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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, @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.