To say that gamers don't have the greatest of reputations is putting it mildly. We're portrayed as violent-minded, introverted, disturbed malefactors and a lot of the perception is, to be fair, quite justified. The release of the Halo 3 homophobia video proved to highlight a very real problem on Xbox Live, that of classless, brainless individuals who have found a home for their hateful and bigoted opinions.
However, does the abuse, chauvanism, homophobia and racism of Xbox Live expose a problem with "gamer culture," or does it rather serve as a magnifying glass for culture at large? While many people choose to use the likes of those found on Xbox Live to mock and chastise the gaming community, how many of them are willing to turn those accusing fingers back to the sector of society that they believe they exclusively belong to?
Is Xbox Live really society's sewer, or is it rather society's mirror? Hit the jump to find the answer.
It's a fact -- if you play on Xbox Live with any degree of regularity, you will hear the term "n*gger" spouted by a number of individuals. Likewise, expect to hear "f*ggot" plenty of times as well. These aren't jokingly said, either, as the infamous xxx GayBoy xxx found out when he used that gamertag to sign into Live and found himself the subject of vitriolic hatred hidden amongst the gags. That video, and the prolonged knowledge of what happens over Live has, for a long time, served to portray gamers in a bad light, and rightfully so.
While not the most prominent online gamer, I will happily sink a few hours into Gears of War or Call of Duty 4. However, unless I'm playing with people from Destructoid, I won't go anywhere near my headset. Why? Because the people on Live are idiots. They're abusive, they have nothing worthwhile to say and when they're not talking about "qu*ers," they're throwing racial slurs at one another. Yes, it's true -- most gamers are absolutely appalling people.
However, many would erect a fence around the problem, claim it's a defect in "gamer culture" and leave it at that. I instead propose that this is an issue that's far greater than gaming, it's just that Xbox Live happens to bring us closer to the heart of the situation than we're comfortable with.
At the end of the day, we gamers are people as well. When the Xbox 360 is switched off, most of us go out and have lives, go to work, socialize, etcetera. We do not inhabit a subterranean netherworld below the cities of the "normal people." When a gamer steps away from the keboard and the controller, he's not a part of this mythical gamer community -- he's a member of the community, period.
Turning that on its head, it's been a long-held belief that the average person who plays Halo online is the stereotypical male known as the "frat boy," the partying, drinking, pink shirt-wearing college guy -- in short, about as diametrically opposed to the hardcore gamer as you can get. These people, while imbeciles, are also people. They are people playing Xbox Live -- not gamers, regular joes with regular lives.
However, when you put the Internet in the hands of a regular person, you do an amazing thing. You give that person anonymity, and a realm where opinions can be expressed without consequence. In short, you grant diplomatic immunity to everyone, and what is the one thing that humans have proven when they're free from consequence? They let their true, sour, corrupt little selves be known.
What I'm trying to say is that the racism, homophobia and misogyny that you see on Xbox Live has never been, nor ever will be, exclusive to Xbox Live. It's just that Live is a realm without fear of reprisal, where every vile aspect of human nature can be let loose from the cage of societal moral sensibilities. In a sense, Xbox Live is one of the few places where you can see the truth about our civilisation and how far we really haven't come.
We like to believe that racism has been stamped out, that gay people are more accepted and that sexism is a thing of the past, but it's not like that and it won't ever be. The only thing that's changed is the level of fear that people with such bigoted opinions now possess. I live in South East London and I work night shifts -- I can tell you from my own experiences that the problems we think have been all but eradicated still flourish behind closed doors and on the streets under cover of dark. I've worked and dealt with sexists, racists and homophobes for years, but the only place where such vileness is being immortalized on a large and public scale is -- you guessed it -- online haunts such as Xbox Live. Places without fear.
It is this fear that also drives society at large to pretend that these problems are exclusive to subsects of people rather than humanity as a whole. We're scared to admit that most of us haven't really evolved since the dark ages, and so it's easier to find something else to blame, someone else to look down upon, rather than accept what human beings are actually like. It's easier to call the mass murderers and serial killers of history "monsters," view them as boogiemen and freaks until we forget that, yes, these so-called monsters were human too. More than that, they were a reflection of humanity's darkest capabilities.
Just like Xbox Live -- a reflection not of gamers, but of people, and of their potential for hatred, for bigotry and for ignorance.
As gamers, there is little we can do to resolve this issue as Xbox Live is, due to it being an extension of the Internet, too large and active a place to properly tame. Rather than just sit back and complain about it, however, Destructoid encourages you to take a stand. If you don't like being reflected poorly by the miscreants and morons who infest Live, report them. Nobody likes being a snitch, but then no decent human being, rare as they may be, likes a racist either. I certainly will enjoy reporting each and every moron to Major Nelson and his banhammer-wielding cohorts from now on. Will it truly cleanse the root of the problem? Of course not, but one less bigot on Live is a good thing.
To answer the question posed at the beginning of this article, Xbox Live serves as neither society's sewer nor its mirror. It is society itself, and it's perhaps time that someone grabbed a plunger.
Contest:
5:11 PM on 12.04.2007
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Dont be so sure, Jim.
Otherwise, great read as always.
I wish this would be on that new "Inside XBOX" feature for everyone to read. Hopefully if people would read how retarded and annoying they're acting, things would calm down a bit (it's a dream I have).
This excerpt here is a potential cause of suicide as powerful as the whole fracking The Catcher in the Rye.
Fear Jim, fear.
I doubt many well educated people play Xbox Live. I'd say it's just the sewer. You market to frat boys and idiots Halo 3, you get your demographic.
Its a sorry state.
It would have been nice though, if the names weren't blurred out so that the decent people that play Halo (few and far between I know) can be aware and possibly return fire. Thats not the right thing to do, but then again, there isn't really a right thing to do in this situation; You can ignore them I suppose, but that just means that they'll go bother someone else.
It frustrates me to no end that there are people like this and I can't do anything to them directly. I imagine that if at any point in time, when I did play Halo 2 online with some friends, if I had been wearing a headset I would've heard several comments about how much I suck (and I do).
I guess the bottom line is: I wish I could put more faith in karma.
My gamertag is in my profile, if anyone wants to play sometime... soon as I get my 360 back from the shop, at least.
And BTW, the online PC community is much nicer....maybe. Well actually it's probably just that less people have mics.
Plus, anonymous assholes are always louder than anonymous decent people because anonymity is their best chance to be heard.
I also think that what is/is not allowed to be voiced in the public arena will influence individual beliefs, in a 1984 sort of way. So maybe not entirely society's mirror, but more of a reciprocal relationship.
Why do the people who discuss this issue always boil it down to Halo and Xbox live? I've played PC games online for years, and just like Xbox live, playing outside of specific friend or interest based communities results in playing with people like this.
Everyone likes to think that their online community is teh SEX, but in reality, anecdotal evidence that shows that gamers who play notHalo are candidates for sainthood and overall stand up human beings is useless because the experience of online gaming varies depending on who happens to be online while you play.
I guess my point is that when the elitist jackasses come out and turn up their noses and talk about how cool they are because they didn't finish the fight, it's annoying. It's like when you're in college and there's that one guy who's always loudly insisting that he NEVER watches TV. Everyone else thinks he's a stuck up ass, and they're exactly right.
I would have to say that its a sewer though only for the same reason that Destructoid is so awesome, because its a bright spot in a sea of total trash. The community here is a really rare thing which is the main reason that I read this site in the first place.
The thing that mainstream media and (non-gaming) society at large needs to realize, is that gamers are people from all walks of life: from obnoxious 12 years to frat boys to parents, from highly educated people to regular working class guys, men, women, etc. Gamers do not constitute a unique or seperate class of people, because every type of person plays games. If bigotry is a problem in environments like Live then (or any other venue that provides anonymity and no consequences - lookin at you internet), then this really does reflect on all of society.
I don't think I really need to tell you guys how much immaturity I have received in and outside of Live and the internet.
At this point I figure it comes with the territory though. My name is rad. No way am I changin.
Bleh, it hurts to even joke like that anymore. Obviously, it's just a mirror. People are like this, people have always been like this. The KKK has their own websites, do people blame the internet? No, but they're all to willing to blame a video game if one happens to get on XBox Live and start mouthing off.
Ignoring all the stuff about racists and homophobes possibly occupying a place like that, I'd totally sign up to live down there, using hidden cameras to monitor robberies and fight crime like some sewer-Batman.
Just give some more reasons on the reporting bad language, hate speach, etc and maybe a recording system to send specific insidents for review. Heck just have it were if more than say 3 people report a person audio of that game is sent for review but also say one person has lots of occurances then flag them to be monitored and capture audio on the next report filed.
can you do the THIZZLE dance?
Fantastic article, Jim, as usual. I agree 100%...if anyone watched the “Lost Episodes” of Chappelle’s Show, Donnell Rawlings said in one of the interstitial segments (and I’m paraphrasing here), “Everyone has an inner racist. The question is, how much can you say before it gets you fucked up?” Of course, the latter part of that statement only applies if that person gets reported, and consequently gets introduced to the business end of a banhammer.
But Xbox Live isn’t a microcosm of the gamer community; it’s a microcosm of the human community. It’s not like this issue is endemic to Live; I hear the same tripe spouted by idiots on the PSN when I’m playing Warhawk. I’d say more, but anything I added would just be a retread of what Jim so elegantly outlined above.
It's a drag, so sometimes I don't play at all. As a matter of fact, I haven't played anyone online in about a month, including against known friends and family.
But I'm glad Jim wrote this post. It reminds me that people like myself should be online playing regardless. And when those idiots get online, I will continue to report them, drop my connection and find someone better to play against online. Like Jim said, every little bit helps!
VaGiNoSiS0869 is now VaGiNoSiS something, cause they made us change our name. Ridiculous
I find that it gets boiled down to Halo because it is so easily accesable for the frat boys when compared to something like high end pc gaming, where you spend a ton of money and you arent given 5 mics for every xbox product you buy. You also cant get 3 of your dumb friends to gather around your screen to play and talk shit with you at the same time.
There is more to my reasoning but maybe ill save it for my first blog post.
However, the number of normal people I've met on Xbox Live vastly outnumbers the number of racist homophobic idiots. Maybe I've just been lucky, but I was expecting the worst when I bought a 360 and my experience has been surprisingly pleasant on the whole.
This is trolling to the extreme.
WAY TO GO, GAY PEOPLE.
also, penny arcade.
"A civilized man can afford to be rude because he doesn't have to live with the fear of getting his head smashed in."
Most people only act civil out of a fear of reprisal. Xbox Live removes that fear. Internet Fuckwad Theory FTW.
and cocks.
While I do shit talk from time to time I do know a limit and thats what 80% of live users don't get. There is a line, try not to cross it.
*sigh*
Someone who is homophobic clearly has trouble with there own sexual identity, which is why they hate. Insecurity, and its similar with the other issues. But what can you do. So long as different people exist there will be problems between them, this is just our nature. People need to try and be more understanding of themselves and others but most are unwilling to try.
I do think that this sort of ignorant, vile behavior is not the norm of the actual hardcore gamer but is a likely indicator that you are playing the pink-shirt/jock/frat-boy who has just now realized that there are games besides Madden to play
My evidence? Play Halo 3 with a group of people ranked 1-10. Now play Halo 3 with a group of people ranked 30-40. Notice a (general) difference? You should because its much, much quieter and polite on the headset. 'nuff said. We = smarter.
If you give the common person a mouthpiece without the fear of reprisal this is what you get. Fear is what keeps most people in line. I'm not going to rob this store because I know I'll go to jail, and going there is something I would fear.
There are more ways that people are kept in line per se and two of them are demoralization and debt. If you keep your people demoralized and in debt they are easier to control. Just think about how much money you owe when you get out of college unless you got a grant? A free thinking, debt free, and confident citizen is much harder to control.
Without any real fear of reprisal this is what would society would become.
Now I can understand the frat boys with this kind of crap; they're dumb, oafish, and full of cheap beer. But some of these kids on XBL... If I talked the way some of these little pricks do, I'd have gotten punched in the face.
Well, enough old folk ranting out of me. Time to sit by the window and stare at that one tree.
You know, I think just about the worst (outcast) community on the PC are furries, they're creepy but at least they are nice. I'll chill with them anyday next to the should-have-been-abortees I've ran into on Live. That said, there's a minor decrease of asshats from Live on the original.
Otherwise, there's a big ol' mute button that anyone, gay, straight, bi, black, asian, transgendered, can use. I sure do, and I'm all of those. Wait. No.
No, that would be 4chan.
Great read.