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.
What do you mean by Lobby? (I haven’t played the game.)
The pre-game room where people are grouped until the game begins.
Pretty standard in internet gaming. 13 year olds discover that they can be crude without consequence, so they try their best to get attention.
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.
I’m a bit surprised that HALO doesn’t have a language filter, especially for racist language.
It’s just as bad on Call of Duty 4.
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.
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.
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?)
There was a Dr. Phil a few weeks back about this, though the racist trash talk escalated into threats of violence (lynching, mostly).
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.
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.
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)
Civility is anchored in the threat of receiving a punch in the snoot.
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.
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.
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.
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 