Poll: The 12-year old Screaming Kid Myth

[Fijiman]

I have come across many small children while playing multiplayer over the years. Although I though they were always referred to as 10-year-olds, not 12. Then again I suppose there isn't much difference between the two ages so I guess it doesn't matter.

 

[RJ 17]

I believe "12 Year Old" is just a catch-all term to describe "children" playing the games. Generally they're prepubescent and thus have notably high-pitched voices.

I haven't played online multiplayer in quite a while, however a few years ago back in the days when I actually was playing CoD I used to encounter these types of players (who did tend to be the most foul-mouthed players in the lobby), though I always called them 9 year olds rather than 12.

 

[OldNewNewOld]

Playing almost exclusively PC games online, I have yet to encounter a screaming kid.
Almost all of the kids are either nice or well, just kids saying stupid things but nothing racist or sexist. Honestly, my worse experience online was with supposedly adults while playing Dota.
Seeing the posts of people in this thread and many other similar like this, i would say that the screaming kids problem is a more or less console exclusive problem. Now the next gen has some exclusives.

 

[Balimaar]

I think a big reason for the number 12 here is that teenager implies at least a little bit of (ugh words fail me) grownup-ness.

You can still call a 12 yr old a kid. It becomes a bit more difficult to call someone a kid when their age number indicates puberty (hence all the "Have your balls dropped yet?" comments you'll get in these games).

 

[Scow2]

I don't blame the kids, i blame the companies who fail to moderate their age restrictions to the point where having age warnings on games is just a dishonest attempt to prove they care when their actions speak of the opposite being true.

Companies do not have the right to discriminate against players/customers based on age. If a parent believes their child is mature enough for a game, they're allowed to play it.

Also - it's impossible to make something targetted to adults without getting kids interested in it simply because it's targetted to adults.

Back when I played the original Planetside, my outfit's BFR pilot was a little kid. Damn good at the game, but his voice was obnoxious as hell.

My younger brother was also an obnoxious COD kiddie. Now he's a Teenage Jackass COD player.

 

[Mau95]

I thought it was 13 year-olds. That's how I hear it most of the time, at least.

 

[Godhead]

If you replaced 12 year olds with Russians then that would be DOTA 2 in a nutshell.

 

[Smooth Operator]

I come across at least one every day, and it's not actually always children it's people who decide to act like spoiled children and imagine themselves really amusing.

But I've come across kids even at the age of 10 even who were top of the team, teaching us old farts how to play because they spend all day on the game and know how shit works much better. Age is not the measure for an idiot, idiocy is.

 

[JayRPG]

School holidays on Australian TF2 servers is hell, there is rarely a server where a high-pitched young kid isn't screaming on about shit, or attempting to troll but just not getting it.

I haven't played CoD since the first MW and I don't remember it being a problem there, but CSS was similarly full of horrible mic spammers.

 

[jklinders]

I don't play online with people much. I'm not really a fan of playing with kids but the overwhelming majority of the ones I did were pretty decent. Now there was this one really fucking rude German sounding guy who was telling me to "turn my fucking headset off" on a co-op match on 2 separate occasions. But unless he was a freak of nature it's unlikely he was less than 25 by the sound of his voice.

that's just my own very limited personal experience though. The community of World of Tanks was almost horrifyingly elitist and shitty. thankfully also limited to text only for the most part.

 

[Trippy Turtle]

They do exist but a lot of people mix them up with the decent twelve year olds. Being young isn't a problem. Its just common that they scream the whole time. Not all of them do this.
Nothing is more annoying than going through a raid with a kid on the mic who is doing fine and not even talking overly much and along comes some 20 year old complaining about squeakers nonstop.

And in the more competitive games with any sort of ranking system you should be ashamed to be getting matched with them.
I noticed I found a lot of kids in Halo 3 at first, but as I got better I consistently found more adults.

 

[MHR]

10 minutes ago in TF2. 2 kids on the same team spamming high-volume high-pitched nonsensical babble into their mics. Team couldn't votekick them fast enough.

Yes, these stupid mic kids are everywhere.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

I can't say I remember ever encountering one. Whenever I had people in voice chat in random online matches it was usually normal people or their mic was so bad that you couldn't tell what they were anyway.

 

[sanquin]

To me it's about mentality, not about the years someone has been alive. I've already learned years ago that how long you are alive has little to do with how mature you are. And since then, when on the net, I've always been basing my age judgements on mentality. Heck, there's little else you can judge someone else on on the net with. Anonymity and all that.

Anyone trash-talking and insulting others like that has the mentality of a 12 year old to me. Why 12? Don't know exactly. But my guess is that that age comes closest to what people are reminded of when experiencing such people online. As in, old enough to have learned some 'new words', combined with hitting puberty and the inability to understand the connotations of said new words. As, can you really say that someone insulting your parents/sexuality so casually, has any real idea of what the words he uses entails? If he did, he wouldn't be using them so casually.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

Counter-Strike seems to be the middleground between console shooters and the faster PC shooters. As a result you will get annoying children from time to time but not as frequently.

funny thing about this, after years of my friends pestering me to get counter strike, I finally got it and have put maybe 5-6 hours into the game...easily 2 hours of those have had 2-3 whiny pre-teens in the lobbies. Now I suck donkey dick at the game so when I die I hear their voices all the damn time, but I would say it is pretty common when playing casual.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

They do exist but a lot of people mix them up with the decent twelve year olds. Being young isn't a problem. Its just common that they scream the whole time. Not all of them do this.
Nothing is more annoying than going through a raid with a kid on the mic who is doing fine and not even talking overly much and along comes some 20 year old complaining about squeakers nonstop.

yeah this. I pretty much never speak, but if I hear some oldfag purposefully talking shit to a younger player just because they exist and are playing the game, you bet your sweet ass I'm gonna hound them about it, see how they like it.

 

[Username Redacted]

The "12-year old screaming kids in online multiplayer" is why I no longer play Left 4 Dead 2 with people I don't know. It's also why, when playing fighting games online a microphone icon earns either a kick or a mute as applicable (host vs. guest) though with the audio quality on PSN or XBLA I can't be sure that the person screaming racist and/or homophobic and/or anti-Semitic epithets at me is actually 12 because when they sound like a wookie it's hard to guess someones age.

 

[Frankster]

I tend to stick to strategy games so people rarely speak in that anyways.

Of the multi fps games I dabble in, Team Fortress 2 is where I tend to encounter quite a lot of "squeakers" who have me scrambling desperately for the mute button before my brain melts out through my ears.

 

[renegade7]

Well, I was a dick when I was in my early teens playing online games. I totally had a "I've just learned how to use curse words and they're still novel to me so I'm going to spew them constantly" phase, but it wore off by the time I was around 16. And I of course apologize to the greater gaming community and that one guy who said his 4 year old was in the room and heard when I called someone a "cocksucking fuckass".

But by and large, I think most of the trolls, bile, and vitriol I hear when I'm playing games online really comes from people in their later teens or 20s. It's easier to put up with it when it's the teenagers and they have nothing to add to the game anyway so you can just mute them, but say it's something like EVE Online and it's your FC being an obnoxious 26 year-old manchild ranting about Muslims or telling a female corpmate that he wants her to link pictures of her breasts, you can't reasonably be in the fleet op if you mute the person who's supposed to be managing the whole thing, so that basically ruins the fun. It's doubly annoying because at 26, you should know better.

 

[Jamieson 90]

How likely you are to encounter the stereoptical 12 year old screaming kid depends on what platform you play on and the sort of games you play; you get obnoxious people at all ages, you're just more likely to find obnoxious immature brats playing COD on the consoles than you are say one on the PC playing a military SIM or a RTS game.

I don't play many competitive games these days, but when I did I was playing complicated team/class/obj games such as Enemy Territory Quake Wars on the PC, and in my experience I didn't encounter one brat in years of playing. In fact, the kids I did encounter were usually very polite and actually knew their stuff.