Do you think the (online) gaming community is more toxic and hostile now than it was in the past?

[Grizzly_Bear_1]

I think it's the same level of nonsense that it has always been. When Everquest first came online and the chat channels were flooded with so much elitism. During the downtime waiting for a creature to spawn, I might have been guilty of keeping those conversations going. I was, and still am, absolutely amazed at the age range of people who took it way too seriously. My fondest memories were when a group of misfits got together, actually worked as a team, and did something we had no business doing because our warrior didn't have a certain sword or whatever the excuse was from the more serious gamers.

Fast forward to today, it's almost the same thing in the Skyrim modding community. There are so many people who cry foul when something is not realistic or fits the setting according to them. And again, I am amazed at the range of ages that complain quite loudly. A horrible thing to say to those people is that it is a single player game, and anyone can download whatever mods they want. Never say that, they will not shut up. They sound like something in between the adults in Charlie Brown and a Monty Python show.

Who knows if my comparison between then and now is accurate. I'm not really interested in social media and value my privacy. Lots of people share too many details online and things to get personal very quickly in those situations.

 

[Pink Gregory]

And I don't even play LoL or DOTA, just Words With Friends against my mum.

Fag, **** and Dickshit are pretty low letter scores.

 

[EXos]

As a British Comedian once said:

"The internet didn't dumb people down. It just made a lot of stupid people much more easily accessible." -R. Coughlan

Back in the time with magazines the offensive voices got edited out. So in a way the internet did make the community more toxic but it wasn't something that wasn't lurking in the depths already.

 

[Nazulu]

I have no idea. I used to play a lot more online games back then, and while there were always assholes, nothing ever went out of control. At least I never saw or heard about it. Just tossed the usual insults back and tried to kill them, like any sane person would.

 

[Hebby]

Compared to what past? Online gaming is a new thing in the greater scheme of things.

But hostile and toxic yes. Classism and elitism can be blamed for much of it. People take games very serious. I don't know the fuck why, but they do. Also the person who spew fag at you and tells you how many dogs your mother have fucked are often timid shy personalities in real life and they know mouthing off there will get their asses kicked. But once online they have a dr. Jekyll and Hyde thing going. If there was written a profile on online gaming bullies, that would be it.

 

[briankoontz]

The world has gotten a lot worse in the past decade+ which is fueling a lot of unhappiness which then spills over into internet culture. If we take that out of the equation the internet and gaming culture have gotten a lot better.

Usenet for example, which was a midpoint between BBSes (Bulletin Board Systems) and the modern forums and social media, was a cesspool of bickering and bile, just a step up from Obi Wan's "wretched hive of scum and villainy". It was a much more freewheeling "live and let insult" culture than the modern internet, where for the most part people go out of their way to be nice to each other.

This was back when trash talking was big in basketball, and it was similar to that culture - everyone insulted everyone not in their inner circle and nobody got too upset about it - instead of getting upset we would just think up a better insult. I'm exaggerating, but not by much.

We've left the Wild West of the internet behind - even 4chan is a pale imitation of those days, except for the technological improvements that have led to the proliferation of images and videos. This is a much more civilized age.

I find the irony here startling - it's the old timers, those of us who have been called every name in the book, my own personal favorite being labeled a "Douchebag from Mars", who are jaded and treat the recent improvement in culture as a nice surprise, while the young people are shocked by the "terrible" nature of the internet and decry the anonymity that encourages it, not realizing that it was FAR worse back in the Wild West days.

These days 4chan is known for being "lawless", but back in the day the entire internet was lawless. We just had to do all of our bad behavior through text - there was no goatse.cx (though that emerged directly out of the culture of the time).

But really, we didn't take the internet nearly as SERIOUSLY then as people do now, who treat it as more important than their "real lives". For us, the internet was always separate from traditional reality, a place where we went to experiment and let loose - for many to explore their "dark side". This was also far before corporations had much presence on the internet and government spying was nearly nonexistent, so people had no pressure to "uphold their reputation".

The problem is that the internet has become so ubiquitous, so surveilled, where everybody knows everything about everyone that nobody can just relax. Nobody can relax when everyone is always watching. There is NO PRIVACY on the modern internet, something that very rarely is mentioned by so called "internet critics". Combined with the ever increasing importance of the internet this is a recipe for cultural disaster.

There was a lot more roleplaying back in the day, real roleplaying, not the modern version that merely describes a leveling/upgrade system, where people would take on an alternate persona. There was an entire genre of multiplayer game, the object-oriented MUD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOO devoted to actual roleplaying.

People frequently took on different personas on Usenet, on forums, and in games - a practice being actively destroyed by Facebook and Twitter. For all of their good practical points, Facebook and Twitter have made the internet really fucking boring.

There's a certain culture clash between old-timers who have a lot of appreciation for the Wild West days and internet newcomers who treat the internet as an extension of their meatbag lives, and who all too frequently don't understand what they've lost when all eyes began watching them, since everyone who has no memories of the 1980s or before has never lived in a non-surveillance state.

 

[The White Hunter]

No for the most part people are fairly nice when I play stuff online. I had a gentlemanly sniper duel with a guy in BF4 last year for example, and people in FFXIV are mostly very nice and willing to help you learn if you don't know a fight, barring something like turn 5 of coil of titan ex (seriously though stop going in titan ex at level 70, you'll get destroyed).

I think forums are actually about on a par with how they were maybe 5 years a go, people are still hostile, there's still trolls, there's still verly defensive fools. It is what it is.

 

[small]

i have definitely noticed it changing for the worst the last 15 years or so. its weird. the people you normally used to see on the news who would camp out for 3 weeks to get a ticket to a star wars film level of geek who would rant and rave if you said anything that was incorrect about their favourite past time seem to of become the norm on the net these days.

maybe a sign of the time but back when i owned an amiga and atari st owners were the scum of the earth, we could still appreciate games the other s had. it was i guess light heated, not so freaking serious do or die like it is now.

all i keep thinking now is grow the fuck up, when i tend to read forums and see the behaviour of people online

 

[briankoontz]

maybe a sign of the time but back when i owned an amiga and atari st owners were the scum of the earth, we could still appreciate games the other s had. it was i guess light heated, not so freaking serious do or die like it is now.

The Amiga was the best gaming system of it's time, and arguably the best of all time (for it's time):

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/07/a-history-of-the-amiga-part-1/

My parents had a lot of brand loyalty to Atari, for no good reason since they made shitty systems compared to just about everything else on the market.

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

I guess with more people playing online games due to consoles enabling online gaming then it has got worse. But only in that there are more people. So maybe we just meet more arseholes online because there are more of them. Though by comparison there are more fun people online as well. Mostly i think it depends on the game and how unlucky you are to meet arseholes.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

I think its just Sturgeon's Law in action. If 90% of players are garbage, well, the pool of garbage got a lot bigger. If you knew 20 cool people then, and know 40 cool people now, your pile of toxic crap went from 180 dicks to 360.

 

[small]

maybe a sign of the time but back when i owned an amiga and atari st owners were the scum of the earth, we could still appreciate games the other s had. it was i guess light heated, not so freaking serious do or die like it is now.

The Amiga was the best gaming system of it's time, and arguably the best of all time (for it's time):

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/07/a-history-of-the-amiga-part-1/

My parents had a lot of brand loyalty to Atari, for no good reason since they made shitty systems compared to just about everything else on the market.

thats true. it was the perfect mix of console plug and play, expandability and being able to do normal computer things on it

 

[loc978]

As a British Comedian once said:

"The internet didn't dumb people down. It just made a lot of stupid people much more easily accessible." -R. Coughlan

Back in the time with magazines the offensive voices got edited out. So in a way the internet did make the community more toxic but it wasn't something that wasn't lurking in the depths already.

...I take that quote a bit differently in this context. Since we're talking about online gaming toxicity specifically...

Playing games online was a whole lot less toxic back in the 90s before it was socially desirable to bother accessing the internet. Fewer people were online, and those that were had expended some considerable effort to figure out how to get there. Perhaps that only made threats and insults less common because everyone involved was acutely aware of precisely how stupid they made a person sound... as if they were unaware of the probable physical distance between themselves and the person they're threatening to beat up... but whatever the reason, insults and threats were few and far between.

 

[AT God]

I hate this argument because it is highly semantic. I believe that the gaming community has more negative things and hateful things being said than previously. However, that is not to say that people have an ANY WAY changed their behavior. Before social media drastically increased the number of people online, the lower numbers meant you had a different population online. Additionally, without standardized forms of communications like twitter or facebook, the people online were further divided into categories of similar temperaments, one website's BBS might be considered toxic while another one might be overly optimistic. Within each of these communities, they number of outliers was limited to single digits because the communities were small, and as such anyone with a controversial attitude, such as one of hostility, would be easily noted and regarded. The mainstreaming of the internet did two things to ruin this balance. One, and most importantly, it drastically increased the number of voices and thereby the number of outliers. And by drastically I mean by close to a billion more people are online than 20 years ago. Had website forums and discussion boards remained isolated from each other, I think increased moderation would have been able to suppress the hostile voices and maintain the same level of hostility in all online communities. However, the second change ruined this, which was the creation of common/popular channels for communication, such as twitter. Since twitter has extremely light moderation, it attracts the most people and with that increased number of people, outliers have become their own community, no longer a nuisance but they are their own voice that must be considered as a population. Their change to essentially a demographic has made them more noticable because their numbers command a certain amount of respect and therefore it appears that the amount of hostile/toxic people has increased, when in reality people haven't changed one bit.

What people considered spam/trolls in the 90's is now an entire demographic, and without an increase in moderation of them, it appears that hostility is up.

That is the longest yes and no answer I have ever written and I have much more important things I should be doing right now.

 

[Fappy]

I really don't think there's a way to prove it one way or the other. One thing I do know, however, is that the toxicity is a lot harder to ignore now. With the internet's growth came more avenues for assholes to fan out across fandoms, websites, game communities, etc. That said, I think it's also been easier to spot the good people.

It all really comes down to where you spend your time. Some game's just have shit communities while others have decent ones.

 

[Buckets]

Definitely with games like WOW, instances used to be fun with Guildies, but Pick Up Groups were a bloody nightmare. You only occasionally found people that were patient and forgiving.
Hated being a healer with the mad rush to the next boss whilst trying to get some bloody mana back, with the dumbass tank shouting 'HEAL ME, F*****g N00b'. I usually dropped out after this kind of abuse, but got a sodding deserter buff which was a right pain in the butt.

It was a much less annoying community before they threw in the expansions, mainly due to most people being fairly new to the instances (except raiders (another story entirely)).

 

[Gamerpalooza]

It all depends.

As a whole it never was.

Individually it is an expected reaction what happens in competitive games. You can't really control yourself in the heat of the moment.

As for more co-op ragers it's on a case by case basis and even then overall as long as everything goes well no one is being hurtful.

Yet when it does happen well by the tone and attitude you can already form an opinion on that individual yet that individual doesn't reflect the whole community or even a fraction of it.

 

[Mad as a Hatter]

I don't know i avoid online multiplayer as much as possible because of bad experiences i had with it. Racism, sexism, Classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia and all kinds of bs was plenty go around. So no thank you i stick to local multiplayer with friends

 

[Scarim Coral]

Definitely yes!

Ok sure it was still bad in the past but now, we can get news of bad stuff that's happening in gaming or maybe back then they didn't think it was news worthy.

 

[Burgers2013]

I think it's gotten worse because of social media, but the actual online gaming experience hasn't really changed, or perhaps it's better than it was.

The actual gaming experience:
I remember when I first started playing games like StarCraft online, I quickly remade my account so that people wouldn't know I was a girl. I was like 11, and during some games I got strings of text describing explicit sexual acts along with the more general ****, *****, get back to the kitchen crap. I had no idea that girls weren't supposed to play games until I played online since my friends/family of both genders played. I really haven't played online games publicly much since I was a younger teen; everyone was just generally unpleasant, and it was hard to pretend to be a dude with a mic. So, if anything I think that part has either stayed about the same or been improved. I played LoadOut recently, and the worst insult I got was: lol u suk. Which was true. I was playing as a girl and everything.

Talking about games outside of gameplay:
I think social media has made it all-too-easy for people to spread obnoxious and hateful comments to strangers outside of the actual gaming experience. See, my friends and I would argue about games and compete to see who could beat games first or beat a high score, but we never threatened each other or had hateful arguments. I think it's because we actually knew and liked each other, and you had to say things face-to-face. Would anyone really tell a friend that he/she is a stupid worthless fanboy/girl if you don't agree on which console to get? Would anyone verbally threaten people who disagree with them in person over such a thing? I think not in most cases, and we had some pretty strong opinions on which consoles/games were best.