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The Gambit Hatespeech Project
Salvation122
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So MIT did a research project on hatespeech in Halo:Reach and a couple of (official? not certain) gaming forums. The full details of how it was conducted and the exact responses received are available in the link, but in short, the responses were more or less exactly what you'd expect. The Reach research focused on hatespeech against Muslims, homosexuals, and blacks; the forum research focused on anti-feminist discussions. Of note is that there wasn't really a control for the gamertag study; I'd have been interested in hearing how often someone who simply played poorly without a notable tag was called a cocksucking faggot motherfucker (or whatever) compared to someone whose gamertag implicitly outed them, as well as seeing whether or not comments dropped off among teammates (or went up among opponents) as skill levels improved.
Things I noticed were that while there were certainly anti-Muslim comments, they were rather fewer and more muted than I expected; griefing seemed more common than actually yelling at him. Similarly, as noted by the researcher, the "black_and_proud" tag received little direct criticism - most of the [censored] comments were not directed at the explicitly black player, but rather in a general way; "five [censored] heading around back," for example. The player did get crap when he objected to the usage, though.
The gaypride tag got about the amount and quality of response that I expected.
The forum stuff was somewhat hard to follow - there are occasional stumbles in the narration, and I wasn't certain if these were separate posts or if there was emphasis there I didn't see; I really wish they'd just made the posts available to read - but although there was a lot of stuff said that was stupid, none of it sounded malicious, especially compared to the flak the guy playing Halo got.
Thoughts?
Things I noticed were that while there were certainly anti-Muslim comments, they were rather fewer and more muted than I expected; griefing seemed more common than actually yelling at him. Similarly, as noted by the researcher, the "black_and_proud" tag received little direct criticism - most of the [censored] comments were not directed at the explicitly black player, but rather in a general way; "five [censored] heading around back," for example. The player did get crap when he objected to the usage, though.
The gaypride tag got about the amount and quality of response that I expected.
The forum stuff was somewhat hard to follow - there are occasional stumbles in the narration, and I wasn't certain if these were separate posts or if there was emphasis there I didn't see; I really wish they'd just made the posts available to read - but although there was a lot of stuff said that was stupid, none of it sounded malicious, especially compared to the flak the guy playing Halo got.
Thoughts?
Salvation122 on
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MIT discovers what everyone who uses the internet already knows?
I mean it's cool that there's an actual study and everything but to me this is like MIT doing a study on whether the sky does actually appear blue on a clear day.
It's surprising how little condemnation there is of this speech in gaming communities. If the greater community stood up to these people, they'd stfu. This is the one aspect of gaming that really bothers me.
Forums is less understandable but internet forums are incredibly diverse in community tolerance on this kind of crap.
This is why I don't play with strangers, and have distanced myself from mainstream gaming generally. I've also found consoles to be worse than PC.
the "greater community" includes a large number of adolescent boys who think that shit is hilarious and appropriate
i think there are more of "these people" than you might think, unfortunately
Yeah I've largely given up playing with strangers too. I mean a big part of that is that playing with people I know is just so much more fun but the terribadness of random assholes in voice chat definately plays a significant role as well.
Seriously, I have to turn it off when playing shooters on consoles because it gets so bad.
Not like anyone is saying anything important anyways in most case.
i was playing halo with the four-letter tag DUSH, because i am actually a giggling six year old boy, and someone climbed onto a warthog i was piloting and yelled "HAHAHAHA! Let's go, DOOOOUUUUUUUCHE!"
i was laughing so hard that i promptly drove off a cliff.
and i didn't hear a single racist slur that entire game. sometimes it works out.
This is dumb. The PA community is being blamed for that when the real culprits are anonymous asshats posting disgusting vitriol on various messageboards and blogs?
"Some writers..." who? Weasel words. No one here would be dumb enough to say that it's okay to be an idiot or racist just because it is commonplace among teenage gamers!
It is ridiculous to hold PAX responsible for the action of a bunch of 4channers when it should be clear to anyone paying attention that, even though the Dickwolves debacle originated from PA, this is ultimately not Penny-Arcade's fault.
Wow, that is indeed some silly goosery :shock:
Ok, we all apparently suck guys. Boo to us.
Why are these researchers making a moral judgment on the norms of a community? Shouldn't their aim be one of understanding?
If these researchers were working the the 50's they'd be saying how Dungeons and Dragons is corruping America's moral values. Had it been the 70's it would've been heavy metal. Oh well.
It feels a lot more like "the penny arcade community" is a proxy for "some dudes from the internet."
It also doesn't seem like the whole dickwolves thing is relevant at all to the findings of their study.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
There were people going to the feminist blogs and posting some really hateful despicable shit.
Every once in awhile in the thread on it here someone would bring it up and pretty much universally the response was "Yeah, those people fucking suck". Then discussion would go back to whether or not some terms that turn up in feminist discussions were stupid/insulting/inflammatory from what I remember.
It's been awhile though and no way am I going digging for or, god forbid, reading through that trainwreck again.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I think the comments about "Nothing surprising here" might have missed this part. It is kind of interesting.
I'm not sure on the quality of the study in question here, but if it's decent, it's interesting that the racism evident in these communities is more of the general using-inappropriate-words kind then direct insult kind.
Except, apparently, when it comes to gays.
The fact that people are mocked for demanding idiots stop using racial slurs is, of course, not surprising in the slightest.
Evidence, well-presented, supporting a truth that we already know is still evidence. It still has the potential of changing minds - even if only to demonstrate to non-gamers that there are gamers who care about this issue and are fighting to improve things.
Well, this is more of an art or anthropology project than a social science study, really. It would serve as a decent preliminary study, the sort of thing you might do as a proof-of-concept to an institutional review board or to a psych department to get the greenlight and funding to go forward with more rigorous research. There's no control groups, very little discussion of coding standards, the forum data all came from three forums for direct competitors in the same genre, etc. But I don't mean to be too damning here, this is still good documentation of a phenomenon that is inarguably prevalent.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
There certainly wasn't any of that stuff in our forums.
Keep in mind, you may be thinking about the retorts from the original G&T thread here, but what you are actually doing right now is linking the vocal minority of the PA community with the blog invasions against rape victims as that is what was talked about in the article.
In other words, you may want to clarify that point, because I refuse to believe that a bunch of G&Ters were involved in the more vicious trolling that happened. The Dickwolves debacle quickly got out of hand and many other sites, such as 4chan, Reddit, SA, etc, heard of the story. We all know how fast things spread on the internet, and I think it is unfair to imply PA is to blame for such atrocious behaviour when it fits the motif of 4channers.
Anyway, I think we should be careful and try to stay on topic. I don't know if the mods would want this to touch too much on the Dickwolves controversy even though it is related to a certain extent.
Edit: I don't know the history of the previous Dickwolf threads as I haven't been paying full attention (i.e., if they were locked or not, etc). I'm just assuming it has been argued to death already, and I don't want to incur the ire of our mods.
Oh, there was a fair chunk of stupid shit here. But I agree, nothing like the vitriol that hit the blogs and Twitter. PA forums are pretty tolerable most of the time when it comes to issues like this, but lets not be pretending everyone here is Captain Progressive, Champion of the Social Minority.
It's not like a game server, where mods can put up disclaimers in the motd saying they will ban people for racism or hate speech, and then actually reinforce those bans. You get on xbl and you have zero control over any of the other players, and until Microsoft or Sony does something about it themselves, you never will. There is no amount of "community" that can exert pressure, that they could never enforce, toward completely random and anonymous people.
Forum stuff, though? That's just dumb. But who in their right mind would post on an official forum anyway.
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You think that parents and friends have the ability to affect anonymous online behavior? Odds are the parents/friends/family/whoever don't even know that shit is going on. Most "racist bigots" online aren't even really racist bigots. They just act that way online. So how would a person from real life have any clue what was going on?
From a guy who used to participate in such behavior to some extent when I was younger, I can tell you that most of the time when a 12 year old says a slur against homosexuals or blacks, it has literally nothing to do with homosexuals or blacks.
Yes. If children are not taught to genuinely care about the feelings of others, then they're going to be comfortable being dicks whenever they can get away with it and especially if they feel it benefits them to do so.
Yes I meant the motivation, and admittedly for some kids they might have racist motivations, but I do not think that is true for the majority of them.
Is that their fault? Not really, they're 12. But I think it's silly to say that prejudice isn't involved and it's just something being said for a reaction. I also think it's really easy to read your current state of mind into what you said as a child. I catch myself doing this all the time.
I also think it's possible for anonymous communities to influence behavior. Not as strongly if there's no actual enforcement power (as in XBL), but if somebody says something dumb and three or four other people on the server just give them a "kid, shut the fuck up," the behavior changes surprisingly quickly.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I think the reverse is probably true. Lots of folks have prejudices, but feel like they can only voice them in an anonymous environment.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Well yeah it's not actually all that surprising. It's what you'd expect from any random predominately white male group.
I think it matters. It just doesn't make it any less bad and stupid.