MaxVest made a point in his cblog about racism in the gaming community..

This, along with another cblog incident (A Mexican user getting pissy at dtoid and an ensuing flood of childish "racist, only funny" idiocy) just a few days ago, led to this reply, which grew kinda big, so I decided to make God change his mind about me sucking and turn it into a blog post instead... so here goes...

Other than Angelsdontburn's "No, just retarded" fact in comment, which is true for a percentage of members in any community, gamers not excluded, I think that it's mostly a bad side-effect of the Net's power of anonymity and distance to kids that still don't grasp how society works.

So, when a kid doesn't get its ass kicked IRL for calling another kid a [insert racial (and sexual, and...) expletives here], but instead does it from the safety of his home on XBL, he's never gonna figure out the repercussions inherent in being a racist dick, ie. said deserved ass-kicking.

This quickly leads to more and more similar behavior, most often to sound as tough as that other guy in the chat room, and in the end you get a very very blurred line between humor and actual racism..

Personally, being white in a country that's barely as multicultural as the US or the UK, I don't really see the problem very often. Add the fact that I do most of my MP gaming in netcafes cause I prefer the closeness of LANs, and you can see that I'm not really all that affected by said "racism" than say, a man of any minority in the US playing Halo 2 in XBL.

Maybe it's because of lack of said exposure that even in a LAN event in a big netcafe, I'll make sure that a 12 year old kid calling me a cheating bitch for fragging his clueless ass gets a scare to remember at the very least. Yeah, it's SRS BSNS alright.

Call me old fashioned if you will, but I'm somewhat concerned about a generation of gamers and netizens growing up without learning the simple fact of life that what goes around comes around, specially when it's about being a total fucktard.

Of course, the issue of parenting plays a great part here too, as long as kids are concerned at least.. And when you let the TV or the PS3 babysit your kid, shit like that is bound to happen. But that's another long (longer, actually) topic, so we'll end the thing here..

So, over-reacting much? Not nearly enough? Do we strangle the dissing 12 year olds by their headsets, or do we go the effortless verbal abuse way? Everyone's doing it, amIrite?