Honestly, I feel like you might be overestimating the degree to which this is specific to video games. I certainly recognize the sort of behavior you're descri

Honestly, I feel like you might be overestimating the degree to which this is specific to video games. I certainly recognize the sort of behavior you're describing, and it makes intuitive sense that online gaming would worsen it with anonymity and dehumanized opponents. But in practice? As a teenager I watched people say "I hope you get cancer" or worse on the field, in the locker room, or even in the cafeteria. Or jump straight to knowingly personal mockery, or just beat somebody up because it was fun to hurt them. And it doesn't necessarily go away when people get out of school. "That guy likes a different sports team than me, let me tell him how he should die painfully" is something people think and act on every day. It's still quite possible that online gaming sparks this behavior from times and moments it would happen otherwise. I certainly don't mean to presume anything about you personally - you know your own story better than any generalization. But as a social pattern? I worry that we're mostly upset about online gaming and cyberbullying because they're new and different. We tolerate an amount of cruelty and violence outside of those settings that I think we're very slow to acknowledge that maybe the digital harm has just made more visible something we've been dealing with for a long time.