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

Swearing online

[riffzifnab]

Swearing online?! That never fucking happens.

Re:Swearing online

[Trick]

I live in a multilingual household myself (one of them French), and you're right. There's absolutely nothing like French for truly inspirational cursing. It's perfect when you really want to make someone feel like dirt (which maybe isn't surprising, considering the source).

On the other hand, for flat-out obscene, French doesn't work very well. It just seems too damned refined.

Piss off a southeast Asian, like someone Vietnamese or Laotian, if you ever want to hear stuff that puts English, or even French, cursing to shame. They won't think twice about tossing in bestiality, violence, and incest, often all at the same time. Really disgusting stuff. You gotta love it.

Re:Swearing online

[jlarocco]

<p> : This is a paragraph tag. You can use it to break your post up into logical, coherent groups of sentences.

There are several uses for the paragraph tag, including:

• Making posts easier to read.
• Making your post look like you actually have thought out, coherent ideas about something
• Making you not look like a fucking moron.

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.

Gamesmanship

[MBraynard]

In some Xbox games, if you are trying to win, you can use the other person's emotional state to overcome their reason/rational thought. Normally when someone is cursing up a storm, they are letting their emotions overcome their rational thought and they make mistakes. This is both in fast games (Halo2) and slow games (World Championship Poker).

If you can just goad them a little bit into cutting loose with their mouths, you are are halfway to victory.

Conversely, it is important to keep your own cool and your focus on the game. A few taunts when the other guy is down may help in keeping him down as you compound his anger, but this must be done out of strategy, not out of an effort to verbally 'get back' at your opponent.

Re:Gamesmanship

[Mr. Flibble]

In some Xbox games, if you are trying to win, you can use the other person's emotional state to overcome their reason/rational thought. Normally when someone is cursing up a storm, they are letting their emotions overcome their rational thought and they make mistakes. This is both in fast games (Halo2) and slow games (World Championship Poker).

I used to play Half Life 2 with a guy who was obviously a troll. His nick was "sand nigger" and he kept uttering profanities all over the chat, both profanity and ethnic slurs.

People used to get all worked up about him and play badly, or type often and get killed - which is exactly what he wanted.

I decided to try anti-trolling him, and instead of responding to the "nigger" in his tag, I began objecting to his use of the word "sand". This confused him, and when I said things (that I don't actually agree with) like: "Well, I find the word 'sand' and all the implications that it carries, I am offended by that. You can keep using 'nigger' thats ok, I am not offended by that, 'nigger' is an ok word to use."

He suddenly lost his temper - and began accusing *ME* of being a racist, because I was clearly not offended by the term "nigger". I kept harping on him about his offensive use of the word "sand" and ignored all his ethnic slurs. His voice became very animated over the chat until he was positivly screaming. He finally left the server in disgust.

So, clearly, he was using his nick and his ethnic slurs as a way to get to people and have an advantage, when I came along and pretended not to be offended by these things, he thought I really was a racist, and went off on me.

That is really the best way to handle people that are trying to emotionally troll you - either ignore them, or troll them back, most will quite ironically bite.

The problem being what...

[__aaclcg7560]

Does it really surprise anyone that kids actually swear? You can't blame this one on video games. I learned all my swear words when my parents argued when I was a child and picked up a few more colorful words from my sister-in-law when she got a divorce from my brother. I didn't start using swear words until I got into middle school where colorful language was a prelude to a fist fight. A long time ago, parents used to take responsibility for their children's language devopment. These days, no one gives a fraq!

What about...

[grub]

... cunt? It's not in his fucking list of damn swears. Fucking cunts always use that fucking cunt word. Cunt, cunt cunt cunt cunt. It's all you hear sometimes.

Fuck.

New disclaimer on XBOX games

[c0d3h4x0r]

WARNING:

By logging onto the XBOX Live service, you understand and agree that you may from time to time hear Steve Ballmer threatening to "fucking kill" you.

I know why

[MBCook]

It is the same reason people act like scum on message boards: anoninimity. No one knows who they are so they don't have to behave. You see that on /. too. Penny Arcade summed it up excelent once.

Comic

Re:Profanity filters?

[wampus]

I'll add that to the list of jobs I do NOT want.

1) Guy that scrapes up dead animals on the side of the road
2) Chicken sexer
3) Bull semen collector
4) X-Box Live voice chat moderator

Profanity filter code.

[LightningBolt!]

When I worked on a networked EA title a couple years back, we were required to put in a chat profanity filter. We were given some code and a file with the obscenity list that had been developed for a previous title. The obscenity file was pretty funny, containing some words we'd never heard before, and some ordinary words that we couldn't imagine used as obscenities. Combined with the code that tried to detect variations, it was weird, because it would allow some really standard obscenities you'd expect to filter out, and blocked stuff like "assume" and "sucker". Also amusing, the file ended up in plaintext on the disc. So if you dumped the disc contents, it looked like some disgruntled programmer had put all sorts of swears into the game.

Fuddy duddies

[RomulusNR]

by a 14 year old that learned a new word on the playground that day [my bold]

I'm always amazed by people who simply seem to never have been young at all, ever.

Or else, there is some condition or secret government experiment that causes people's brains to be wiped of all experiences had before age 22.

Earth to shut-in researchers: Most kids know all such words well before age 12.

Maybe some parents don't manage to hear them until 14, but that's because they are uninvolved with their children's lives, or else drastically shelter them.

Re:Wait, teenagers swear?

[R3d M3rcury]

Actually, the problem I have with kids swearing has to do with their young and whiny voices.

When I grew up, it was one of those "Just hear it, don't say it." It was pretty much true for every other kid, too. So when I heard people swear, it was mostly adults. To be specific, it was mostly male adults. With deep male voices saying, "C'mon, move you goddamn pig-fuckin' bastard" while trying to move a rock out of the way or some other strenuous male activity. When women swore, it was usually in an expletive sense, like "Oh shit! I forgot to pick up milk at the store!"

But still, mature voices.

So, yes, I hate hearing little kids swear just because it sounds so wrong to hear, "motherfucking asshole" in this high-pitched voice.

Ha HA, MULTIPLE entendre!

[shigelojoe]

I made a guy come over the poker table at me once. Best poker game of my life.

You must have had a good hand, eh?

Re:One reason I let my XBox Live account die.

[orac2]

I agree -- the swearing's fine, it's all the racism, misogyny and homophobia that's really starting to get old. I've attended press conferences with video game execs[1] and when I ask them about the dichotomoy between wanting to be treated like a legitimate, mainstream activity on the one hand and the hostile and exclusionary nature of an average morning on X-Box they, at best, shrug their shoulders with a "what can you do?" attitude or, at worst, fail to even understand the basis of the question. How about enforcing your damn ToS??? For younger players Xbox live requires a credit card to use, so there's supposed to be some adult around -- why capture a few seconds of the audio stream and send them a damn letter with a link explaining why their son has been banned? A few hundred "Notes home to the Parents" would have a definite chilling effect -- at the very least, it would finally say, "You know what guys, this isn't okay" instead of the wink, wink bullshit from the game companies that happens now, to point where some kids don't even understand why anyone would object when they spout some of this garbage.

And just in case any of those kids are reading, let me spell it out: it's not okay to use "gay" as a synonym for "crap", "fag" as a synonym for "asshole", "rape" as a synonym for "achieve victory over" or "nigger" as a synonym for, well, anything.

[1] These are often the same execs who mouth platitudes about wanting the industry to be less male oriented, and more welcoming to women, while surrounded by giant advertising placards featuring anatomically impossible women with heavy weaponry.

Re:My CS Glory Days

[miyako]

I'm 22 and have played most of the most violent video games available...and I don't think it's appropriate for ME to see the goatse guy any more often than strictly nessesary.