Black and Gay gamers, does the Halo lobby piss you off?

[yojimbo]

I've been playing a lot of Halo 3. The lobby before the game has a lot of nigger this, nigger that comments, and fag, fag, fag,,, . It's got lots of other annoying crap but the amount of blantant horrible racism and homophobic is quite surprising.

[Argent Towers]

What do you mean by Lobby? (I haven't played the game.)

[Red Barchetta]

What do you mean by Lobby? (I haven't played the game.)

The pre-game room where people are grouped until the game begins.

[SenorBeef]

Pretty standard in internet gaming. 13 year olds discover that they can be crude without consequence, so they try their best to get attention.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

[yojimbo]

It's not just 13 year olds. The real bile seems to come from a lot of near the end of high school/college kids. I can see where the 13 year olds get it from.

[Hamlet]

I'm a bit surprised that HALO doesn't have a language filter, especially for racist language.

[Crusoe]

It's just as bad on Call of Duty 4.

[The Controvert]

You know, it does seem like it's relatively simple to program it to block certain strings. It'd be hilarious if it replaced certain keywords with random benign text.

Hey, what's up TRANSLUCENT LOLLIPOPs? You're all FRAGRANT BLENDERs!And they could come up with clever ways to replace expressions so people can't get around it by repeating letters, inserting spaces, or adding shift characters. But then it'd be weird iFLOWERainst all odds, certain words would suddenly appear in normal text.

[Amp]

It's not just blacks and gays that should be offended. My 12 year old son and I play Halo 3 all the time and I hate him having to hear that language. I usually mute the all the players until we get into the actual game. It seems to stop once the game is in progress but not always.

[Jurph]

You're all a bunch of SPIDER EXPERTS and you should all go to NEW JERSEY.

(7chan and 4chan have made word-substitution a way of life... why can't Halo and SEATTLE_COMPANY?)

[Cat Fight]

There was a Dr. Phil (http://www.ripten.com/2008/01/09/dr-phil-combats-racists-on-xbox-live-not-physically-that-would-be-too-awesome/) a few weeks back about this, though the racist trash talk escalated into threats of violence (lynching, mostly).

[Charger]

Just so people know, the communication isn't through text, it is verbal.

I have encountered a lot of nastiness in online gaming. I once played a racing game where two guys were debating about racism. One guy kept blurting racist remarks (about blacks) and the other guy was putting him in his place. They do have ways of muting individuals, and you can also give players bad reviews (or good reviews, like the guy who was putting racist guy in his place). If there are enough bad reviews, and they are all under the same category, like "abusive language," their account will be banned.There are five stars worth of reputation that each player has. I'm proud to say that I have five stars filled. I try to do my part to put the gay bashers and racists into the bad reputation pile.

[A Priori Tea]

Yeah, it can get pretty damned irksome, particularly when you have two or three who think that "fag" is the ultimate insult and should be thrown around at any opportunity.

Muting, filing player complaints, and (if necessary) saying "You guys are idiotic assholes. I don't play with idiotic assholes," and dropping out of the game seems to work reasonably well. That, and at least on Live, there's a handy "Avoid Player" feature, so you can steer clear of the egregious offenders.

[Jayn_Newell]

Black and gay? I'm white and straight and that talk pisses me off (I don't play Halo, but it seems to be common across all MMOs to some extent)

[The Hamster King]

Civility is anchored in the threat of receiving a punch in the snoot.

[appleciders]

I'm agreeing with Jayn_Newell- that kind of thing is a big part of why I dislike online gaming. Some games are better than others, though, because some companies enforce rules in different ways. Westwood games I remember as being pretty tame because nearly anything offensive was blocked, Diablo II was tame on the homophobia and anti-black sentiments, I think purely based on the people playing and not censorship, but appalling in the way people hated Koreans.

[Vinyl Turnip]

My feelings are mixed. On the one hand, the racist and anti-gay slurs are certainly disturbing. On the other hand, it's comforting to see that there are still a few words that kids know how to spell properly.

[Zsofia]

My feelings are mixed. On the one hand, the racist and anti-gay slurs are certainly disturbing. On the other hand, it's comforting to see that there are still a few words that kids know how to spell properly.
There's nothing sadder than "niger" (what, the country?) or "faggit", however.

[yojimbo]

Don't get me wrong.

It is totally right and proper for any right thinking person to be offended about this shit. I only mentioned the people in the OP because they are being picked on in particular. I spend quite a bit of time laughing at and ridiculing the people who are spouting this shit.

It would probably mean more to me if I was actually black or gay howvever.

[yojimbo]

It's not just blacks and gays that should be offended. My 12 year old son and I play Halo 3 all the time and I hate him having to hear that language. I usually mute the all the players until we get into the actual game. It seems to stop once the game is in progress but not always.Amp if you ever see a player called yoji102 in the play list then unmute. Coz you son will hear a Irishman fighting the good fight ;)

[cainxinth]

Civility is anchored in the threat of receiving a punch in the snoot.

Pochacco wins for most quote worthy answer.

[Leaper]

You know, it does seem like it's relatively simple to program it to block certain strings. It'd be hilarious if it replaced certain keywords with random benign text.

Hey, what's up TRANSLUCENT LOLLIPOPs? You're all FRAGRANT BLENDERs!

Read the comic PS238 by Aaron Williams, do you? :) Funny, isn't it?

And it's not just the Halo lobby. Apparently, there's angry, insulting trash talk coming up when people play UNO (yes, the card game Uno)!

[Argent Towers]

Fuck Halo - Battlefield 2 is where it's at. You'll get kicked and/or banned for any racist language on most BF2 servers.

[dangermom]

Does Halo have any "no offensive language" servers? My husband has been playing Team Fortress 2 a lot, online with his brother and SIL, and it has the same audio setup, I guess. I noticed that he was telling some guy on his team that it was a clean server and to quit with the language. Turns out there are servers specified as no language, who knew? But it's nice to have, I think.

[Just Some Guy]

Black and gay? I'm white and straight and that talk pisses me off (I don't play Halo, but it seems to be common across all MMOs to some extent)
Same here and it's not the hate speech that bothers me so much as the people are so incredibly unpleasant to be around that I don't want to play online. Even if they didn't use those words then they'd be screaming some other kind of insult or incoherent ranting. And if they're not doing that then they're telling you how awful you are for not doing things the exact same way (often a particularly inefficient way) that everyone else plays.

The decent person needle in the haystack of idiots just isn't worth the effort.

[Least Original User Name Ever]

Don't get me wrong.

It is totally right and proper for any right thinking person to be offended about this shit. I only mentioned the people in the OP because they are being picked on in particular. I spend quite a bit of time laughing at and ridiculing the people who are spouting this shit.

It would probably mean more to me if I was actually black or gay howvever.

If I'm in charge of a party that has someone that's talking all that shit, I kick him out after warning him once. If I go into a party that it happens, I leave.

I know of a couple messageboards that people get together and play and don't have to worry about the kids. If you're interested, message me. They tend to cater to the older gamer as well.

[Pithy Moniker]

I'm neither black nor gay but I find it extremely off putting. On my first few evenings in Gears of War, I ran into a load of kids spouting off this nonsense.

First impressions being what they are, it turned my mild dislike for online shooter matches into out and out hatred.

[smiling bandit]

In a related matter, yesterday, for the first time, I hit ignore on not one but two people in World of Warrcraft. The first started blabbing about how all Role-players were freaks... on a role playing server... in a role-playing game...

When the twit started yakking about how we were all cybering off to each other (and yes, the mron meant exactly what you think) and we were all males. Of course, some males play female characters. Some femkales also *gasp* play male ones.

Then the dim-witted baboon and some other poo-flinging monkey started getting into it on about America rock and is teh bestest and all other countries suck versus America bites and it's no good and we are all going to die at the hands of the Germans/Russians/Chinese/whatever.

I ignored them both. And I hope they both get eaten by a passing level 72 elite and the GM's "accidentally" delete their accounts.

[Hentor the Barbarian]

It's just as bad on Call of Duty 4.You get one of those headsets thinking, "Cool, I'll be able to develop team strategy with people," and then find out that you never develop team strategy. If you're lucky, you get quiet, but most of the time you get streams of cursing, stupid posturing, ADHD kids who just don't shut up, or trolls.

[Lady of the Lake]

In a related matter, yesterday, for the first time, I hit ignore on not one but two people in World of Warrcraft. The first started blabbing about how all Role-players were freaks... on a role playing server... in a role-playing game...

Ugh, yes, agreed here. Last night I was playing Wow on The Scyers server (RP) and I guess a whole bunch of servers where down because we suddenly had an influx of level 1 blood elves who couldn't spell and were using general chat to insult role playing servers...on a role playing server.

They were just so condescending...and yet so idiotic at the same time...

I wanted to spank them...

[hotflungwok]

This has been around since open multiplayer first started, and it's just got worse.

I remember playing Diablo 1 online, and running into a guy asking questions about some monster. I wanted clarification, and he said 'You know, the little guys, the dungeon niggers.' That was a camel's back moment for me, and I stopped playing Diablo online after that.

I remember another time playing Starcraft on Battle.net when this guy is massing troops to attack a zerg base, when a defiler pops up and plagues em. He says 'Man defilers are gay'. So I said back 'You mean defilers prefer sex partners of their own gender?' And he gets flustered and defensive and finishes with 'No, they're just gay'. It struck me that he just meant gay=bad and didn't care what else it meant, and how messed up that was.

It's been the same everywhere I've gone, and it's one of the reasons I rarely play online with people I don't know. And probably the biggest reason I've avoided MMORPGs compeltey. I watched my friend play Everquest when it first came out, and it was stuffed wall to wall with 10 years suffering from terminal Tourette's syndrome.

[D_Odds]

You know, it does seem like it's relatively simple to program it to block certain strings. It'd be hilarious if it replaced certain keywords with random benign text.

Hey, what's up TRANSLUCENT LOLLIPOPs? You're all FRAGRANT BLENDERs!And they could come up with clever ways to replace expressions so people can't get around it by repeating letters, inserting spaces, or adding shift characters. But then it'd be weird iFLOWERainst all odds, certain words would suddenly appear in normal text.By any chance, do you read P.S. 238?

[control-z]

That's a shame. I'm a PC gamer and we generally don't have lobbies, we just pick a server from a list (usually sorted by ping) and play. Once in the game I'd say the censored and uncensored servers are about 50-50 for Half-Life-based games. Usually as a game gets older there will be fewer admins around to enforce.

[Leaper]

By any chance, do you read P.S. 238?

Very good question! (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=9413291&postcount=22) :D

[The Controvert]

Hah, you guys are so JUMPING clever.

[some white dude]

I can't remember who it was, but one of my buddies told me about someone that got booted from XBL for racist language. XBL does allow users to report others for misconduct. I imagine if one player received enough bad reports, XBL would investigate and perhaps act accordingly.

Halo had sort of a mass appeal and brought in a bunch of new gamers. COD4 is popular, but let's face it, it's not getting press on major news networks like Halo did. I think those new gamers are the really bad ones because I simply don't see as much bigotry in COD4. It's like most of the morons from Halo were replaced by Brits.

[WhyNot]

My 15 year old is a huge XBOX Live fan (Halo, Call of Duty 4 and others) and I'm proud to say that he's put the kibosh on a few asshats of this variety. He's got one of those gaming chairs with speakers in it, and at random moments I'll go listen in (he knows this - sometimes he wears the headset, and he also knows that at any moment I might ask him to take the headset off and put in through the speakers, just to check up on him. It's part of our agreement for letting him play games too violent for my taste). Anyway, the first time I heard something offensive, he quickly told the guy to shut it (and sniped him to make his point ;) ), and I've overheard him a few times telling people his little sister or his mother was in listening distance and would they watch their language, please, even if neither she nor I were in the room with him.

Obviously, I have no problem with swearing, but yeah, the nigger and faggot comments do get under my skin. He knows that shit's not allowed in my house and he respects that, even if the speaker is in another country.

[D_Odds]

Very good question! (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=9413291&postcount=22) :DIf I were a smart man, this would teach me to :

(1) Read the whole damn thread before posting, and
(2) Return to a thread in which I've posted to finish reading the posts in the thread.

If I were a smart man...