Go on any major video game media site or YouTube and you will find a group of anonymous crazy immature overly aggressive nutcases. These people act like they are 13 years old and have parents that have taught them that they are the greatest thing in the world. Most of them can’t spell and have the grammatical ability of someone who learned English from drug dealers. They will jump on anyone who doesn’t agree with the narrow short sighted opinion with everything from racist epitaphs to personal acts about your mother. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, people on forums are awful. This certainly isn’t just when it comes to video games but just about everything else as well. But as time has gone on, (It wasn’t a bed of roses in 2004 either), rather than getting better it has actually gotten worse. The more people who are using the internet it seems the worse it is getting. I’m just getting so tired of it. Every developer I’ve talked to who gets bombarded online finds that when he meets people in real life most people are kind, friendly, and incredibly grateful for the work the developer is doing. What can we attribute all this craziness to then? I see it as two big things and every site on the internet with forums must take some responsibility for this. Journalists who have of late been complaining about it must also take some responsibility because they may have a part to play in this as well.
The biggest problem on every forum site is the absolute anonymity people are afforded. What is the deal? It isn’t 1993, we don’t need to worry that someone is going to hack us if we use our real names. With Facebook and all the other social media sites everyone is everywhere on the internet. But forums are still the bastions of the ignorant and the stupid because there are no names. People who are ACTUALLY trying to have a conversation cannot over the din created by these racist halfwits. Forum moderators should find their site accounts and ban them for life not for 30 days. These are not people you want in your community and it isn’t a matter of freedom of speech. It’s a matter of being a racist, narrow minded, psychopath that just wants to cause trouble and cyber bully people. If your big company owns a website with forums it’s in the best interest of the company to keep people from acting this way on your forums. Otherwise, you are not only enabling these people but you are; by doing nothing agreeing with the behavior. There are lots of people out there reading this right now saying that well who decides these things. After all, there were people banned on LucasArts forums for saying they hated the game the company was making at the time. Well, lets see… People who spew racist, sexist, pornographic, or abusive language constantly are people I’m talking about. People who purposely and consistently take the opposite opinion of everyone else just to make other people angry. You know, TROLLS. In 2012, there is absolutely no accuse for this behavior or the absolute inability of every site on the internet with a comments/forums section to deal with it.
The other big problem here are the game journalists who constantly goad people into acting in this manner by creating stories purely to rile people up to get more hits. Stories with titles like, “Developer X says gamers are idiots.” Or “Developer X has decided that game consoles are completely irrelevant and instead of making their AAA game they are going to make iOS games instead.” Or my favorite,”Is the Console War Over?” The last one is the best because journalists are the ones who created the Console War to begin with. The actual console war ended way back when both Atari and Intellivision tanked after long life cycles. There is no real story in any of these things and developers are often not only misquoted but simply taken completely out of context. I’ve heard developers jokingly say something that is taken as a serious statement 48 hours later. Its all to get hits and that’s fine for the site but the “community” around these topics just gets riled up and decides to go on a rant that this both ill informed and totally irrelevant. The best part of all this for the website is that the more stories like this they run the more developers don’t want to talk to them at all and have PR speak instead. Then the website complains that they have no access to developers. “No kidding,” I wouldn’t want to talk to you either.
Finally, as I said earlier things are getting worse, not better. I think this summarizes the reaction of most normal people this days,
“Something slightly negative is discussed or is reported on dealing with the game industry,
A bunch of site write stories about it,
The internet goes CRAZY!”
That’s about how it goes. People get whipped up into a frenzy about practically nothing these days.
“My favorite dropped the multiplayer mode I didn’t want or ask for!”
“Oh NO!“
Start a petition to put it back in.
It is completely short lived and completely unnecessary. Developers usually ignore it and shake it off as most normal people do. But when Bioware,, a company that was up to that point very well loved; decided to “change” the ending to Mass Effect 3 because of the public outcry about their “bad” ending. It seemed like perhaps the mob had won for once. But then the very worst part of all of this was that once they put out their new ending. Nothing happened! Their sales didn’t increase, public opinion didn’t shift their way. Everyone had forgotten about it. It no longer mattered.
But the precedent it set, offered a legitimacy to this stupid and ridiculous behavior. If these are things in life you are worried about you either live in a fantasy land or are 12 years old. There is a crippling repression going on, no jobs, and military conflict on multiple fronts and you fools are worried about the ending to a video game. Grow UP! But I guess this is the same racist, sexist, minority that is so vocal on the forums of all these sites. Which I guess makes sense; considering if you consistently act like your 12 years old, the concerns of adults fail to matter after a while. I wouldn’t really know. When I was 12, all I worried about was going outside to play with my friends and trying to date girls that were a year older than me. The only video games I played were at arcades….
A few things to consider if you are part of a video game website or company that provides forums for your fans, or perhaps the owners of a service like Twitch.tv, Ustream, etc and have a streaming chat.
- Have a policy against profanity and player bullying and here is the hard part ENFORCE IT!
- Remove all avatars and usernames, instead use the person’s real name as it appears on their form of payment or application when they signed up for your site or service.
- As a user of any of these services please TRY to simply ignore these people and carry on. Another words, “DON’T FEED THE TROLL”
- Also as a user of these services remember just because you PERSONALLY might think something is funny when you are writing in a forum, social media, etc… That everyone else might not and might have a less than sterling opinion of you because of it.
- Remember that the users of your service/website are ultimately a reflection of your website/service to EVERYONE who uses it.
- Finally and most importantly, at the end of the day everything in this article is a prime example of not taking REAL WORLD issues seriously enough. Things like racism, sexism, civil rights, war, etc… Are far more important and should be taken far more seriously than ANYTHING that happens on the internet.
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