By David Futrelle
If you ever wonder why online gaming culture is such a complete shitshow, it’s not because it’s dominated by angry teenagers who think it’s fun to call other players “f*ggots” and possibly even send SWAT teams to their houses. These people could easily be banned, No, the real problem is that so many adult gamers either don’t give a shit about the rampant harassment or think it’s actually pretty cool.
Consider, for example, the reaction of Reddit’s KotakuInAction to a report from the Anti-Defamation League suggesting that the overwhelming majority of online game players faced harassment, much of it severe and prolonged abuse that went beyond name calling to violent threats, stalking and even doxing.
You might have expected that even in the KotakuInAction subreddit — which still identifies itself as “the main hub for GamerGate on Reddit” — there would be some small number of commenters who would find this at least a teensy bit disturbing. But when I looked in on a thread devoted to the topic today, there were 56 comments up and not a single one of them suggested that all this harassment might be, you know, a bad thing. In other words, according to my completely unscientific survey, 100 percent of them don’t give a shit.
Instead, some commenters minimized and misrepresented the study’s results; others mocked the victims of harassment; still others more or less reveled in the toxic culture portrayed. A few posted neutral comments and jokes. But no one stood up to take issue with the culture of harassment.
The ADL’s findings are genuinely distressing:
Seventy-four percent of adults who play online multiplayer games in the US experience some form of harassment while playing games online. Sixty-five percent of players experience some form of severe harassment, including physical threats, stalking, and sustained harassment. Alarmingly, nearly a third of online multiplayer gamers (29%) have been doxed.
Much of this harassment seems to have been motivated by some form of bigotry — from misogyny to racism.
Fifty-three percent of online multiplayer gamers who experience harassment believe they were targeted because of their race/ethnicity, religion, ability, gender or sexual orientation. Thirty-eight percent of women and 35 percent of LGBTQ+ players reported harassment on the basis of their gender and sexual orientation, respectively. Approximately a quarter to a third of players who are black or African American (31%), Hispanic/Latinx (24%) and Asian-American (23%) experienced harassment because of their race or ethnicity in an online multiplayer game. Online multiplayer gamers were also targeted because of their religion: 19 percent of Jews and Muslims also reported being harassed.3
So how did KiA commenters respond?
By dismissing those complaining of harassment as wimps:
They are privileged coddled children in adult bodies who need to spend extended time in the wild without help or support.
By telling victims to suck it up:
Be adult. Get called f*ggot by online stranger.
Mute.
Thats being an adult.
By suggesting that getting harassed was actually a badge of honor:
You’re not online gaming right if you’re not getting called a f*ggot.
By suggesting that the whole point of online gaming is to make others miserable:
If the person I’m playing against online is having fun, I’m not having fun.
By encouraging those who get harassed to harass back:
Get called f*ggot by online stranger.
Call him the same.
By dismissing harassment as little more than meaningless “name calling.”
I don’t even think they know what harassment is. Calling someone a name and not making a continuous campaign of it is not harassment. It’s just being rude. Now what some of bluechecks do to Trump is harassment.
By literally declaring that “boys will be boys.”
its not harassment, its called smack talk and its just what guys do to each other to stop our egos getting out of control.
Or “kids will be kids.”
74% of adults get harassed by 12 year olds who like to smack-talk because that shit’s funny when you’re 12.
This is kids being kids. If anything it’s a parenting problem, not a society problem.
The game industry could take steps to significantly reduce the amount of harassment in online gaming. But they won’t, not so long as there is such a loud and vociferous pro-harassment lobby out there, on Reddit and elsewhere.
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fortunately not all online gaming communities are like this. The Grand theft auto 5 online roleplaying community I recently joined is great. a while back there was a bit of a problem with people roleplaying suicide and it was starting to stress out some players so the admins asked that such scenarios be avoided and people complied .
I think a viewpoint like that only feeds into the notion that toxicity is inherent to online competition and that there’s nothing that can really be done about it. I don’t see anything inherent to online video game competitions that should attract assholes more readily than in single player video games or outside sports.
@An Impish Pepper
You’ve … not played Rimworld, have you. AKA the war crimes simulator. 😛
There are a significant number of arseholes attracted to that (it’s bad enough that there are always a couple of Rimworld threads in Shit Reddit Says at any given time.)
Good game, but really glad it’s not multiplayer!
Non sequitur.
@Ariblester
Video Games are not art because gamers do not treat games as art. This sort of harassment, toxicity is far more common in sports fandom than oh opera studies; likewise the treating of video games as a zero sum games-your pleasure is my pain as typified by these comments-which is alien to relationships of the art world
I do not care if you define art by aspects in the work. I do not. I define art by how we (collectively) treat something.
Okay then, I withdraw my comment. The conclusion does indeed follow from the premises.
@Mike:
Does this apply only to multi-player games? Would you accept that a single-player game can be art? Or how about an online game which successfully eliminates that toxicity, such as Journey?
@Mike
Your definition of art is not consistent with anything I’ve ever seen before. I’m not an expert, but I’ve taken enough art history classes to know that plenty of works of art garnered various reactions, some negative or toxic. Art is not defined by how people treat it. Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, for example, would be considered art by most people today, but when it was premiered it was met with riots. Does this mean that it was not art originally but became art? Art is generally defined by artistic intent, not public reception. For example, if I make a painting and people deface it because they don’t like it, does that mean it was never art to begin with because it wasn’t treated as art by the community? In the case of video games, letting the view and behavior of a minority of a community determine whether something is art doesn’t seem to be the best gauge.
Nevermind that this ignores the fact that, yes, even in ‘high art’ fields like opera, theater, etc, there is misogyny, there is racism, there are other bigotries, there is harassment.
I feel like we sometimes lose sight of the fact that multiple things can be true.
There is really disgusting harassment in video games. There is harassment in other areas.
This is sort of like the folks who live in the northern US ranting about racism in the southern US. Yes, plenty of racists live in the South (see NC lady in other thread), but if there didn’t exist racism anywhere else in the country, we wouldn’t have Miller (from Cali), Trump (from NY), etc
@Mike
All I can say is that you’ve clearly never been backstage…
@Skye
Racism is more deeply embedded in public life in the the Southeast, principally because the same rich, white, now-wanna-be slaveholder families still run the show down there, like they always have.
I think that Mike is referring specifically to the audience community, rather than the creators. I think.
@Ariblester, Dalillama, Mike
I can’t say opera audiences are always great either. I enjoy opera a lot and go to performances whenever I can, and most of the people I know who are into opera are not bad, but I have met some unsavory fans as well. For example, there was quite a fan backlash when my local opera company had an African-American singer perform the lead part in one show. Then there are other racism issues in opera, such as the controversy around Wagner and his Ring Cycle and racist undertones in other operas.
In short, there is harassment and bigotry in all forms of art, this does not make them not art, and we should all try to work towards eliminating this bigotry.
Related: This interesting article about trans opera singers (also somewhat controversial in the world of opera).
@ naglfar
I nearly started WW3 just by mentioning I didn’t like Surtitles.
They force you to take your eyes away from the action, and they give away plot points too early. I much prefer dubbed opera ?
@Dalillama, you’re right. I was not trying to downplay the racism that exists in the South. I was trying to point out that it exists throughout the US.
Frankly, @Naglfar did a much better job articulating the point I was trying to make
“Fifty-three percent of online multiplayer gamers who experience harassment believe they were targeted because of their race/ethnicity, religion, ability, gender or sexual orientation. ”
They really undercut their argument by including ability in there. Not because “being bad at a game” justifies harassment but because the arguments for and against it are different from those about harassing women and minorities.
I hate surtitles when the opera’s in a language I understand, or when I know it well enough to not need them. What’s especially distracting is when the translation’s not very good.
The best option is the Met’s, I think, which as I understand it has the translations on the back of the chair in front of you, so you can turn them off if you want; but unfortunately, not many places have the Met’s budget.
“I would speculate that, even if it was practical to do so, heavy policing of griefing would be a bad idea. The griefers would just find ways of perverting the system, such as getting random people banned for griefing.”
I am currently banned from twitter for “misgendering” a TERF by calling her a cis woman. She replied with “stop misgendering me” and getting her mumsnet pals to mass-report me, causing it to be flagged as hate speech. I appealed it in April, still no followup.
@Betrayer
I think when they said ability they meant having a physical or mental handicap, not ability to play the game.
Sorry about your Twitter ban. I’m beginning to think Jack Dorsey is actively trying to court hate on his platform by banning anyone who calls out TERFs yet refusing to ban neo-Nazis or TERFs.
I saw La Traviata in college because, as an art major, we had to attend a certain number of artistic events (art shows, plays, ballet, opera, etc. Anything we could get a ticket stub to prove our attendance) every semester.
I really liked it and was shocked to find myself bawling at the end when (spoiler alert?) Violetta died. Shocked because the saddest of sad films or plays had never so much as wrung a single tear from my eye before.
There were supertitles which helped me since my Italian isn’t anything near fluent. I’m functional in restaurants and shopping, though.
I’d really like to see Aida someday. I almost went back in the early 90s when it was being performed at the Hollywood Bowl with the whole menagerie of animals by the L.A. Opera Company.
@Hambeast
Aida is a great opera. I’ve only seen it performed without elephants, but still definitely worth seeing.
I generally like supertitles because I don’t speak Italian or French or German and they help me understand the storyline better. I can understand why others might not agree, but I am in favor.
@Betrayer:
I’m pretty sure that they’re talking about what many people call DISability. The term disability has fallen out of favor in many circles, because you still have **some** abilities, they’re just different and/or less from what other bodies can manage.
In this particular case, however, I can see the confusion, and assuming I’m right, it was pretty careless of them to use it in this way in this context with no clarifiers that they weren’t talking about game skill.
@Naglfar:
Sadly, it’s getting harder to find elephants who can perform without autotune.
@Crip Dyke:
Sorry for misunderstanding you.
@ rabid rabbit & naglfar
I’m having flashbacks! 🙂