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Uneducated Opinion

If I haven’t met you chances are I don’t want to hear your voice while I’m playing games. Not because you were caught playing one man tug of war in the bathroom of the party bus though. It’s because multiplayer lobbies have conditioned me to believe that if I unmute your microphone, I will be subjected to either:

• A) Some psychotic rant with Kid Rock or some other garbled noise playing in the background
• B) The sound of you giving yourself a colonoscopy with the microphone

Why have multiplayer lobbies become mini anger management conventions attended only by people with severe touretts? If we’re all players in the same game, then where did the sportsmanship go and why don’t we show any respect online?

Either at the beginning or at the end of most sporting matches, the teams come together to slap hands, wish each good luck or congratulate each other on a good game. But when someone loses a match on Halo, why does he instantly start throwing a bigger temper tantrum than Kevin Smith, 5 minutes into his Jenny Craig diet?

Multiplayer matches on Xbox live are often like time traveling to 18th century Southern United States where Negroes are still feared and anal rape is an acceptable ‘move’ on the third date.

Unwinding with some Gears online after a long day of touching his dink in front of kids at the zoo

So why is the gaming community so full of rage? Perhaps, it has something to do with the games we play. I realize that in some competitive games, it’s fun to trash talk. In fact, trash talk can become an important part of any physical, or highly competitive game. Saying the right thing, can often help give one player a psychological edge over the other. An example of this is when you whisper into granny’s ear that you’ll stab her if she takes the last gingerbread cookie after Christmas dinner.

If it was only violent games that attracted these idiots then why are so many people getting banned from family games like Uno after they flash their junk or are caught sending erotic messages about their mistreated dongs to other players?

Next, we could assume that people are this way because only children, introverted nerds and the mentally disabled play video games, but the stats just don’t seem to line up. According to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the average gamer is roughly 33 years old. More than half of all households own either a 360, a PS3 or a Wii. Basically, if your house doesn’t have one of these consoles you’re different and that means I don’t want you drinking from the same fountain as me or riding at the front of the bus.

And even more surprising is that 38% of all gamers are women. And women are 10% more likely to play video games online than men. This will come as a shock to many of you who’ve never spoken with a women in real life, but for the most part they are polite, friendly and despite the gigs of video on your hard drive they are not constantly surrounded by 25 guys jerking off into their hair. Almost every normal person seems to play games.

Maybe, gamers and developers are still stuck in the mentality that it’s just the way video games are and always will be. Have developers given us the steps necessary to self police the community? Xbox Live gives you the option to avoid certain players, but that doesn’t let the player know everyone else want’s him to drive his Rascal through an elevator door and fall to his death.

You could say that the anonymity of the internet enables people to be this way, but I think that if games included systems that allowed players to rank each other on teamwork abilities, sportsmanship and fun to play against that the community would very quickly become good at self policing, and removing the obnoxious losers. Consequently, adding a reward system for being recognized as a decent human being online would give people further motive.

Okay, maybe we don't need to be this friendly ...anyone else getting hard?

Over 70% of gamers play online.  If we all love multiplayer games so much, why are our chat rooms and lobbies filled with these types of people? We all love to eat, but you don’t see people threatening to rape each other in the buffet line up.

Is it any surprise that 7 out of 10 of the top selling games in September had multiplayer modes? But for some reasons, gamers don’t enjoy getting along with each other. What they do seem to enjoy is threatening to travel across the country to stab their opponent in the neck. In same cases, they also enjoy carrying this act out.

We’re a community of players, gamers and competitors. We’re playing a sport. Sure, it’s not the kind of sport that will earn you women, confidence or the respect of your disapproving father who spends restless nights wondering what he did so wrong, but more people play video games than play any other sport. So why don’t we as a community have some self respect and stop acting like a bunch of caged monkeys trying to throw the most shit at each other?

Perhaps, developers in the community should spend a little less time squeezing the zits on their foreheads and a little more time developing tools that support a mature community that doesn’t consider racism, bigotry and idiocy qualifications to join. Give us more self policing options and bring our online experience up so it feels like I’m hanging out with a bunch of normal adult men and women, rather than a bunch of monkeys who play games to pass the time between raping each other.

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Ignorant Geek Wisdom

• Making fun of a guy who has My Little Pony bed sheets is more fun than going to retirement homes and swapping senior citizens’ heart medicine with sugar pills while they’re sleeping.

  -Mike

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