty awful in general, but you can't really keep a playerbase of that size and have everyone act positively. Occasionally I'd still run into people who turned-out to be friendly, but most of the time it's just a sea of garbage, where you want to turn off every possible chat window.
Yes and no? I would be anything it's safe to say the vast majority of players in almost any given game will be perfectly fine people, but since it's often the case that the most vocal are also the troublemakers, it certainly makes it seem like a lot of these communities are unwelcoming. I wouldn't limit it to just competitive games either.
FFXIV has enough passive-aggressive assholes to populate a small country and learning how to play Monster Hunter by reading forums (not here) made me go "What the fuck is wrong with you people..." because I don't think I've ever seen elitists be so incredibly elitist. Again, it's probably safe to say it's a minority because I've met a lot of awesome people online, but the bad can be so in your face on some days, even if you aren't actually playing the game and just browsing forums/reddit, that it can paint a lot of communities in a bad light.
Part of me wants to blame Twitch and Youtube because every now and then when I decide to browse for new content, I get disheartened by how many mean people are out there. Just mean for no good goddamn reason. And I can't help but imagine the millions of kids and teenagers who look up to these people and then go online and emulate that behavior. Again, there's a lot of really cool folks out there cranking out gaming content on both platforms...but like...you don't see a "Mr. Rogers"-type out there making headlines in the gaming community do you? It's fuckin full of PewdiePies and Allinitys. You know what I mean? It's practically the blind leading the blind.
Obviously, a lot of people would still be terrible people even if Twitch and Youtube didn't exist, but let's just say that they aren't helping mend this problem specifically is my point.
In any case, I've pretty much always kept to myself online and that hasn't changed. If anything, it's just gotten worse though because I just mute everyone immediately even if I'm playing something for the first time. I don't want to take any chances. I don't play games to deal with other people's bullshit.
I regulary run into people telling other people to commit suicide while playing Overwatch or using slurs. It's not a good experience. I like Ubisoft's new Rainbow Six Siege policy where they instantly ban people who use slurs. I still think most developers have been too lax and not harsh enough when it comes to banning people who are toxic.
Blizzard filters out "ggez" and replaces it with another phrase. They could do the same with slurs but hide the text and instaban the offender but they don't.
Outside of forums and YouTube, the only "gaming communities" that I can talk about, albeit with minimal authority, are Killzone 2 when Killzone 3 was weeks away from launching, the Criterion's Need for Speed Hot Pursuit. Not much to say about Killzone 2 multiplayer since most people were quiet, but this one guy singing "Say My Name" by Destiny's Child in Hot Pursuit made me laugh.
Oh, and the usual hive of scum and villainy that is general chat in MMOs.
Are people really as bad as some people make out? Yes, yes they are. Many of them, it turns out, play video games. Some even make em.
It is surprising to me though how little there seems to be relative to my expectations derived from common sentiments. Some games (MOBA/FPS) I go into matches with bated breath for the first sign of a hate-filled asshole, but then before I know it we're all just there quietly playing the game, pinging occasionally or what-have-you to better cooperate without having to directly communicate, then it's over. But when it finally does happen it's like "aha! here we go! found one! see, people who play video games are the worst!" but when taken next to all of that pleasant disappointment prior, the sentiment falls by the wayside (or should), and the boring old notion of "it's just some people" springs to mind.
Granted I'm not fuckin putting myself out there wrt ethnicity or gender, so it could be a matter of gliding under the radar in a lot of cases. Or it could just be the games I play (or how much I play them). Still, reflecting on my past experiences in online games (the overwhelming majority of which were a bunch of strangers silently playing together and then parting ways, sometimes with a perfunctory "gg"), it actually kind of makes me feel better about humanity in a weird way. Hunh. The silent majority who's at least *potentially* decent versus the few who are unabashedly not.
The bad ones do stick out more though. I've uninstalled games that I'd been playing for weeks happily because of an awful encounter that puts me off of playing any further. Most recently I'd defended someone in L4D versus mode who was getting shit on for being bad, then I got kicked and was just like "well that's enough L4D multiplayer for the year" lol. But I'd had so many baseline experiences (not necessarily positive, just normal) before that with people who were at the very least not that level of asshole. Instead of thinking about and going back to that larger pool of silent players, I elected to just play something else. Odd thing about it is if someone asked, I'd probably be inclined (before now I guess) to say L4D could be toxic, despite the fact that the majority of my time with both games was normal, and a significant amount of my time was actually positive.
Let me put it this way: PC gamer recently put out an incredibly mild article discussing gender and sexuality in sci-fi games, and pretty much every reply to the tweet they made about it was how trans people like me just have a mental illness. Considering how widespread stuff like that is in online communities, how many of those people go on to play a multitude of games, and how we hear about them being a nightmare to moderate, I'm going with yes.
The only times I've found positive gaming communities are in two MMOs. The Secret World, where the playerbase was so small and the game dying such a long, slow death that everyone there was only there because they loved the story and the world of the game and wanted to talk about it. And Final Fantasy XIV, where, for whatever reason, basically everyone is either super positive or just silent; and the rare times that some one would act like an asshole, in a dungeon run not going well for instance, everyone would stand up to them.
But that's it for me. I will say that the vast majority of the people I've encountered in other games aren't assholes, they are just people silently playing their game alongside me. But most of the time whens someone does decide to talk, its really bad. Which is why I always keep voice chat on mute, though I try not to mute chat unless its really bad.
Giant Bomb forums are one of the few that stand out to me as not vitriolic and shitty so not all of them are bad but boy a whole lot of them sure can be especially on Reddit where Incel fuckheads are infiltrating gaming relates pages because their own page got deleted
I agree with you that in most games communities, people who will actively and explicitly practice toxicity are in the small minority. However, we also need to acknowledge that that doesn't make vulnerable groups' dissatisfaction with those communities any less valid. If a black person comes to us and tells us "Hey, I get racially abused in 1 in 20 Overwatch matches", the appropriate response is never "Well, that's not very many". In a situation like that, huge damage is being done, enough to seriously reduce the presence of certain demographics in the community, making the community more homogeneous, which only tends to amplify the problem.
One thing I think is really worth paying attention to is there are a lot of situations where it may only be 1 in 20 or 1 in 30 people who are actively abusive or bigoted, but those other 19 or those 29 players often do nothing, which only encourages abusers who now believe that they have implicit permission from the community to keep acting the way they do, or at least, they believe that there will be no consequences for their toxicity. When you try to push the silent 19 to stand up against these toxic individuals and better educate themselves about what is toxic and how to tamp down on toxicity, they'll often take the decision not to engage, telling you that they don't want to deal with politics in the gaming space. For many of them, it doesn't matter if there is a problem of serial abuse which drives people out of the community or worse, as long as they get to have a fun time without anyone else bringing them down.
In many cases, some proportion of the people who aren't actively harassing anyone themselves will also still oppose people who try to weed out the toxic element of the community. It's very common to hear gamers say that they condemn death threats or abuse or whatever else, but to hear them simultaneously saying that articles that investigate a culture of toxicity in the hobby are "an attack on gamers" or that feminists who'd stand up for women in the community are delusional and dangerous. So it's not really that you have 1 in 20 problem community members and 19 in 20 non-problematic community members, instead, those 1 in 20 are as loud and numerous as they are because they know that the other 19 will likely turn a blind eye or even actively defend them. If you see a certain behaviour occurring in a culture again and again, it's not usually some sort of glitch within that culture, but is the product of the culture itself. So while a statement like "Everyone in this community is toxic" is obviously hyperbole (and probably meant to be read as such), I do think that on these grounds you can say "This community is toxic", even when the openly abusive people are in the minority.
I 100% think most gaming communities are toxic. I have never played an online multiplayer game where the voice or text chat is not a stream of offensive garbage.
Rainbow Six: Siege is a great example, queue up for a Casual or Ranked match and wait for the N word to start flying. Ubi has recently started cracking down on this with autobans, but the community has already wised up to this and are working around it. Great! -_-
I'm sure most gamers are FINE, but you never hear from those folks. It's the trolls/creeps/jerks that you can hear and leave the impression.
I've got a pretty thick skin when it comes to BS in chat so it rarely bothers me, if it's detracting from my enjoyment I mute the annoyances. I think when you get that many people playing/chatting together you're bound to run into the odd dickhead. I don't condone that sort of behaviour but I can happily ignore it, trolls are gonna troll.
@fezrock: I've had much the same experience in FFXIV, the occasional bell-end but a remarkably good natured crowd otherwise.
As someone who spends a lot of time playing games like Crusader Kings 2, Hearts of Iron IV (WWII), and Victoria 2 (slavery and colonization) I can safely say that yes there can be some intensely bad elements to gaming communities. The modding and discussion scene for those games can be great but you'll also see some obnoxious shit not too infrequently.
I've heard and seen enough of other people's awful experiences online to not even bother. Part of the reason I enjoy Splatoon 2 and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is because there's no voice chat to speak of. Take a look at any gaming site like IGN or GameSpot and there's dozens of them just waiting to pounce and spread their anger and hatred, to say nothing of places like YouTube. I used to try to fight it off myself, but I'm old enough now to know it just ends up dragging me down to their level. I don't need that kind of stress in my life. It's part of the reason I love the forums here.
Do I want to hear the garbage I see people posting in my ear while trying to chill out and play some nice matches of Splatoon? Nope.
@gamer_152: Just wanna add that there was a period where I stopped playing a game for a couple of months as a result of a particularly bad experience in a single match. There was some other poor matches along the way prior but after that last one I just mentally gave up and shelved the game for some time. The fact that it's as you say probably around 1-20/30 people actively engaging in these kind of actions that really annoys me as you'd think everyone else would potentially be able to outnumber these people and stamp out this unsavoury behaviour quite easily.
I'll be honest I always thought not engaging with someone trying to ruin the game for others would have been one of the best things to do since I assume the main goal of these people is to generate a reaction from everyone else in game. I'll still use whatever reporting feature are in the game but I figured I don't wanna give the person anymore satisfaction that their actions are having the desired effect they want, although I can see how no reaction can be interpreted as "No one seems to mind so I'll keep doing it". It kinda feel like a damned if I do, damned if I don't with this situation.
I'm too scared to participate in communities like OW / LoL, to the extent that they're kinda keeping me from playing the games I want to play... Which is definitely not how things should be. If I do play, I do what I can to get rid of chat. I love the games, I really genuinely do... It's just, even thinking of engaging with a community that has the potential of being highly toxic is enough to spoil and prevent an experience (even when there is no guarantee the experience is going to be a negative one)...
... However, we also need to acknowledge that that doesn't make vulnerable groups' dissatisfaction with those communities any less valid. If a black person comes to us and tells us "Hey, I get racially abused in 1 in 20 Overwatch matches", the appropriate response is never "Well, that's not very many". In a situation like that, huge damage is being done, enough to seriously reduce the presence of certain demographics in the community, making the community more homogeneous, which only tends to amplify the problem.
One thing I think is really worth paying attention to is there are a lot of situations where it may only be 1 in 20 or 1 in 30 people who are actively abusive or bigoted, but those other 19 or those 29 players often do nothing, which only encourages abusers who now believe that they have implicit permission from the community to keep acting the way they do, or at least, they believe that there will be no consequences for their toxicity.
I really agree with this. At the same time, the worst part is that some of those people choosing not to participate may even be sympathetic toward the person being harassed or abused -- yet for whatever reason, choose to do nothing about it.
@craigieboy: I mean, if you're not actually being outraged by them, and in a matter-of-fact way say something like "hey, you're being an asshole," I don't think you're really giving them what they want (assuming they're genuinely just a troll). That kind of response anticlimactically side-steps the whole troll shtick anyways, and can have the added benefit of cutting the silence and getting others to feel more comfortable with calling 'em out in a similar fashion. If everyone's made to feel okay calling out that one asshole player instead of silently enduring them, it can have an immediate disarming effect on the person being an asshole. Been in matches where someone else says something to the bully (cause that's basically what we're dealin with; schoolyard shit) and, feeling emboldened, others and myself join them, and the whole mood of the match makes a complete 180.
I don't think a lot of the silence comes from any kind of unconscious agreement or acceptance of shitty behaviour though, so much as the fact that consciously entering into interpersonal conflict is generally undesirable. It's uncomfortable. I get how someone might not wanna speak up because they don't want to be a target themselves, or because they don't think they know what to say, or whatever fair or silly reason is enough in the moment to keep them being passive. It gives a lot of power to the assholes who start shit, and obviously it's a useless consolation to the person being singled-out (in those cases), but I'm not gonna actively shit on the silent players for not always getting involved. Don't get me wrong, it's not good to not call someone out under those circumstances. Failing to speak out doesn't mean you're some kind of monster making the world a worser place, but it ain't a virtue either.
The indifferent players are another story though. And if there's an easy system for reporting bad behaviour then there's no good reason to not at least do that.
This might be a bit off-topic here but I've always kind of felt that what people consider "toxic" is just regular old shit talking, and of course the defenition of "toxic" has changed in recent years to the point that stuff that was just typically accepted a few years ago now deemed offensive and toxic today. Of course extreme things like racial slurs and sexist comments towards women are never okay, but IMO insults, off-color joke and bad lanuage are fair game.
Now, I started out in the FPS and fighting game communities so maybe my tolerance for non-PC things is a little higher than others simple due to more exposure over the years, but I never took much issue with it unless it was outright abuse and "not cool", but yeah... People shit talk - especially teenage and 20-something dudes who are super competitive and have AIAS (Anonymous Internet Asshole Syndrome). That doesn't excuse shiity behavior but hey, people are shitty, especially if you aren't held accountable for the shitty things you say online.
Now onto the OP's question I don't think gaming communities are as toxic as people say but there are definitely pockets of bad actors that cause a lot of trouble, usually younger teens and kids in certain communities.
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