There’s been a lot of talk in the news about the relationship between gaming and bullying. Where does smack talk end and harassment begin? What can be done to make sure that vulnerable people aren’t being exposed to cyber bullying while partaking in an activity that is supposed to be recreational? These are essential conversations. Yet experts seem to devote little attention to something that is obvious to anybody who is a gamer. The kind of bullying that happens in game space is not the same as that which unfolds in schools and other non-gaming online spaces.
I don’t want to suggest that game spaces are somehow exempt from lowest common denominator bullying and hate speak. That happens, and it’s quite sad. Instead, I would offer that there is a fundamentally different state of mind to the gaming bully, and said state is likely immune to conventional anti-bullying strategies.
Allow me to explain through narrative. Once upon a time there was a bully named Brandon. He had a shitty home life, a learning disability, and at age twelve stood nearly six feet tall. For various and sundry reasons, he decided that he would torment yours truly through a combination of punches to my knee and subsequent public ridicule as I limped around the playground. My parents’ advice was pointless in this situation; they told me to ignore him. That made things worse. Teachers were worse than useless in their attempts facilitate some sort of peace treaty between myself and my bully. If the half-illiterate lummox had any respect for the rule of law and civil discourse, then he wouldn’t have taken to bullying.
The only solution was one that Admiral Adama espoused in Battlestar: meet force with force. It took one glorious act of resistance, wherein I visited upon Brandon the pain and embarrassment he had heaped upon me for months, to break the cycle. For the remainder of that year, and the year that followed, Brandon never so much as made eye contact with me. But oh how I waited for the day when he would give me even the thinnest excuse to lay another beating on him. I had proven myself his superior; he knew it and I knew it. More than anything in the world, I wanted an opportunity to settle accounts for all the times he had laid his hands upon me.
Why this story, you might ask. Because gaming bullies, are not the Brandons of the world. They are not the sort who pick on smart kids because of their own short comings. They’re not sociopaths in the making who feel a giddy pleasure in hurting others. Gaming bullies are me, or rather what people like Brandon could have made me. Gaming bullies are people who have proven themselves superior to others, within their given game, and then search for opportunities to demonstrate that superiority. This is the keystone reason why combating gaming bullying is going to be a particularly challenging thing.
Consider current strategies for fighting childhood/teenage bullying. A pillar of that effort is reminding people that we are all, by and large, equal. Gaming bullies won’t respond to that principle as the game space itself is a pure meritocracy. If a person practices long enough, they will get good at their chosen game. In the mind of the gaming bully, they have earned the right to stomp on the skulls of their lessers – possibly because they were stomped on as a newbie (a behaviour pattern that gaming bullies share with those in the real world) or possibly because they feel that by virtue of their skill alone they can act however they like. Let me be clear, I don’t condone this false sense of privilege and entitlement. Nor do I mean to suggest that every elite player is prone to such retrograde behavior. Simply that those who undertake bullying actions in game spaces do so with an institutional righteousness that is absent in more conventional bullying. Therefore telling the gaming bully that their actions are unacceptable on the grounds of equanimity, and every act that stems from said core principle, will not be well met.
Another variable to consider is that gaming spaces are not public spaces. They’re owned by private corporations who are in the business of facilitating competition. While most responsible developers include, at the very least, boilerplate terms of service that name hate speak as grounds for termination of service, the effectiveness those policies depend heavily upon the willingness of gamers to self police.
Consider this example. Some months ago I was in Starcraft 2’s in-game chat. Therein one gentleman was going on at length about his inability to find a job. He aired all sorts of dirty laundry, including a story about his inability to land a gig at a fast food restaurant. Some people in the chat decided to give this fellow a hard time. He was told that if he sounded as desperate and pathetic in his cover letters as he did in chat, nobody would ever give him a job – perhaps a fair point if it wasn’t wrapped in a bow of dickishnes and snark. Another person said something along the lines of “just kill yourself already”. Others called him out for moaning about his life in Starcraft, rather than devoting his energy to job hunting. I doubt any of the people in this scenario would win a congeniality award, but who among them crossed the line? By what means do we measure that line? And before you say common sense, let’s remember this is a person venting about their career in an in-game Starcraft chat. Common sense would dictate a person talk to their therapist about those issues, not a room full of strangers.
This example also begs the question, what do gamers owe to each other as members of a community? How far does that community extend outside of the game space? Should everybody who was in that chat room have flagged the “kill yourself” guy for abuse? Or in his own trollish and ill-bred way, was he saying what we were all thinking, “Stop hijacking the conversation when we’re trying to talk about build orders.” Thus do we come to the next big problem in game space bullying: gaming is an intensely personal activity. The idea that a gamer would have to take on responsibility for other gamers’ welfare runs counter intuitive to the whole process. Why should a person pay for a game only to be told that part of enjoying that experience requires them to be on guard for potential bullies and other deviant behavior? Is that even a realistic expectation? NB: I’m excluding MMOs from this particular line of thought as they have their own unique social mores and hierarchies that would be worthy of a post on its own.
While I whole heartedly believe that conversations on gaming and bullying need to happen, these talks need to framed within an appropriate context. In the real world, people are trained to believe that we are all equal and valid. In the gaming world, this is hardly the case. The elite are elite not through inheritance or circumstance of birth, but through performance. Dealing with bullying that emerges out of that head space will require a strategy that 1) addresses the fact that these bullies have earned a station that puts them above others in a particular game space 2) doesn’t depend the expectation that gamers will be a self policing community and 3) is not so invasive that it prompts gamers, who can be very libertarian, into acts of Anonymous-esque rebellion against the measures that are meant to ensure a safe experience for all.
Interesting article Adam, and well put. I’m not a gamer myself, but I was wondering, are there community standards in any of these gaming communities/groups. I’m thinking specifically of the example awhile back of the fighting game exhibition/competition where a male player was viciously attacking a female player using hateful, misogynistic speech and claimed it was okay because that was expected in the community. Do these standards, if they exist, have an effect on what is and isn’t considered bullying?
K.W. Ramsey recently posted..The Dork Review: Ninjas Vs. Pirates Featuring Zombies
KW, you’ve touched on one of the big problems with this issue. Standards vary from game to game. Hate speak, racism, and the like are usually covered under boiler plate terms of service. And there’s a huge world of difference between real world events and competition limited to online spaces. I’d like to think that smack talk that you desribe would get flagged by whoever was officiating the event. But unlike regular sports eSports have no regulating bodies, at least not yet.
As for in-game harassment…I used to play an MMO called EVE Online. It was a space trading/combat game. The company that designed it prided themselves on keeping it a very free market with limited rules and intervention. So much so that people have lost and made small fortunes through insider trading within the game’s various corporations. Nothing that dramatic ever happened to me though. On my worst day in EVE Online a certain player took issue with my screen name and persisted in blasting my ship out from under me, over and over. He managed to be around every corner. More than that, he would “pod” me by destroying my escape pod and killing my character thus causing me to lose stat points that only accumulated over time.
Some might say he was bullying me. Others that he was just exercising his right to do what he wanted within an lassie-faire environment. By playing that game I give my approval to participate in a lassie-faire space. So who am I to cry foul when somebody acts like an ass hat and tosses in a few epithets about my lineage to boot?
Even if we were to have a debate on this topic and nail down what constituted bullying and what was fair play, all of that goes out the window when we change games.
Excellent post, Adam, and you’re absolutely right. I think gaming bullies are following some of the same behaviour patterns that actual combat triggers. It becomes a more pack-animal mentality life and while they’re living it virtually, it doesn’t make the bullying any less real to the bullied.
Beverly recently posted..Would You Ask a Critic to Change a Review?
I’m not a gamer. But what you describe does map to real-world bullying: Bullies don’t look for a challenge, they look for victims. While surely in-game bullies have earned an elite status, why are they not looking for further opportunities to test themselves? The reason is the same as the meat-space bully: They need to win and will only put themselves in sure-to-win scenarios.
Matt Moore recently posted..The New Bit.ly / J.mp
Matt, you’re absolutely right in tracking the predator-prey psychology of bullies regardless of the world in which they live. I think the key difference between the two worlds is the presumption of power on behalf of the bully. Meat bullies have cronies validating their behavior and their role as the alpha dog. Gaming bullies have a system based on merit and skill validating their questionable actions. Something like Starcraft divides players who compete online into leagues (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, Grand Master – the latter two generally occupied by professional SC players) If a Diamond level player starts hassling a Bronze player, for whatever reason, they have an incredibly complex matchmaking/competition system backing up their words. If I, as a Gold league player, called out the Diamond troll in question, it would likely be met with a “talk to me when you’re my equal” response. Perhaps because the titles are meaningless outside of the game space (save for pro players who generally conduct themselves like professionals for fear of losing sponsors or youtube fans) rank and station become something incredibly powerful to the game world’s social dynamic.
That’s a great point, too, Matt. I wonder if it seems different somehow because of the exaggerations that happen when people have the screen anonymity.
Beverly recently posted..Would You Ask a Critic to Change a Review?
Beverly – I have no doubt. I also imagine a lot of bullied nerds become bullies themselves in the game space.
Matt Moore recently posted..The New Bit.ly / J.mp
I found this article as I googled “Trash talk vs bullying” and I found it a very good read. I’m the President of my university’s gaming club, and while in my own house I make sure that everyone understands that bullying and aggression in general is frowned upon, I’ve been spending the past couple days with some teenagers in my advisor’s summer camp program. They are very aggressive and smack talk quickly becomes a problem, even when everyone is in the same room. I haven’t really found the answers I was looking for, but it helped to have it pointed out that they view their own game success as validation.