this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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There are plenty of multiplayer games I adore. However, it seems like every community has these "brain dead", patronizing, or out right toxic elements that are just nasty. I'd rather debate politics than make suggestions in some gaming communities because the responses are just so ... annoying.

As an example, I once dared to suggest that a game developer implement a mode to prevent crouched status from rendering on death cams so that players that are bothered by t-bagging could avoid it (after a match where a friend rage quit because someone just kept head shotting him -- possibly with cheats -- and then t-bagging). This post got tons of hate, and like -50 upvotes on reddit because of course someone should be forced to watch someone t-bag them.

Another example on a official game forum... I made a forum post suggesting Bungie use Mastodon (or really just something else being my intent)... The response I got was some positivity but mostly just "lol nobody uses that sweetie" and other patronizing comments.

Meanwhile studios themselves often seem to be filled with developers that understand this stuff is a problem, and the lack of sportsmanship (or generally civilized attitudes) does push away players. It just doesn't make sense to me that no studio is saying "get lost" to these elements or implementing anti-toxicity features. I just want to play games with nice normal people, is that really so much to ask?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yep. Penny arcade did a great comic on this almost 20 years ago.

The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory

Which was:

Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad

They then refined it to:

Normal Person - Consequences + Audience = Total Fuckwad

Which is a perfect explanation for Twitter both before and after EM took over.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Anyway, her suggestion looked like this:

Normal Person - Consequences + Audience = Total Fuckwad

which adjusts Anonymity toward its functional result. For some reason, and I don't know why, the notion of subtraction, of negation, is much more optimistic that our construction because it implies that you can add something and change it. The underlying assertion is that we can fix this with technology, which, again, you know, engineers. Our conversations tend to be interesting.

Very cool when it's put like that.