Shitty Game Communities

I’d pay extra to never hear a stranger’s voice in a game ever. Its why I love the ping system in Apex.

1 Like

I actually really enjoy working with my team and communicating via voice. When I get teams that aren’t toxic babies (1/4 or so), it is such an awesome experience. Blizz just needs to hard ban people for being shits.

I’d say context matters a lot. The only time in my adult life I enjoyed “stranger’s voices” was world of warcraft.

It was contingent on the fact that communication was necessary for doing this reactive, synchronized dance we had do to so voice was basically necessary, while there was also a good amount of waiting around doing nothing where we got to socialize a bit.

Both those elements were necessary. Were it not necessary nobody would do it. Were there not downtime to get to know people, you’d not see them as people, just as disembodied voices basically being NPCs in your personal quest for whatever.

With their powers combined though, captain friendship can be formed and they end up not being strangers but, Lee the Quebecois CS student and Tom and Andrea, the recently wed couple who both work in the same school system etc. etc. etc.

I wouldn’t say I necessarily enjoyed the part of the story where they were strangers but somewhere, and it’s hard to point to where, I started enjoying it.

Games like overwatch and the like, your teammates may as well be NPCs you need in order to win. You want to win and enjoying the company of your team is not even on the radar. Except insofar as making them comfortable with you helps you win. Hell, you’re gamifying your socializing, in the hopes that the best strategy will emerge and you can use it to win more often.

No thanks. If I wanna gamify my socializing I’ll play a visual novel.

They come down pretty hard on toxicity reports.

Absolutely. I get one or two things a week of “your report did a thing” but it is still a work in progress.

3 Likes

I have this big incomplete theory about how table top groups being sort of naturally insular makes the public venues “that guys” more prominent and that in turn makes them behave even worse.

Like, here’s your pool of people interested in this hobby today. Five of them make a group over here. Six of them make a group over there. A couple bounce between multiple groups. A few might play at a public store. There’s at least a couple “that guys” in the mix somewhere with differing levels and with different group tolerances.

Over time, the overall pool expands and contracts some. New people are going to have slightly harder problems finding those private games, and everyone can more easily find public games. A couple groups burn out, some players get “done” with the hobby, etc. The “that guys” though tend to be a little more interested usually and a little less able to network. So they congregate and concentrate into the public venues. This leads to them concentrating more and more in the public venues, and thus the public venues getting more “toxic” or however you want to term it, and if they’re not self-policing they start to become literal problems preventing new players from exploring the hobby.

And I think that differs from some other hobbies that certainly have “that guys”, like pick your sports fandom, because the sports fandom is usually pretty large and it’s a lot more… public for everyone. You might have your private fantasy league or something, but it usually works. Where it looks the most like the RPG problem is when you get into those weird sort of serious but not serious events. Like I know a lot of cyclists, and from the stories they tell it seems like they do end up having to be pretty self-policing about their public rides because they have their own potential problem actors that can quickly make such a thing unfun for the people that set out to get into it.

Yes, it seems to come down to participatory activities vs watching someone else do stuff. If you are a group of people who have to do or make or achieve something together, inter-personal issues can really come to the fore. If you’re all just there to watch a sport… not so much.

I feel like the geek social fallacies come into play as well. Was never a major problem at my local shop for when I did D&D organized play, but everyone who partook was not afraid to shut something down if it was inappropriate, but there was certainly adjacent problem people at the gamestore for other hobbies (MTG for example) where I could see some of it happen and the gameshop itself banned Yu-Gi-Oh play completely after problems.