Online Games: Let's All Calm Down a Little, Please?

This post may be a bit more controversial than ones that I have done in the past. Online competitive gaming is all the rage right now, thanks to League of Legends, DOTA, Overwatch and many more massively-popular titles that are all riding the wave of online multiplayer to the tune of billions of pounds of profit. To say that online gaming is big business isn’t controversial, but to say that I find it unenjoyable probably will be.

The main reason that I don’t usually play online multiplayer games often is simply because of the toxicity of most player bases. It may be tarring with the same brush but I have found that with my time in gaming it is impossible to find any online competitive game that isn’t tarnished by a violently-nasty set of players who will harass and name-call you with ever-increasing levels of profanity. One of the worst examples is in Grand Theft Auto Online, where after I shot and killed a player a couple of times in deathmatch I received a message that I simply can’t repeat here, telling me to kill myself. Grand Theft Auto is an extreme case, but the fact that this case exists at all, and the fact that so many gamers corroborate such stories daily, shows that the culture around gaming just isn’t good enough.

The gaming community as a whole has become so completely toxic, corrupted by a sad trend of a nasty minority ruining things for the many. It’s such a shame because I feel that online gaming offers a whole world of opportunities, but it’s telling that in a world where DayZ exists, a massively-multiplayer zombie survival game, where players can interact as much as they want with each other, band together, or go on raids, or even create communities like The Walking Dead, instead so much of DayZ is spent avoiding other people for fear that instead of actually interacting with you in any meaningful way, players would sooner just shoot you in the head and harass you. It seems that instead of engaging with each other as a community, thanks to how online gaming has evolved we are instead treating one another as enemies.

I think that what makes online gaming so toxic is because of how intensely competitive games have become. Players are gaming intensely hard in competitive events and becoming incredibly emotionally charged. In a deathmatch type FPS game, this is also done hand-in-hand with visceral, high-octane violence. It is totally understandable that players can become very emotionally tense in such an environment and occasionally blow up at one another; just look at how angry sports fans can get, for example.

However, I think that it is so sad that I mention games and sports hooliganism in such a parallel context, and I think that this spells out a problem in the gaming community that needs to be dealt with somehow. There needs to be a cultural shift towards engaging with each other in more civil ways. I wish not to engage with controversial politically-sensitive topics, but it’s telling that any conversation around accessibility in gaming is treated with a razor’s edge. We have become hyper-sensitive, toxic and too aggressive, and overall I think we need to just calm down.

Games like Overwatch are so good because they try extremely hard to shift gaming’s entire culture by discouraging toxicity. For example, players attempting to type trash talk at one another in Overwatch instead find their messages replaced with text designed to humiliate themselves for the audacity to do so. On top of that, so much of Overwatch is made carefully to boost accessibility and encourage different playstyles and to engage with each other in a less angry way; the focus is on teamwork and objectives instead of killing, just like Splatoon.

I think that overall, Overwatch is a good example of how online competitive gaming should move forward, with a focus on engagement rather than confrontation. We need more games that shift the focus to the objective instead. Gaming culture has become corrupt somehow. Thanks to anonymity, trolling and trash talk, I find it difficult to find a rewarding experience from playing online. I hope that in the future, we have calmed down a little, and can talk to one another like mature people who all understand that we share that one thing; a love of gaming.

I don’t claim to know how to turn this around, but I think Overwatch has made some important steps forward in improving accessibility. Rocket League is another excellent example, as is Speedrunners, and many indie games are showing ways in which we can use online gaming to come together instead of make each other’s gaming lives miserable. Gaming is overall becoming a better place, thanks to the aforementioned trend of games that are less about confrontation, not to mention all the Let's Players and Twitch streamers, who are developing communities that are growing together in much healthier ways. Charity streams, in particular, show just how much potential for understanding there is in the gaming space. 

I would, however, recommend right now for anyone looking to have a good time gaming online to only do it with friends that you know and trust outside of the game for now, until we can learn to take a step back and understand that we all love games, and we all want to have a great time together.