Sit down kids because I’m going to tell you a story.
To set the scene, my friends and I like playing this online game called Town of Salem together. What we do is make a party and then join a forum of other random users and play the game for a few hours while talking and laughing about it.
Today we started gaming and slipped into an anonymous group of other players. Now, before you start the actual game, you go through three steps, a quick forum chat where the players can talk to each other for about 30 seconds, name choosing step, and role assignment, but that isn’t as important as the other two.
We get into the chat and people start popping up greetings on the message board. Little “hi’s” and “ooooh what’s going to happen today” messages, but then a person, who I’m going to call Asshole here, entered the chat with only a message a true Asshole would want to spam to everyone else on the board 5 seconds after entering. They start spamming racial slurs and homophobic catchphrases, all the text obviously a copy and paste they made. The chat explodes with other players going “????????!!!!!! What the fuck????” But before we can do anything the chat closes and we have to pick names. I’m obviously enraged at this point, who the FUCK does this guy think he is, and name myself #blacklivesmatter because this guy is being a total fucking asshat on a stick.
Roles are assigned and the game starts, and what I immediately notice is that most of the other players named themselves gay and black supportive names, like “Bi-guy”, “I like Gay Sex”, and “I’m Black MF”. All of the people in the game chat start trying to find out who the guy is, and it’s pretty obvious at this point because his game name is one of the only ones not explicitly and angrily supporting black or gay people. We kick this Asshole out of the game and almost 13 people reported him afterwards.
It was a very, very, very good day.
It made me feel very good inside to be a part of something like that, to stand up just in a commonplace way against people being absolute dicks in a place that supposed to be a place to have a good time, but it made me face the facts of the gaming community. Even though so much of the gaming community loves and supports gay and black players and gamers, there is a scarily present portion of the community that holds on to old world notions of hate and discrimination. And there is a scarier yet portion who are fine with standing by and letting it happen to people, like the three other people in the chat who completely ignored what the Asshole was saying. There’s a real and present problem in the gaming community between people who hold prejudices against people who just want to live and people who simply ignore it all. I, a closeted white girl, do not encounter this personally at all. But it rears its ugly head every so often and I’m reminded that it’s out there. It hasn’t gone and it may never unless there are people who do something about it.
So please do me a favor, and the next time you see something like this happen or encounter a situation like this, kick that fucker out of the game. Make it awkward. Tackle and address what the fuck is actually happening while it’s happening so that maybe the person will think twice about doing it again. It may not work every time, but the less we tolerate hate, the less it becomes acceptable in our community; and the more everyone gets to just play games in peace. Thanks.