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A study carried out by an anti-bullying charity found that 57% of the young people it surveyed had experienced bullying online when playing games.
In addition, 22% said they had stopped playing a game as a result.
Ditch the Label surveyed around 2,500 young members of the virtual hotel platform Habbo, aged between 12 and 25.
One 16-year-old gamer, Bailey Mitchell, told the BBC he had experienced bullying while playing online games since the age of 10.
"If you're going to school every day and you're being bullied in school you want to go home to your computer to escape," he said.
"So if you're getting more abuse thrown at you it's going to put you off doing anything social - it has for a lot of people I know, me included.
"It's regular, every other game you're in, there's always someone who has a mic or types in chat. They'll call you some random abusive thing they can think of."
Indeed, young gamers should stop bullying old people in online games.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 02 2017, @04:18PM (6 children)
I have a strong suspicion, verified somewhat by the users who bothered to log in, that most of the "grow a pair and deal with the abuse" people are from the conservative / libertarian line. What is it that makes you all such sociopaths? There were no actions being advised by this article, just a rundown of how many kids experience online bullying. How can a community change when it doesn't even know what the problems are?
Obviously people feel free to shit talk and say things they wouldn't in real life due to the anonymity of the internet, but it is a trend we should be aware of and discourage.
To draw a ridiculous parallel, all you conservatives whining about immigrants raping and stealing just deal with it. Rape and theft is a part of life, been around since before we left the trees (sorry did I trigger you with that monkey comment?) so everyone should just grow a pair and deal. Don't like Sharia law? You can move to a different area, you can wear iron underpants, I mean c'mon the solutions are endless!! /SARCASM
Or we agree as a community on what behaviors are OK and we discourage the ones that are not. Hopefully without any laws that violate the constitution. Since I brought up the constitution, there are a dozen laws already on the books that we need to repeal so let's get started!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 02 2017, @04:58PM (1 child)
The amount of what you think are keywords with a high emotional response potential in your post... It shows what you think is provocative. And it is hilarious. May your life be infinite and have plenty of meaning.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 02 2017, @05:11PM
May you grow beyond your narrow world view, even if it causes you to lose some of the meaning in your life. I wasn't going for emotional response, just making a valid comparison. Carry on you subtle edge lord!
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday June 02 2017, @05:18PM (2 children)
False equivalence. Rape and theft are things that we have police to (supposedly) protect us from (it doesn't work that well in practice, but the threat of punishment does help keep it down to some extent, esp. by locking up offenders so they can't do it again), and it's hard to just get away from people who would do these things to you. Not many people can afford to just buy a nice house in a remote place and still earn a living, plus not many people want to live a solitary life like that. People have a right to live in civil society without fearing for their safety. Moving to a different area isn't feasible for many; that takes money.
However, we're talking about online gaming here. The "community" there is whoever bothers to play that game. If the community in some particular game is toxic, the answer is simple: stop playing the game! This isn't like having the right to live in your neighborhood and go to work without being assaulted on the subway; games are a luxury, nothing more, so if playing a game (which, BTW, costs $$$ to play usually) is making you miserable, then just stop! Find another game to play. And since this seems to be a problem with these stupid "social" games, stop playing social games, and play single-player games instead. You don't have to worry about some NPC hurling obscenities at you in a single-player game usually.
The fundamental issue you're getting into here is public space vs. private space. Walking around on public streets, using public transit, going to work, going to restaurants, etc. are all public space, and it is the government's job to provide a level of safety and protection for us in these places, and that includes protection from harassment, discrimination, etc. Online games are not public, they're private. It's not the government's job to protect you from harassment or discrimination at a private club, and in fact many private clubs explicitly discriminate against people--many country clubs are infamous for refusing entry to black people for instance. If you don't like the way you're treated in a private club like the Elks or whatever, the correct course of action is to stop paying your dues there and leave. It's exactly the same here: these games are pay-to-play, they're private spaces owned and run by the game companies, so if they're doing a lousy job of policing their members, then the correct course of action is to stop paying and leave. In fact, the *only* truly effective way of dealing with a private business that provides a poor customer experience is to "vote with your feet", as the only thing that companies understand is the bottom line.
This isn't "conservative" or "libertarian", this is a philosophy that anyone who doesn't believe in authoritarian/totalitarian governments should agree with. That includes people normally called "liberals" (in the US), who believe in private enterprise and capitalism restrained by sensible government regulation and a certain amount of "socialistic" government services. When you have governments getting intimately involved in how private companies (and not utility companies which have government-granted monopolies) run their customer-service operations, now you're looking at fascism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 02 2017, @05:42PM (1 child)
It was a parallel, not an equal example. All your points are very valid, but what I was trying to highlight was the similarities. Lots of people chimed in with stuff like "grow a pair, learn to deal with assholes cause that's reality" etc. So I used a drastic example to illustrate the idea. People are treating this story like its advocating safe spaces, but there was nothing of the sort discussed.
There are lots of knee-jerk reactions from people who are probably shit talkers in games and think it is 100% always OK and fuck the whiners. The problem is games have a large range of player ages so swearing and hateful language can actually have seriously negative effects. You wouldn't go to a middle school and expect to hear death threats / racial slurs / sexist insults in the playground so why is it acceptable online culture? Anyone can do it, I'm not arguing for censorship, but the community should realize that the behavior is way out of line and should be reeled in to be more like amateur sports leagues. Some shit talk is OK, insane death threats and hateful garbage is not.
Again, the assholes can still be assholes, but if you in any way condone shitty behavior like this it just makes you one of the shitty people. "Grow a pair" is a stupid response that does not fix the actual problem. That is ancient male conditioning bullshit that causes a lot of mental health problems along with propagating the original problem. The unstated addition is "its ok to say hateful shit, if someone can't handle it that is their problem because they're just pussies".
"Vote with your feet" is also not a great response, it is a massive cultural problem that won't be solved by a few people boycotting some game. The only way for a culture shift to happen is for the community to advocate for a change. It is simple, you hear some asshole going overboard on being an asshole? Call them out, tell them to tone it down. "Hey I get you're frustrated by noobs but shit talking distracts the team and makes the noobs do worse." Stuff like that.
I still see the parallels between the political viewpoints held by users here and the support of gaming trash talk. It is interesting.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday June 02 2017, @08:31PM
I'm not condoning the behavior at all, what I'm pointing out is that there's no way you're going to change it without basically having the government police online gaming, which I hope is a ridiculous notion. The "community" isn't going to advocate for any change (this community is the one acting badly in the first place after all), and really has very little power: these games are run by *private companies*. It's up to them to police them, and they're unlikely to do so because that requires a lot of manpower which cuts into their profits. Therefore, the only sensible course of action is for anyone who doesn't like this behavior to vote with their feet, and for children, for parents to not let them play these games.
Your comparison with amateur sports leagues is bad: amateur sports leagues are not run by for-profit corporations, they're run by volunteers. Your "community" terminology actually makes sense there, because they're really quite "communistic" in practice, and I don't mean that in a bad way: they're non-profit, they're run by volunteers, they probably (I've never been in one so I'm just guessing) have a somewhat democratic process for deciding leadership, and on top of all that, they're composed of people from a particular locality who mostly all probably know each other anyway, not a bunch of strangers from across the planet. Online games are not like this; they're owned and operated by for-profit corporations, not any kind of "community", and there's certainly no democratically-elected leadership there that can police it and eject problem players. And don't forget, those bad actors are paid customers; they paid to use this service, so kicking people off for bad language or whatever isn't likely to look good for the company, taking peoples' money and then denying them use of the service they paid for.
Again, the only sensible way to deal with this is to vote with your feet. These are private corporations, not communities; if you don't like them, then leave. It's no different than the local private golf club that allows its members to use racial epithets against minority customers. There is no legal recourse for those customers than to leave.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 03 2017, @12:48PM
> What is it that makes you all such sociopaths?
Because a world enforcing the right not to be offended is a world where you don't have the right to tell the truth.