I rarely play games with randoms. Injustice 2 (at launch anyway) had no way for you to disable your opponent's mic. I played a few ranked matches. My 3rd or 4th match, a guy I beat called me a faggot and a nigger.
Then I remembered why I stick with friends.
Gaming culture can die in a fire.
I don't take it to be part of gaming culture. Wouldn't you agree that that kind of thing would never happen at a local gaming event?
I think it's more that, culturally, it isn't acceptable to be bigoted, but a lot of people still
are. They seek some way to vent those opinions and express them socially, and so we get things like Youtube comments. That anonymity allows them to express those opinions they have where they can't otherwise. Online gaming is just another venue for this.
I am reminded of a news story I read about a man who was "happily married" with kids, and everyone would say he was normal as could be. Nothing vile about him in person-to-person contact. But he would go online in his spare time and call women "whores" and other derogatory names. Beneath the surface of his complacent life there was a lot of hatred, and he needed to get that out somehow.
That's awful, but still an improvement - rather than people expressing their hateful opinions through something like a public lynching declared in a newspaper, they shout a slur through a microphone. I think the next step is really difficult to figure out. How do you eliminate the privation of hatred without some Orwellian measure? I mean this on a large-scale; obviously, on a small scale you just do what you can socially. But I sure wouldn't mind not having to pull a male student aside every few days to explain why he can't call another kid in my classroom a "faggot".
Side note: part of the challenges with teaching youths not to be bigoted is getting them to understand what bigotry entails. I have a student who called another student an "n word". My school is extremely diverse, and naturally all of the black kids started picking on him in response to his racism. The student was actually confused and reportedly said "Why are they all picking on me? I only called one of them an 'n word'". Which brings to mind something about that hateful word that it took me
years to eliminate. At my high school, which had to be 99% non-black (we didn't even get MLK day off), the history teacher there taught all the kids that the "n word" just means "low quality black person", and so it wasn't actually a racist term. Every student who took his class came out "enlightened", and felt more justified than ever in saying "oh, that black person is an 'n word', but that other one over there isn't - it's not racist, you see". I've heard this said quite often, and maybe it's part of the key to this problem.
