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Sure. Gaming used to be fun. Logging on to CS surf maps full of hackers wallclipping and spamming myg0t clips was hilarious. But things have gotten dark. Modern

Sure. Gaming used to be fun. Logging on to CS surf maps full of hackers wallclipping and spamming myg0t clips was hilarious. But things have gotten dark. Modern "gamer culture" is a rotten festering corpse of what it was 20 years ago. The toxicity is so unbearable I don't even bother with multiplayer anymore.

pzmarzly 3y ago
Theory: gaming has turned from plaything to a sport. Most people don't play online games purely for the sake of fun or "killing" spare time, but with a desire to become better, to become more like the youtubers and e-sport players they follow. I recently went back to CSGO after 5 years break. I'm terrible at it and I'm "stuck" in Silver II rank (second lowest out of 18), but I'm having the best time I ever had with this game. Just keep laughing when your teammates scream at each other in various Central & Eastern European languages and you will be fine.
- zer8k 3y ago
  > Just keep laughing when your teammates scream at each other in various Central & Eastern European languages and you will be fine. The people who want these rules are completely incapable of separating casual epithet throwing in a public lobby from assaults on their direct person. It's an extension of the "speech is violence" culture that pervades the west. It's cool to be not cool with people being assholes in game. You don't need Big Brother (TM) to police it. The community did just fine. I was called all manner of things playing CS 1.6. The things the internet claimed to have done with my mother was a quite extensive list. I never took any of it personally and half the time it was hilarious. The only difference now is I guess people are doxxing each other which is something I never experienced growing up. But then again, back then you didn't have some sort of narcissistic personality disorder driving you to keep your real life linked inextricably to your online one.
- tekla 3y ago
  I loved the shittalking in gaming. I got called every slur in the book constantly and it was so much fun laughing at people who were getting incredibly angry that I didn't give a shit.
  - MBCook 3y ago
    So no one else should be able to choose anything different?
    - tekla 3y ago
      You can choose to not hear it by muting other people. I can choose to hear it and laugh. Maximum choice for all involved.
      - MBCook 3y ago
        Being forced to hear it until you smash mute is not a choice. Having to hear it should be opt-in.
    - ThrowawayR2 3y ago
      The deep, deep irony of the parent poster applauding platform-wide policing of language that offers no choice to opt out and at the same time attempting to cast aspersions on others about not wanting to allow choice should not be lost on us.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  Global ranked matchmaking is a cursed concept in videogames. I don't think it can be made non-toxic, TBH. You take basically everyone playing the game, for whatever reason they enjoy playing it (at any given time), and you chuck them all into a blender where the only metric is on average how good they are at winning the objective. On top of this, you're basically never going to be matched with the same people again, and no-one can really choose who they're matched with (blizzard has the concept but for some reason limits how many people you can avoid matching! And there's no 'match with this person again'). So you completely obliterate any idea of community or community norms around playing the game or acting, and chuck people wanting a serious game with lots of teamwork in with people who just want to fool around and not even play the objective, as well as people who just want to piss others off and will see basically no concequences for it. Even if you remove the really obviously bad actors who yell slurs and abuse at everyone it's not a recipe for people having a good time, because there's so many other ways you can get pissed off by someone else, and they might not even be in the wrong, they just want to play a different version of the game to you.
_boffin_ 3y ago
How so? How is it so much more toxic? I’m thinking that you’re just envisioning the good ole days.
MBCook 3y ago
Nice to see a little sanity in these comments. The only multiplayer I’ve played in the last 15+ years is some Nintendo stuff like Splatoon/Mario Kart or Fall Guys, where there is no voice chat or text chat. The one exception was Destiny, where there was no voice chat by default or I had turned it off. Don’t remember which. Random internet people are a disaster. MS has a brand to keep up, they don’t want to be known for the kind of trash that make up the loudest segment of online gaming. Good for them. This seems like the right decision to me. Don’t like the XBLA policies? Don’t play online on the Xbox.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  > Nice to see a little sanity in these comments. Seriously. I used to be much more of a free speech absolutist, but I have to admit the experiment has failed. The unmoderated Internet is a cesspool, and unmoderated game chat is a sewer within a cesspool. People are just sick of it. Whenever you see someone set up "The Free Speech Version Of Site XYZ" (where XYZ can be Reddit, Twitter, anything really) it almost inevitably fills itself up with trash. Show me an unmoderated site that isn't entirely spam and sewage. I say run an experiment: Set up some moderated servers and unmoderated servers, and let people vote with their controllers. Normal people don't want to join a game or website where the lobby is full of 14 year olds shouting N--ger N--ger N--ger N--ger over and over.
  - rcxdude 3y ago
    > I say run an experiment: Set up some moderated servers and unmoderated servers, and let people vote with their controller. That's what we had with community servers. And you could generally find one which meshed with your skill level, gameplay style, and tolerance for abuse. I would quite like that back, TBH, so yes, let's have that experiment! (but like, have the moderation in that community as well, not imposed by a corporation. Apart from you can have different standards in different places it's also generally more effective. A bad actor (cheating or abuse) in most of these lobbies will still ruin the whole game, because they don't get banned for a while. I'd say that's ineffective moderation, regardless of the accuracy of the decisions).
  - 3y ago
redox99 3y ago
I don't know what you mean by toxicity, but "back in the day" as you mention, you'd get called an n-word 5 times a match. Nowadays that doesn't happen in most games because they ban you if you do so.
- stevenwoo 3y ago
  I remember when voice chat first became available in multiplayer shooters (outside of addons) and became aware almost everyone else was a male adolescent, knew my mother, and all of them were cursing up a storm like South Park characters. It was pretty disappointing and I turned it off after a few matches on different servers.
  - zirgs 3y ago
    And those who weren't male adolescents simply kept their mouths shut.
flkiwi 3y ago
I'm just surprised there are apparently that many people who are (a) running around yelling racial slurs (b) as if it is a routine thing people do and (c) equating yelling hate speech as "swearing". I mean, I grew up with goatse. I'm not a wilting flower. But I don't know anyone who regularly uses racial hate speech and the rate of gender, sexuality, and nationality hate speech I hear is ... single percentages of what it was. And that's a good thing. I'm having a hard time understanding that a private company cultivating a welcoming environment to the people who pay its bills is a bad thing.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  The thing is, with stuff like this, it doesn't really need to be many people. This applies online and IRL. Even if <1% of people are unhinged enough to be shouting abuse at a particular group (or just at anyone in general) whenever they see one of them online or in public, members of that group will regularly experience that abuse, because in public or in online gameplay you interact with quite a lot of different people.
  - flkiwi 3y ago
    Oh absolutely, but I'm sort of sampling from the group on this thread. There's a surprising amount of "just mute it" as if the burden of not hearing slurs should fall on the hearer. Purely as a practical matter, a private company competing in many lucrative and sensitive markets isn't going to tolerate diluting its goodwill by becoming known as the place where hate speech is accepted. One user managed to scare TWO advertisers off "X". That's without even reaching the morality issue. (Lots of folks also equating profanity with hate speech, which is bizarre. If I were in a PUBG lobby and someone called me a mfer, I would laugh. If they called me a <n-word> <f-word> <k-word>, I would leave and never come back.)

pzmarzly 3y ago

Theory: gaming has turned from plaything to a sport. Most people don't play online games purely for the sake of fun or "killing" spare time, but with a desire to become better, to become more like the youtubers and e-sport players they follow. I recently went back to CSGO after 5 years break. I'm terrible at it and I'm "stuck" in Silver II rank (second lowest out of 18), but I'm having the best time I ever had with this game. Just keep laughing when your teammates scream at each other in various Central & Eastern European languages and you will be fine.

zer8k 3y ago
> Just keep laughing when your teammates scream at each other in various Central & Eastern European languages and you will be fine. The people who want these rules are completely incapable of separating casual epithet throwing in a public lobby from assaults on their direct person. It's an extension of the "speech is violence" culture that pervades the west. It's cool to be not cool with people being assholes in game. You don't need Big Brother (TM) to police it. The community did just fine. I was called all manner of things playing CS 1.6. The things the internet claimed to have done with my mother was a quite extensive list. I never took any of it personally and half the time it was hilarious. The only difference now is I guess people are doxxing each other which is something I never experienced growing up. But then again, back then you didn't have some sort of narcissistic personality disorder driving you to keep your real life linked inextricably to your online one.
tekla 3y ago
I loved the shittalking in gaming. I got called every slur in the book constantly and it was so much fun laughing at people who were getting incredibly angry that I didn't give a shit.
- MBCook 3y ago
  So no one else should be able to choose anything different?
  - tekla 3y ago
    You can choose to not hear it by muting other people. I can choose to hear it and laugh. Maximum choice for all involved.
    - MBCook 3y ago
      Being forced to hear it until you smash mute is not a choice. Having to hear it should be opt-in.
  - ThrowawayR2 3y ago
    The deep, deep irony of the parent poster applauding platform-wide policing of language that offers no choice to opt out and at the same time attempting to cast aspersions on others about not wanting to allow choice should not be lost on us.
rcxdude 3y ago
Global ranked matchmaking is a cursed concept in videogames. I don't think it can be made non-toxic, TBH. You take basically everyone playing the game, for whatever reason they enjoy playing it (at any given time), and you chuck them all into a blender where the only metric is on average how good they are at winning the objective. On top of this, you're basically never going to be matched with the same people again, and no-one can really choose who they're matched with (blizzard has the concept but for some reason limits how many people you can avoid matching! And there's no 'match with this person again'). So you completely obliterate any idea of community or community norms around playing the game or acting, and chuck people wanting a serious game with lots of teamwork in with people who just want to fool around and not even play the objective, as well as people who just want to piss others off and will see basically no concequences for it. Even if you remove the really obviously bad actors who yell slurs and abuse at everyone it's not a recipe for people having a good time, because there's so many other ways you can get pissed off by someone else, and they might not even be in the wrong, they just want to play a different version of the game to you.

_boffin_ 3y ago

How so? How is it so much more toxic? I’m thinking that you’re just envisioning the good ole days.

MBCook 3y ago

Nice to see a little sanity in these comments. The only multiplayer I’ve played in the last 15+ years is some Nintendo stuff like Splatoon/Mario Kart or Fall Guys, where there is no voice chat or text chat. The one exception was Destiny, where there was no voice chat by default or I had turned it off. Don’t remember which. Random internet people are a disaster. MS has a brand to keep up, they don’t want to be known for the kind of trash that make up the loudest segment of online gaming. Good for them. This seems like the right decision to me. Don’t like the XBLA policies? Don’t play online on the Xbox.

ryandrake 3y ago
> Nice to see a little sanity in these comments. Seriously. I used to be much more of a free speech absolutist, but I have to admit the experiment has failed. The unmoderated Internet is a cesspool, and unmoderated game chat is a sewer within a cesspool. People are just sick of it. Whenever you see someone set up "The Free Speech Version Of Site XYZ" (where XYZ can be Reddit, Twitter, anything really) it almost inevitably fills itself up with trash. Show me an unmoderated site that isn't entirely spam and sewage. I say run an experiment: Set up some moderated servers and unmoderated servers, and let people vote with their controllers. Normal people don't want to join a game or website where the lobby is full of 14 year olds shouting N--ger N--ger N--ger N--ger over and over.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  > I say run an experiment: Set up some moderated servers and unmoderated servers, and let people vote with their controller. That's what we had with community servers. And you could generally find one which meshed with your skill level, gameplay style, and tolerance for abuse. I would quite like that back, TBH, so yes, let's have that experiment! (but like, have the moderation in that community as well, not imposed by a corporation. Apart from you can have different standards in different places it's also generally more effective. A bad actor (cheating or abuse) in most of these lobbies will still ruin the whole game, because they don't get banned for a while. I'd say that's ineffective moderation, regardless of the accuracy of the decisions).
- 3y ago

redox99 3y ago

I don't know what you mean by toxicity, but "back in the day" as you mention, you'd get called an n-word 5 times a match. Nowadays that doesn't happen in most games because they ban you if you do so.

stevenwoo 3y ago
I remember when voice chat first became available in multiplayer shooters (outside of addons) and became aware almost everyone else was a male adolescent, knew my mother, and all of them were cursing up a storm like South Park characters. It was pretty disappointing and I turned it off after a few matches on different servers.
- zirgs 3y ago
  And those who weren't male adolescents simply kept their mouths shut.

flkiwi 3y ago

I'm just surprised there are apparently that many people who are (a) running around yelling racial slurs (b) as if it is a routine thing people do and (c) equating yelling hate speech as "swearing". I mean, I grew up with goatse. I'm not a wilting flower. But I don't know anyone who regularly uses racial hate speech and the rate of gender, sexuality, and nationality hate speech I hear is ... single percentages of what it was. And that's a good thing. I'm having a hard time understanding that a private company cultivating a welcoming environment to the people who pay its bills is a bad thing.

rcxdude 3y ago
The thing is, with stuff like this, it doesn't really need to be many people. This applies online and IRL. Even if <1% of people are unhinged enough to be shouting abuse at a particular group (or just at anyone in general) whenever they see one of them online or in public, members of that group will regularly experience that abuse, because in public or in online gameplay you interact with quite a lot of different people.
- flkiwi 3y ago
  Oh absolutely, but I'm sort of sampling from the group on this thread. There's a surprising amount of "just mute it" as if the burden of not hearing slurs should fall on the hearer. Purely as a practical matter, a private company competing in many lucrative and sensitive markets isn't going to tolerate diluting its goodwill by becoming known as the place where hate speech is accepted. One user managed to scare TWO advertisers off "X". That's without even reaching the morality issue. (Lots of folks also equating profanity with hate speech, which is bizarre. If I were in a PUBG lobby and someone called me a mfer, I would laugh. If they called me a <n-word> <f-word> <k-word>, I would leave and never come back.)