A Report on Swearing in Online Games

A Next Generation article references an informal study done on the frequency of swearing on Xbox Live. From the study: "When you logon to Xbox live more often then not you will be greeted by a 14 year old that learned a new word on the playground that day, or maybe it's the drunken 24 year old who hates black people, gays and anyone who isn't in his frat. No matter who you are if you have played on live you have run into cursing and lewdness. If you look at the rating for the game you can see that it is intended for ages 17+ but parents don't care/understand/listen so lots of underage kids have [Halo 2]." Warning: links contain profanity.

Comments

Expected

[Agent00Wang]

Considering that the bulk of online gamers are of the age where they probably speak like this in real life too, it shouldn't be very surprising that it spills over into their online activities as well.

Re:Expected

[Kelson]

Whenever someone brings up the "Ah! Kids can hear swearing! Aiiieeee!!!!" meme, I bring out this story from my own childhood.

When I was in middle school, I spent a week working at a cub scout day camp. I think I was around 12 or 13 at the time. The adults warned us that we had to watch our language around the cubs (who were probably around 8 or 9), because they didn't want the kids picking up any bad words from us. They needn't have bothered. The kids were far more foul-mouthed around us than we were amongst ourselves, and actually managed to shock us. This was in the late 1980s.

Kids don't need TV, movies, video games or the Internet to learn bad words. They learn them from their friends at school, or they learn them from parents, or from neighbor kids.

There was a B.C. comic strip a few years ago that I thought illustrated this point well: Two kids (well, ants) walk into the room, one crying, "Mom, he said the Z-word!" The parents send the kid to his room, then have this brief conversation: "Where'd the little %@#&! learn the Z-word?" "Beats the #@*$ out of me."

Re:Expected

[Wildclaw]

The sad thing is that excessive swearing is a sign that the person in question is lacking in vocabulary. Swear words are mostly used in sentences as replacement for more complex words or sentence structures.

People who swear every other sentence have serious problems expressing themselves because their speech are very binary. Either someone is a fucker or an ordinary person, but the inbetween doesn't exist. It is of course possible to place different values on each swear word, but that rarely happens because it would defeat the purpose of using swear words to simplify sentences.

This is why it is very important to make sure that children don't swear. Swearing is addictive because it is easy to do and doesn't require thinking and as long as someone uses swear words he/she won't learn to take advantage of the full range of the language.

Swearing is in my opinion best reserved to expressing extreme emotions. The more they are used the more diluted they become.