Steve the Pocket said:
I want to see one company, just one, have an official policy against anticivil behavior in their games and actually have the infrastructure in place to enforce it. Some talk a big game about wanting to police player behavior but either wind up having nothing to show for it a year later (Valve, with DOTA 2) or wind up creating a system that's used
by the trolls to kick everyone
else out (Valve again, with CS:GO). As time goes on, I'm more convinced that it simply can't be done, and if that's the case, then maybe we'd be better off just hanging it up and going back to games you can only play with friends.
Therumancer said:
The problem is simply what's defined as being "toxic" behavior, after all it tends to be highly subjective. In many cases it seems to me that you have a lot of easily offended politically correct types trying to enforce their personal morality on everyone else, and declaring things they don't like "toxic" or in some way wrong.
After three drafts, I concluded that there was no way I was going to be able to respond to this in a non-accusatory way, so let me just make it clear that I do not have much patience for people who use the phrase "political correctness" unironically, and that, as far as I'm concerned, most if not all of the people you described in the WOW chat room sound like the sorts of people I'd be just as eager to kick out of my game as the all-out trolls that Shamus was talking about. If someone's idea of "fun" involves making jokes at the expense of minority groups, then they probably don't deserve to have fun of any sort, let alone the kind they prefer.
Well you could always just say you don't have a problem with political correctness or the tenets it represents. Whether you like it or not there is nothing "ironic" about those trends and the effect they have on modern politics and discussion. As much as many people hate the label, it's a term that comes up even in classes on sociology and ethics.
To put things into classroom context (though understand it's been almost two decades since I was in school) the tenets of political correctness is that anything negative directed at a large group of people must be a lie, or treated as one, and acting against or criticizing a group of people for trends is inherently wrong. Of course sociology as a science is all about identifying trends among large groups of people, and of course finding ways to manipulate and exploit them for your own purposes. It also gets into points like how dealing with a person on an individual basis is far different than dealing with groups on a societal level, as well as looking at how dynamics changes based on the makeup. A point used in old movies like "Men In Black" when they pointed out "A person is fine, but people aren't" when talking about why they needed to keep the aliens concealed. The same basic logic can be used when dealing with cultures and the problems on a large scale.
In ethics (which is an examination of different ethical systems, as opposed to telling you what is right and what's wrong) there should be a whole section dedicated to the pros and cons of political correctness. The basic idea being that every problem needs to be addressed on an individual level, divorced from overall context, and that social policies should of course totally ignore sociology and it's predictions. This of course gets into questions like how one can also argue a moral responsibility to engineer things for the best using sociological data, and to resolve individual cases in a way likely to have the best large scale success.
In a practical context, which is an example so I'm not going to argue, look at say "The Middle East" and the whole set of issues about profiling and acting based on cultural and sociological realities as opposed to creating an environment where every individual can be an exception so nothing can be done on a large scale. Along with the point that when you do not act on a large scale you allow a culture and attitudes to proliferate, along with the problems, refusing to act on a large scale arguably makes those in a position to act who choose not to do so in part responsible for the actions that come about from a culture allowed to operate unchecked. This can range from making arguments that the west shares responsibility for the plight of women in Muslim nations for refusing to act against the culture, to situations where you deal with Muslims coming into countries in large numbers and cause all kinds of problems in terms of anti-societal behavior, violence, threats of terrorism, and other things... problems which generally can't be resolved by going after one person at a time. Indeed isolating a Muslim from the pack might find him quite reasonables as a person, but put him together with dozens or hundreds of people like him and leave them to their own devices without any controls... and well, the results typically aren't pretty. If you don't like me using Muslims, this argument can be made about a lot of groups... and of course it can also be argued from a number of perspectives. A Muslim could argue the same way about western culture and how we say damn all our women to hell by refusing to keep them in line, and point out that they can usually get some sympathy from individual Americans, but address the issue of Sharia and Muslim rule on a large scale, and they hit a stone wall.
The point of this rant (in a long message) is that many, many, people will use the term "political correctness" without irony and oppose it for a large number of reasons. It shouldn't surprise you at all, even if you strongly disagree with the other side of the equasion... this kind of thing is a major issue because there are strong arguments on both sides of the fence, and one can make strong ethical arguments both for and against the point of view and policies that go with it. The fact that you seemingly can't see, or respect, the other side, and don't seem to understand it, is not uncommon and is pretty much why the US remains so heavily deadlocked politically. The middle ground we need is somewhere between the two extremes, which are pretty much society having to deal with everything individually, and society being able to deal with problems on a sociological level. In actual issues it tends to come down to the rights of a human, as opposed to the needs of humanity... so to speak. Nobody wants to see the middle ground on pretty much any issue, especially those favoring political correctness who are against any kind of group regulation in any context.
THAT said, it goes well beyond the whole point of what I'm talking about. As a general rule in your typical zone chat you generally don't see anything more "anti-minority" than comedy movies. As a general rule, groups of people do laugh at themselves and with say Blacks you see this in Tyler Perry movies, Eddie Murphy movies, Wayans Brothers movies and tons of others. With jews you've had things like "The Harlem Hammer" and "You Don't Mess With The Zohan", and you see this with pretty much every group out there.
A typical situation might have some troll who might not even be Canadian, coming into a zone chat and commenting about all the toxic rain which obviously comes from America. To which a partner might respond "really, I thought it was run off from all the unwashed Frenchmen north of the US border" followed by comments on whether Quebec really counts as Canada or not, and then someone saying "Hey, leave Canada alone, it's one of the nicer states... and we love our hat", followed by someone saying Canada isn't a hat, but is riding on the big dumb beast that is the USA... etc... and it goes on and on in this vein and everyone is getting a chuckle... then someone comes in, assumes some of the comments are serious, and gets all offended. In such a case the guy getting offended is the problem (and he has an ignore feature) not everyone else who is just having fun.
Context of course matters, the point here being that you rarely, if ever, see any kind of serious racial, or socio-political statements in MMO chat. If people start to get too serious, usually ice spreads across the chat and things take care of themselves that way.
Basically if someone in zone chat goes "Q: What's the difference between a truck load of babies and a truck load of bowling balls? A: You can't use a pitchfork on the bowling balls" and you get 30 people going "lulz" in chat and your getting all upset because "how dare someone make disgusting jokes about hurting babies", your the problem, and if you start making complaints and otherwise ranting in chat about it, being a general Mr. Buzzkillington when everyone wants some distraction from their grind, you just became the actual troll/problem.
The key point is context matters, and it's also why I mentioned the whole "Five minute rule" thing, basically you can't get context if you just run into an MMO zone and hear two lines of an ongoing dialogue or don't like one joke. You know someone who says "You know the real reason the Germans invented the autobahn right? It was the keep up with the French retreat..." likely isn't a Nazi sympathizer or seriously anti-French.
