This post isn't here to measure the fine points of either research. It's about the behavior of men on Facebook because I have yet to see a share of either report where at least one man hasn't rushed in with an attempt to redefine gamers in ways that marginalize women. More often several do so. These comments are prompt, self-assured, and devoid of bona fides--as if possession of a Y chromosome suffices not only to ensure automatic entry to the Inner Circle of Hardcore Gamership, but also to a key for the gate--which they promptly lock and install a sign like this:
...or perhaps more like this...
Plenty of other guys, of course, do not conduct themselves like that for various reasons ranging from not being gamers themselves to thinking this is juvenile behavior to knowing several female gamers who would flatten a fellow and loot his corpse in retaliation.
His digital virtual corpse, of course. Not his real body. But those women would make a YouTube video of his digital defeat and cut it to Ray Charles and post it to all their shared groups which is worse than death.
Now here's the thing: if you're a guy who doesn't make gratuitous references to Candy Crush whenever women and gaming get discussed in general terms, and if you refrain from disrespecting females out of some slightly higher impulse than fear of public humliation...
...then I'd really like to see you contribute to these conversations in a constructive way. It gets dang tiresome for us females to confront those gatekeeper dudes ourselves. Sometimes it's difficult to find a humorous angle; been locking horns with that sort since I was playing D&D from the Blue Book (unquestionably hardcore and unquestionably old school) and it more often ends with a grudging thanks for being the exception than with any sort of actual realization that gatekeeping itself is presumptuous or out of line.
It would be great to see a clueful guy jump in and talk to the gatekeepers with something along the lines of Don't be like that.
Or anything up to and including And who the hell are you to say who's hardcore?
Multiple clueful guys chiming in would be even better.
The conversation doesn't need to be expanded into other directions because, being old school, my attitude is basically if some random dude wasn't gaming in Dave Arneson's basement he won't have a whole lot of seniority and he certainly can't claim to be upholding tradition. The first generation of modern gaming is now. We make the traditions; don't sit this one out.
A piece published in Slate today asks readers to use an alternate name for a mottled variety of citrus fruit. L.V. Anderson traces not so much the history of the kaffir lime (or makrut lime) as the history of the word kaffir, which is a racist epithet in South Africa. Not surprisingly, the reactions among readers are sharply divided with a lot of people who had been unfamiliar with the racial slur reacting with scorn at the suggestion.
So what connection does this have to gaming? We'll get to that in a moment, but first I'll spoil a fond childhood memory. Remember this cartoon?
The song has an unsavory origin; here's a reproduction of the original sheet music cover.
It comes from a (thankfully, extinct) genre of music called coon songs, which were every bit as racist as the name implies.
The Michigan J. Frog cartoon uses only the chorus and leaves out most of the sharper epithets. One remains that had lost its slang meaning by 1955 when Warner Bros. covered it. In 1898 when the song was written, "honey" was not just a term of endearment--it referred to a woman who lived with a man without marriage--particularly if she were African-American, which was scandalous behavior in those days and went along with the stereotype that African-Americans were promiscuous.
That might not seem so different from gangsta rap until you realize that these songs weren't written by African-Americans, but by white people who were making caricatures. This is blackface minstrel material. Here's another sheet music cover from the genre.
So do you stop enjoying Michigan J. Frog?
Before you answer that let's spoil another fond childhood memory--if not one of yours then my own. One of the best things about the holidays as a kid was watching the mailbox as cards trickled in from friends and relatives, then seeing what lovely images they had. A few of the cards every year were reproductions from Currier & Ives, which looked like this or hand horses and sleigh bells.
Largely forgotten are one of Currier and Ives's other lithograph series: the Darktown Comics. I found 155 results for Currier and Ives Darktown Comics prints at the Library of Congress website, which is more results than their Christmas engravings.
Admittedly this is somewhat different because the Christmas greetings themselves aren't cleaned-up versions of overtly racist material, but the same partnership printed them both. I don't stop enjoying a nostalgic greeting card since learning this, yet it leaves me regarding the publisher differently. Also looking at the faces in those old prints more critically; they didn't do the diversity thing.
The point here is that if you dig around you can find bigotry in unexpected places including limes and cartoons of frogs. It turns out that L.V. Anderson isn't alone in preferring makrut lime to kaffir lime; The Oxford Companion to Food advises the same terminology choice, although these authors might not make much headway because kaffir lime is in wider use and most native speakers of English are unaware of the negative connotations. Personally I'll refer to the fruit by whatever name people recognize; in the part of the world where I live you have to be a serious foodie to know about it at all.
Sometimes an epithet means nothing when it transits from one country to another: it took several conversations with an Australian to understand what a bogan is. In other instances slang meanings are totally different; I probably won't drop the habit of sometimes saying "roger that" to people, which is a polite and respectful affirmative in U.S. military slang. The meaning is totally different in the United Kingdom; sometimes I catch myself and mutual laughter results in chats with British friends. Fortunately they have taken no offense where none is intended.
So back to gaming (had to tie this in with the main blog theme eventually) there's an automated chat filter at the game I play, which--like any other chat filter--serves a limited purpose but lets a lot of stuff through and sometimes filters out completely innocent stuff. One of the innocent things it filters is a common abbreviation for 600,000: 600k. You can write k after any other number to indicate thousands, just not after 600. Most people have absolutely no idea why it intrudes because there are reasons in a war game to chat about quantities of things and that one filter action seems downright weird.
It may be a credit to cultural progress that this word no longer means something to young people. It seems to have had its last hurrah during the Vietnam War, and was still in use in movies about that war as late as the 1980s and 1990s. So my best guess is that during the early days of the Internet somebody added that and its leet version into a list of chat filter no-nos. Which was not a bad idea in theory, but in practice has had the unintended effect of introducing people to a racist epithet they hadn't known existed.
The minimum age to play this game is 13. Giving a 13-year-old a mystery that leads to the discovery of a Bad Word is something like giving Pandora a box and telling her not to open it. If you want the box to stay closed, keep it out of sight.
One of the things I often do on forums is illustrate discussions with pictures of squirrels. Players have been requesting reposts so here are a few of the Photoshop composites.
One of our standard forum poll answers is "Bacon." This started out with a search for "Bacon Pirate." Found a workable image, changed the background to black, resized and cropped and rotated. Worked it together with an image of a squirrel standing up. The flagpole is crude; didn't spend a lot of time on refinement. But it works.
This next composite doesn't have any squirrels; it's a standby that returns to use in a lot of situations. The basic idea here was to adapt the masks of comedy and tragedy into a jolly Roger.
The Drama Pirate
Forums in any online game attract people who are at least as interested in playing other people as in playing the game itself. Rather than let that accumulate to toxic levels it's sometimes useful to hoist the appropriate identifying graphics.
Remember which door we opened.
Another non-squirrel graphic comes into use when players quarrel over gaming styles.
Play within the rules, of course. And if you play within an alliance the team may set certain requirements for continued membership. Beyond those boundaries anything goes. A lot of people sign up for this sort of game to indulge their inner troublemaker.
Moderators who troll? Say it ain't so.
What's worse than a troll picking its nose?
One of these trolls was easy; the other took a bit of work. If there's anything more charmingly grotesque than an illustration of a troll picking its nose, that would have to be an animated GIF of a troll eating its boogers. This required moving the index finger and creating a tongue as well as making the phlegm appear to fall as it drips. Ended up using the tongue from a kitten and then putting it through several distortions.
The Kixeye Death Star
Kixeye is a pretty cool company; they actually offered me moderator ops on the same day I Photoshopped their company logo onto the Death Star. Which of course meant that shortly afterward there had to be a Darth Squirrel.
Join the dark side? Who, me?
Will rifle through the image files and pull out more of these another day.
As the old joke goes: violent content doesn't make gamers aggressve; lag does.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26921743
The research sought to establish whether it was violence in games which made players feel more aggressive, or a combination of other factors. Six separate studies were carried out. One of them involved modifying Half-Life 2 - a critically-acclaimed, but graphic, shooting title. The researchers created a modified version in which rather than violently removing enemies, the player would instead "tag" foes who would then evaporate. This version was tested alongside the normal, violent version. However, only some of the gamers were given a tutorial before playing the game so they could familiarise themselves with the controls and game mechanics. The researchers found that it was the players who had not had the tutorial who felt less competent and more aggressive, rather than people who had played the more violent version of the game.
One of the questions that has come up from several directions recently is what forum moderators do. Even among the game's best players there are widespread misconceptions. It's tough to communicate when people who mean well come to the table with an off-target understanding. So this post is an effort to clear some of that smoke from the air.
Messengers become targets. That comes with the territory and it's something that every thoughtful forum member who gets offered mod ops considers in advance. The best moderators are the ones who have to be talked into accepting the responsibility.
You probably didn't click on it; few do. But they still apply.
Most people are reasonable when a moderator sets out where the boundaries are. Which makes sense; a forum would get flooded with spam if rules didn't exist. The minimum age to play this game is 13 so it's a PG-13 environment. One yardstick for where to intervene is, "Would this be appropriate if an eighth grader were standing in the room and the parents were present?"
4chan is thataway.
The forum has other parameters, most of which are standard at a business website. If you went to Coca-Cola's website and talked about what a great product Pepsi is, your post wouldn't stay live very long. There are other venues for product comparison. A few of the rules are specific to the gaming industry. In a better world it wouldn't be necessary to write a rule specifically about "I quit" threads, but that type of thread is common in Internet communities and especially prevalent in gaming. Most of the time it doesn't prove true.
There's a very interesting analysis at a site called Meatball Wiki, which is dedicated to online community dynamics. To quote a highlight:
Very often, a goodbye message is not an attempt to leave, but an attempt to draw all the attention upon oneself. In this way it is typically PassiveAggressive, as an intrinsically NonViolent act--the RightToLeave--is turned around to become a vehicle for violence. If it helps you think of it, the GoodBye message is seen as the author as a means to punish the rest of the community for failing him or her. As in, "Fine, I'll show you. I'm out of here."
The trouble with goodbye messages is they are often taken naively on face value by the community. In the case where the community actually does not want the person to leave because they like him or her, outpourings of messages will come to keep the person within the fold. However, this is merely acquiescing to the ultimatum the author has presented. "Love me or I am leaving." All ultimata must be called as it is unacceptable to use emotional extortion to get special treatment, thus this strategy ultimately fails as the community will end up eating humble pie when they have to live with the person whom they were fighting with. It's hard to go back and disagree with them again (as the original dispute has not been settled) after you just exclaimed your undying admiration. Thus they gain shortcut privileges as a VestedContributor.
On the whole these are reasonable parameters and I'm OK with them. If I had been the one to write the forum rules I probably would have written a few of them differently, but I can accept what's there. The tricky thing about being one of the relatively few people who has the buttons to say no and make it stick is that the least reasonable people inevitably cross one's path.
That segues into a topic which is best described in a separate post. To preview: one of the most widespread misconceptions within the game community--even among the game's most experienced and well intentioned players--is about what types of self-censorship moderators adhere to. We are not employees and we are not there to defend the company. What does happen is different: my humor has become much more gentle since getting moderator ops. The moment one accepts the extra responsibility, cheers of congratulations come in...for about three days. Afterward people are apt to suppose that you've either sold out or the power has gone to your head.
Seriously, moderating an online game forum isn't much power. But if a person is going to let power go to their head it doesn't take much power to do it.
Forums are strange communities. A few things tend to be constant about them, one of which is that moderators are supposed to handle anything immediately and perfectly. Which is enough to dumbfound anybody. Here's one from yesterday.
Removed the forum name because the intent here isn't to call anybody out. It's an opening post that could be closed immediately--wouldn't be difficult to justify action within the rules, but coming down too hard with the tools tends to cause longer term problems. We're talking about a game; it's supposed to be fun. Once in a while anyone could feel frustrated in a long term strategy game when they're having a hard time competing. This is someone who has probably played at least a year.
So what to do? Fortunately someone had found this shark in a business suit a few hours earlier. I have no idea who created the image (and kudos to that artist). It just seemed like the right thread to use it.
Forum humor is a tricky thing. Nobody likes to be the butt of a joke in a public setting, especially not when the person cracking the joke is in a position of power. Moderator ops really aren't much power, but up close it can seem to people like a much bigger deal than it is. So the humor has to be gentle. Tried to add something more thoughtful afterward.
The community is not necessarily gentle. That's the advantage of not having extra buttons; you can pretty much be candid as long as it doesn't get too vulgar. The community was not kind to the player who started this thread. Some of the feedback was constructive, others just disagreed. Kept an eye on it to make sure it didn't descend into abuse. Another moderator closed discussion a few hours later.
The fine line here is letting discussion take place so that people don't react against things getting shut down too early. There are threads that do need closure at the first post. This one seemed to go better by giving people the chance to respond.
