Slashdot Mirror
Cleaning up Thunder Bluff
An anonymous reader writes "Colleen Hannon at Gamers With Jobs is mad as hell, and she's not going to take it anymore. 'Unless you're playing Neopets, online servers are full of foul-mouthed, racist junk-monkeys. The hate-filled miasma they spatter around them has reached the point where many people who could be on those services won't go, and those who do brave it won't go without a posse and riot gear.' She plays out every side of the argument: why things have gotten as bad as they've become, what publishers have and haven't done about it, and why she thinks things are now at unacceptable levels of incivility. She's calling on us gamers to get together and figure this out, because: 'If we wait for the new sheriff in town to fight this battle for us we might not like the town we're left with.' Is it as bad as she says?"
Gabe said it best.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
If the video game industry wasn't an extended boys locker room where everything goes because there's no parents or teachers around? I worked for six years in the video game industry where such childish behavior was the norm. The supervisors called each other "douche bags". A woman lead tester was fired for calling a tester an "a**hole" for screwing off on her project, never mind that male testers routinely called each other "hos" and "bitches". Maybe it's time for the video game industry to clean up its act.
The problem is a lack of real-world accountability.
If someone were to act in real life the way some of those idiots act online, they'd get punched in the face pretty quickly. Unfortunately, there's no way to punch someone in the face over the net.
America's Army still has the best solution. Their in-game implementation of the United States Army Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. They just put griefers in a barred cell from which there is no escape, and keep them there for a while. There's nothing to do in the cell, except peer out the little barred window and watch the sun go down.
Did anyone play pick up basketball games at their local playground growing up? Racist, sexist, homophobic, profane... you name it! It was called smack talk and some people were incredible at it. This is the modern day equivalent. If you are a 30-year gamer with a job (like me) and you go into a game filled with teenagers... guess what? Smack talk. It's no different than heading to your local basketball court and trying to hang with the teenagers there.