When a gay person hears "faggot," they hear it as a question: "Remember when that mailman spat at you?" or maybe "Remember when your mother cried when you finally managed to come out to her?" It is the sound of pain, confusion and fear - or perhaps mild amusement that the mailman could only spit a measly meter from his door - but usually it is an unpleasant memory, like one of the fragile crates breaking with an orange flash in "Handle With Care."
Mod designer Robert Yang on responses to the discovery by players of one of his mods that their perspective character is a gay man, Not That There's Anything Wrong With That.
The fear of homosexuality by willing participants in a highly homosocial environment like multiplayer games - where an awful lot of the people you're interacting with are likely to be male - is pretty interesting. Much less interesting is the cavalcade of racial and sexuality-based abuse that at this point is pretty much baked into the PvP experience - as referenced by this (NSFW) remix of an advert for Halo 3. I play multiplayer FPS, and in particular Left 4 Dead. Usually I do this with friends, but sometimes the mood takes me and I jump into a quick match. Quick matches are the zipless version of deathmatching, really - you'll probably never see these people again, and your brief time together is conditional upon the achievement of a common goal. It's a zombie massage parlour.
Problem being, these casual encounters might involve one of two insults being bounced around a lot - newb and gay. You're gay, the zombies' pathing is gay, the clipping when attempting to get through doors to avoid an enraged monster is gay, and so on. Also, in their desire to represent a diverse range of survivors, Valve made one of the playable characters African American and another a woman. You can see where that might go in a moment of rage, or attempted bonding between socially uncertain young men.
XBox Live has a recommendation system, which allows users at least to express a very simple approval or disapproval of a fellow player - which may not be very much use for establishing a world of gamers without prejudice, but will allow you to filter out players you have had unhappy encounters with from your personal view of the world. That isn't much of a grievance procedure, though, and in fact the terminology is so built into the culture that I suspect that a complaint to Microsoft that its servers were full of people willing to call you a fag at the drop of a hat would be met by sincere "yes, and...?" bewilderment.
Possibly this would be less the case with the liberal use of racial epithets (and one racial epithet in particular) for the character of Louis. This article in the Houston Chronicle was reblogged by various game sites and led to a lot of furious responses (gamers discussing racism is, along with comic book fans discussing the question of consent in recent issues of Spider-Man, a conversation it can be quite painful to experience). The examples the writer gives are, unfortunately, pretty weak - and it is either disingenuous or foolish to say that Left 4 Dead 2 has been "causing an uproar", with the heavy implication that this uproar was about its Louisiana setting and the possible triggering or racism thereof, rather than the fact that many gamers think that it should be an expansion pack to Left 4 Dead rather than a standalone game - but the question deserves a better article and, in the main, better responses. Especially, in fact, because Steam has no equivalent marking system to XBox Live, so even this very blunt instrument is absent. You can complain to server admins, but again the rotating and ephemeral nature of the servers used for quick matching means that this would be a very small amount of spit hurled into the teeth of a force 8.
So, what do you do? I'm still trying to work out an answer to this question. It's tough on the other players, but generally my response is to make it clear why I'm leaving the game, and then leave. This is a bit feeble, but not many options exist. Depending on circumstances, it doesn't always seem wholly inappropriate to empty one's rifle into the head of the person who made the remark on the way out. The difficulty being that in the etiquette of games both of these activities - rage quitting and team killing - are unacceptable, as they impair the playing experience for others. It's a little mind-bending to think that applying these principles to the real world would make it less polite to leave a room in the middle of a game of bridge than to call a fellow player a faggot for a badly judged clubs bid.
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3 comments:
Interesting.
Your point in the final paragraph about the compatibility of politeness and strategies of objection to hatespeech has got me thinking:
"The difficulty being that in the etiquette of games both of these activities - rage quitting and team killing - are unacceptable, as they impair the playing experience for others. It's a little mind-bending to think that applying these principles to the real world would make it less polite to leave a room in the middle of a game of bridge than to call a fellow player a faggot for a badly judged clubs bid."
What is politeness? Is it only a set of behaviours intended to support the current race/class system? Whose comfort is considered important? Perhaps the manners of critical consciousness will necessarily be different – to turn it around - is politeness ever compatible with confronting oppression? I think a lot of folks feel offended when presented with their wrongdoing however polite the presentation; in my opinion those folks most worthy of my respect are those who behave like civilised adult humans when gently confronted with unintended adverse consequences of their actions.
I can’t remember who it was who wrote that the social “rules” in functional families are few and explicit; but that kind of thinking is an argument for explicit behavioural codes. What’s the point at which politeness gets defined by games distributors? I suppose widespread cultural change requires the greater quantity of cash in the hands of those identifying with “wrong side” of the gender/orientation/race division?
my opinion those folks most worthy of my respect are those who behave like civilised adult humans when gently confronted with unintended adverse consequences of their actions.
Absolutely, and ultimately I think politeness only goes so far - I want to be a good participant in the communal experience of the game, but at the same time I don't really feel bad about disrupting the gaming experience for someone who has just disrupted it for me, and at that point I have to hope that the other participants would rather have that disruption as well than ignore the elephant. It's possible they won't, in which case... well, that's a shame, but the game doesn't delete itself from your hard drive if one instance of it is ruined, and if enough people start dropping out of games or team killing, it provides an incentive for the players for whom getting through the game is the objective to start policing themselves and others. I remember the first time I encountered this was when a friend was playing Counter Strike and responded to a team mate using racial abuse with "First of all [shoots him in the head]. Second, please don't use that word". Which seemed proportional.
As it is, you'll often, just as you would in the real world, get people explaining that what they are doing is not offensive, and in extreme cases that you are in fact not responding to offensive behaviour but engaging in some sort of complex psychological gambit.
I don't want to suggest that the world of online multiplayer is a total cesspool though - most games take place among groups organised around principles of amity and mutual respect, and actually the ability of games to create a context for interaction is really awesome. There are specific sets of circumstances - the anonymity of the server (and server admins ultimately set the rules in distributed online play networks), the knowledge that you will possibly never encounter anyone in the group again, the isolated and atomic nature of the group game, effectively - which I think make it more likely that this sort of unintentional racist or homophobic griefing will take place. In some cases, servers are basically set up for awfulness - in the same way that it's hard for Facebook to police every hate group that get set up.
And also, sadly, a kind of cultural training that some terms just aren't really offensive, and that if you think they are then you are in absolute terms wrong - the Chris Moyles argument that "gay" meaning bad has nothing to do with "gay" meaning "gay". Given that today there is a debate going on about the circumstances under which it's OK to tell a colleague in light entertainment that she looks like a Pakistani (editorial gloss), and how one comes back from that, that kind of belief - that people just need to (to quote Brucie) get a sense of humour - is by no means unique to gaming.
This is something which I think there's a real incentive to crack - because teaching environments may become more like games and games may become more like teaching environments. By which I don't mean the model where people attend lectures in Second Life or similar, but rather that the way people are taught to do things in games (how you move, how you aim, how you manipulate objects) can and will be harnessed to teach. I've already seen 3D realtime environments being used to train people in how to keep power plants running - partly because you can do things like blow up the plant, which you can't in real-life hands-on training.
Cultural heterogeneity is definitely an important point -and a sense that you will be heard, that your voice will be respected - basically, that you can say "not cool" and have the responses to that not treat your perspective as totally alien or insane. That's not just about having a more representative sample of humanity gaming, but that representative sample's opinions being given space and not swamped - which might be easier in less immediately tense environments than a zombie apocalypse, but nonetheless.
One issue here is that the participants aren't thinking of this as hate speech - it's just the natural expression of frustration at another player, or at the game. Part of the diialect, essentially. I don't think that has to be the case, but it's very common. Which is where Yang, I think, hits the nail on the head:
Rather, I define homophobia as anytime I feel pressured to compromise this crucial part of myself. It is everywhere and always.
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