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

[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.

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.

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?