JRT POST

Competitive Counter-Strike Global Offensive Player Adam Bahriz may kill you in the game. He is so skilled that he signed a contract with Team Envy, an e-sports organization that has some of the highest-ranked e-sports players in North America.Barritz also happens to be deaf and dumb and legally blind. This condition is called HSAN 8.

“What do you want to do? Just eliminated A? I can buy cigarettes,” Barritz says. His teammate immediately jumped up to laugh at him and shut him down. “You will only be blocked,” one of them said. “We know you are trolling,” another said. “It’s annoying.” “You have muted.”

“Well, I won’t say anything, sorry,” he said helplessly.

Barritz spent the rest of the game silently, and even began to cry, revealing the real and effective impact of bullying on gamers who have experienced bullying. This is all the problem of toxic gaming culture, where insults are unscrupulous, bullying often occurs, from racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, abilityism, etc., everything is a fair game. “This incident makes me very frustrated,” Barritz told me. “I just want to have fun while playing the game-but the speech barrier that I can’t control makes this difficult.” Barritz said that in the end toxic teammates kicked him out of the game, although “most of the time people do It’s toxic, but it’s rare to get kicked out of the game. That’s why it’s so frustrating. You can mute the toxic person, but you can’t stop your entire team from kicking you together for speech problems. ”

In 2017, a Twitch anchor, Nicole Smith, Recording the abuse she received while playing “Overwatch”.

“Go back to the kitchen,” a teammate said.
“That’s why girls shouldn’t do anything,” another person interjected.
“Can you really die?”

Like Barritz, Smith was subjected to a series of insults, harassment, and in her case, misogynistic comments.The abuse Smith had to endure in order to play video games is reminiscent of GamerGate, where Women in games and gaming news (And anyone who defended them) endured weeks, months, or even years of harassment, including death threats, human stalking, and stalking. This has led to changes in the game industry’s response to online harassment. Some game developers and publishers have launched their own initiatives to combat malicious behavior in games, and have widely criticized many of the same publishers and developers for waiting until people’s lives are in danger. The harassment is taken seriously.

A kind 2020 Anti-Defamation League Investigation It was revealed that 81% of American adults were harassed in online multiplayer games, compared with 74% in 2019, while 70% of them were called offensive names in online multiplayer games, and 60% were procrastinators. Fishing or “deliberate and malicious attempts to provoke targets” [other gamers] React negatively. ”Overall, there has been an increase of 7% from 2019 to 2020.

For Bahriz, he is no longer abused as before, but when he is abused, he usually just silences them and does his best to “not let the toxicity mentally distract from the game,” he said. However, for others, if mute is available even in the game they are playing, then simply mute will not work. In 2019, another ADL survey found that 22% of American adults who were harassed in online multiplayer games stopped playing certain games altogether due to harassment.

Game developers want to fight back, but according to their conditions

In 2017, more than 200 companies including Activision Blizzard, Epic, Intel, Microsoft, Twitch, etc. formed Fair Play League As its website says, “Encourage fair competition and healthy communities.” In 2018, Blizzard Publicly named 180 Overwatch Players were banned for bad behavior, including insulting and deliberately throwing games in audio chat. This is not bad for a game that couldn’t even report abusive players when it was released in 2016. In 2019, Ubisoft issued an instant Half-hour ban in order to Rainbow Six Siege If the company detects defamation in the text chat, the player.Ubisoft code of Conduct Say this includes “any language or content that is considered illegal, dangerous, threatening, abusive, obscene, vulgar, slanderous, hateful, racism, sexism, moral offense, or harassment.” In the same year, Electronic Arts established a company. Players Committee And the first summit was held at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany.

Riot Games, a company that has always been in the news Endotoxicity and also As toxicity in its game, Is also working hard to solve this problem. In 2012, it introduced a court system in League of Legends. Players will be subject to temporary bans based on behaviors and violations that players believe other players are unacceptable. (The court system no longer exists.) In 2016, it released A report in Scientific american The conclusion is that based on its Toxicity Research, Adding in-game hints (among other things) can reduce the player’s insults in the lobby and games containing insults by 25%. As recently as April 2021, Riot changed its privacy policy to allow the capture and evaluation of players’ voice communications when submitting reports on player behavior, with the goal of reducing the toxicity of voice communications and game chats.