People are extremely condescending to each other whenever they get the chance if they don't have any prior history with the other person. They insult names, gear, habits, pets, guilds, arena ratings, talent spec - pretty much everything. When they run out of things game-related to insult they turn to the chat channels and use everything allowed (and many things disallowed) to describe their fellow players personally.
It's interesting to watch in the same way that seeing a knee surgery is interesting. Oh look, under that person's skin is... wow, who would have known they were hiding that? Given the right subject and the wrong words, even the mildest-mannered people turn into frothing e-thugs who get all tough and rowdy and talk about violating each others' dead grandmothers.
I've got to wonder where it came from. There is the preconception this is just the way things are (the saying "welcome to the internet" comes to mind), but I remember a very short time in 2004-2005 when it wasn't always this way. Back in the beginning there were consequences for being a jerk. Not only were the chat channels moderated far more than they are now, but guilds themselves would exclude people who were public nuisances. And generally the people who couldn't keep their chat clean were problems in other areas too, and it was good for the guild to blacklist them.
Things have changed. Another 6-8 million people have joined the game since then, and they are younger on average than the previous generation of players, and are more insecure. They react with harsh words towards anyone who they think might be questioning them, and they quickly turn every disagreement into a circus of monkeys flinging crap. Sometimes they just like to see it fly, and start out tossing the first load to see how much hits the fan. It's as much an e-sport to them as the game itself is, and they strive to 'build cred' by being a reliable foil.
Well, it isn't impressive or amusing. It's dumb. Not that they care what people think, there's not anything a person could say to make someone change their behavior, because the antisocial feed on discontent. The only thing that could possibly affect them is being banned from the game, because it would rob them of participation. So really, the only recourse for anyone who dislikes this growing sport is to leave the discussion.
Most people who don't care for the chat /leave the global channels altogether. It affects them somewhat because they are left out of some economic or grouping opportunities - legitimate traffic interspersed within the insults - but for the most part they end up playing a separate game within the larger game with a separate group apart from the larger group. The insults continue, the groups break into smaller pieces, and eventually the fun dwindles for the smallest groups and people leave the game.
And that leaves WoW as a game on the decline, because Blizzard decided not to moderate their own global chat. It's their choice, but if they truly valued the quality of their content they would realize that the chat is a large piece of that content, and moderate it to some degree. Maybe they see that their product is on the decline and view that effort as tossing money into a losing proposition, in favor of creating new titles for people to migrate to.
Dunno, but it has been interesting to watch as a social dynamic. Anyway, it's on the internet so no one is free from insult, even if you just write a tiny blog for your friends somewhere.
Doesn't WoW have a "/mute " ability? Most of the MUSHES, MOOS and other virtual worlds (like SL) have that as their main tool to allow self-moderating.
ReplyDeleteIt's amazing how well it works because it allows each person to define who is in-or-out of their world.