Dealing with threats, slurs and slander in online gaming
Nary a match of Halo 3 can go by online without one player threatening to do sexually explicit things to another player’s mother, or one player’s ethnic background being verbally assaulted by the entirety of a party’s group – and it isn’t specific to Halo. Are gamers being irreparably damaged by verbal abuse in online gaming, and if so, where does the line get drawn?
It would probably come as a gross and disturbing shock to a mother, the things that are spat over voice communicators in online matches. Things people wouldn’t dream of saying in public or even in the privacy of their homes with friends are exchanged lightheartedly and in vicious fashion via game consoles worldwide.
Racial slurs, threats of violent and sexually explicit acts and worse are par for the course, sadly. Recently one gamer suffered the consequences of his aggressive game-speak; in December, a task force in Allegheny, MD, arrested a Call of Duty 4 player living at Frostburg State University for making threats to the school and its students.
Allegedly during a heated match, the player in question implied that he was going to shoot up the school, and a gamer from the Midwest U.S. contacted authorities local to the vocal player. After a little digging, the C3I task force arrested the player in his dorm on campus. The student said he didn’t mean what he said.
Does anyone really mean what they say online? Are the words people use and the statements they make serious – and meant to be taken as such – or are they a form of stress-relief that players come to enjoy about online gaming?
Obviously, if a player was truly singed by remarks made in an online match, he or she could simply put the game down and take up another pastime – let’s not pursue the “victim” angle with this one.
However, if threats against schools and people are to be taken seriously like the case in Maryland, why shouldn’t physical threats be taken seriously? Logically, people should then be arrested on a daily basis in the hundreds of thousands for hate speech and slander.
The nature of online gaming and communication will play a huge part in the developments between the law and games – let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
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