Unfortunately, the only short-term solution would be to grow a thick skin and realize that the words of an internet tough guy aren’t worth the effort to listen to. Any other way to solve this problem would require a sudden and radical shift in attitude both from game companies and players (especially those who aren’t dicks, but don’t care enough to stand up for people who are being bullied). The problem with bullying is that sanctioning it would only mean that there are no (or less, anyway) repeat offenders. Reporting someone to get them banned still means that they get to throw the punch and you’ll still feel the effect of that. Worse, it actually shows others that you’re affected by the bully which may lead to them bullying you in retaliation and so on.

Bars that show rep are a start, but are easily skewed by having enough friends (which these guys will have because trolls tend to hunt in packs), a better way is to show actual complaints made against a player (which would have to reviewed by a mod to avoid abuse).

We would need actual people doing this work because any kind of automated script will only work for so long until a workaround has been found. Voice communication would be even harder to monitor and filter because it needs to function real-time to be of any use in an FPS.

I do think Jend hit the nail on the head with regards to money being the main culprit here though – unless we can show the big guys that a friendlier game environment means more income for themm, it won’t be worth spending money on the actual manpower that we would need to make a system that keeps players safe from bullying work.

I just wanted to say not all of us are insufferable pricks, and don’t mind/enjoy playing with girl gamers.

Those girls who just play to impress their boyfriends or whomever, however, should be insulted mercilessly, in the same way that screechers and druggies should.

About the morons: One does have to admire the sheer amount of willpower it takes to ignore any and all rules of grammar and spelling.

I do like the bars that show rep, community approval or some such. These can be abused as well, but that can be mitigated by allowing each person one vote against one person- no multiple ones.

Perhaps it’s not coding that will save our online spaces- it’s the humanity that we can put into those spaces. Putting real human mods in place and giving them the power to ban outright at will. Eventually the runoff scum will find it’s own place to be- just like in offline life. There are bars I don’t go to because I’m not interested in what they have- namely the clientele.

I wish we could dispel the idea that the majority of gamers are men and are young- it’s such patent BS. They’re MUCH easier to advertise to and sell sub-par games towards; so of course, it appears that’s all there is to the market.

I like to think that when we get more women, POC and other marginalized groups making games that it will change but sometimes I lose hope that the change is going to come from within the AAA powerhouses. They’re making money so why should they change? In the end- we have to vote with our wallets and that’s easier said than done, apparently.

When creating and supporting a culture that demeans anyone who is ‘other’ stops being profitable- they will stop doing it. Till then- money in is the only thing they care about. ‘They’ being the head honchos and shareholders- not necessarily the individual programers.

Ganging up on you is just primate behavior. Everyone wants to belong, and everyone wants to contribute, so they try to one-up each other.

What can you do about it? You can’t shut them up. Complaining to mods will only work if they’re saying things that are explicitly sexual, racist, homophobic, etc. In other words, something that could attract negative PR from professional victim groups.

So. Either put them on ignore (if that feature exists). Or, come to the understanding that the opinion of strangers on the internet is completely irrelevant, and doesn’t reflect on you.

On the contrary. If some punk is calling you fat, that shows what a crass, unpleasant person he is.

Changing your attitude isn’t easy, and it is time-consuming. If you’re soft and sensitive now, it will take a while to harden up. And you’ll go in fits and starts. But eventually you will make it.

(In case this comes across as preachy, I do speak from experience. I used to be the wide eyed kid that took everything so seriously on the internet.)

The other thing that’s hard is to resist the urge to fire back. If you respond in any way, you’re just fueling the fire. If you fail to respond, the troll will taunt you for awhile “aww she’s probably crying irl” but eventually will get bored and give up.

I come from a family of misogynistic and sexist men. Two of my brothers may easily be one of the commentators you encountered. It is my personal feeling from experience is that a person who resorts to these lines of insults has low intelligence and lacks the ability to articulate themselves well because if they could they would say something that would take more intelligence to say. And usually when someone calls me a hoe online, I revel in smug superiority knowing that he just called me a gardening tool. Likewise, with my brothers, it just rolls off my back. I was raised in a family where arguing was a sport for me and in my experience calling someone fat, ugly or slutty is too easy. Anyone can say it. It’s the tools of an amateur. But if someone zings me good by being witty and clever (ala Dorothy Parker) , I will worship them at their feet.

And I know how to play these chumps really well. Nothing makes the losers get madder when you prove not only impervious to their attempts at insults but counter them with cool clever barbs that they can’t quite understand but sense they have just been *dissed* somehow. I have a general rule now, not to waste my time with haters because I want my time spent with quality people but occasionally I’ll indulge and then I can feel quite like a cat toying with a mouse. (Unless it turns out to be a troll and then I have already lost).

That being said, last year I was actually affected really bad for the first time. I thought Charlie Chaplin’s Time Traveller on youtube was a trailhead, so I posted my own very silly tongue-in-cheek video arguing in defence of its “validity”. Suddenly, I started getting huge numbers of views and I backtraced it to this guy who took my laughable video as god’s gospel and decided to not only eviscerate it for my apparent stupidity in believing in something as dumb as time travel but actually went on to say things like I needed to be taken behind a shed and have my head bashed in repeatedly with a hammer because I was to stupid to live and inciting men to find me. The hate oozing off this guy was something I have rarely encountered. Worse, there were 1000′s of comments under his video of men planning together to find where I lived to do god knows what.

For a few days, I was petrified and it was all I could think of. I couldn’t sleep at night because his face was in front of me always. I realized I had to get over it somehow, and the only way I could was to imagine him as a newborn baby that was unloved and neglected, and I would pick that baby up and just pour love on it. And within fortyfive minutes of doing that, his power over me was broken and I could sleep again. I truly believe that the power of love trumps hate always (in a pychological sense) and I refuse to give this man anymore headspace in my life other than to share my story. He hurt me deeply the first time I saw the video, but then I’m the fool who replayed it again and again in my head. No more.

As always, I believe that online communities need to self-regulate by standing upto hate in defence of not only our friends but strangers as well.

P.S. I don’t think being fat, ugly or slutty are necessarily bad things either. ;)

Auto-moderating of chat comments. Either something such as the pirate speak in Puzzle Pirates where dirty words are transformed or where insults are transfered to the first person so “you suck!” becomes “i suck!”. This solution can be easily gamed by the players, but also provides some comic relief to the situation. It’s also limited, though becoming less so as translation software improves.

Unfortunately, this behavior will never change and the anonymity of the internet just makes it worse. I dealt with this kind of hazing as a child and have occasionally had it pop up as an adult.

I dealt with one particularly nasty daily hazing from a boy with horrible acne. I took it for a long time but eventually I beat him to the punch and called him pizzaface or something like that – I can’t remember the exact thing i said. This ended the hazing – this boy never said another word to me – I still felt bad about it though. It’s not in my nature to treat people that way.

If I were experiencing the hazing you experienced in the game I probably would have tried to find those individuals profiles- odds are they were repulsive little toads – then I would decide if it was worth it to zing them back with superior firepower. They are probably just traditional griefers with undeveloped social skills, gigantic insecurities.

The sheer volume of stupidity and nastiness on the internet is distressing to me but I see it mirrored in reality tv, talk shows, and real life.

Back in college, in one of my very first MUDs, a player moved my character to a room with no exits and proceeded to sexually harass me. All I could do, other than quitting, was scream for help. Every other player in the game tried to get him to stop, but all any of us could do was wait for a ‘god’ character to come save me. Imagine, in real life, a guy dragging a girl into a room with a steel door, where the best her friends can do is pound on the door and yell that they’ve called the cops. The difference being that it was online – I did have the option of quitting and hoping that when I came back later, he’d be gone and someone was around to help. But even online, you shouldn’t have to do nothing but hope.

The major difference between that situation and what those guys did to you? I had people speak up for me. Oh, and most of a couple decades. It’s not a new thing.

Here’s what I’ve noticed – most of the offenders are young guys. I don’t have scientific back up, but I’d say teens. And it’s an empowerment thing. In ‘real life’ they’re are little fish, but as soon as they log in to a game, they think it’s their chance to be top dog (sorry for mixed metaphors there). They can say anything they want and there’s *no repercussions*. Sure, they might get banned from a game, but it’s not usually all that hard to rejoin as another persona, and even if they can’t get in, who cares? It’s not like their parents or friends know what they’ve said or done, they aren’t grounded, school/jobs aren’t affected. They might be ticked off that they’ve gotten a slap on the hand – they aren’t really going to see online moderators as authority figures, because they are as faceless as any other player, including the player(s) they are bullying. And yet, they’ve still hurt someone.

People are trying to figure out how to deal with bullying in real, everyday life, and failing. Why? Because bullying is not about the victim. Bullying is about someone trying to make themselves feel bigger. As long as they can find someone that can’t defend themselves, all they have to do is wait until they get away from the eyes/ears of mom/dad/teacher/moderator.

How do you fight it? Depends on you. Ignore it and go do something else for a while. Get a moderator to deal with it. Or feed it back to them.
I usually go for 1 and 2, the third option is not in my personality.

How do you prevent it? Well, it will be around at least until ‘real world’ bullying is ‘solved’. Most likely longer, because of the facelessness. Remember, it’s not about weight, gender, religion, race, etc. It’s about some punk trying to feel better about themselves – I doubt they even realize they’re being hurtful. So best prevention is to actively create a friendly environment from day 0. Granted, games like Runescape go a tad overboard – you can’t swear, you can’t say the word ‘password’ even, but then they are actively trying to create a safe game for kids, not just adults. But game creators/moderators need to set the tone at the start so the first players will understand the ‘rules’, because the players are the BEST line of defense against bullies. They can speak up, they can set an example of how you SHOULD treat others, and they can recognize that someone is acting like a jerk and choose, as a group, not to cooperate with him – make the game not fun for him. Realistically, he’ll just move on to the next game, so it’s not a long term solution. Which is the worst part of it.

You asked what worries me? We’re grown ups. We know who and what we are. Imagine being a 14 or 15 year old girl having to deal with that. Not good.

Just remember: ILLEGITIMI NON CARBORUNDUM! It sucks that it happened, but don’t let it shape your view of the game. And remember – this kid started out by mispelling ‘Eric’ while he was *looking* at the name, he is CLEARLY not worth any more upset that you’ve already felt.

I haven’t accepted it, but I don’t really know what to DO about it, other than speaking up when I see it happening (instead of, you know, going to get a freaking bowl of popcorn and watching like it’s a spectator sport), or spreading the word when I hear about it happening to someone else.

In closing, it offends and upsets me that this happened to you, Brooke, and that it happens to so many women and girls who love to play games but have to worry about people like this stealing away our joy and our fun.

I don’t think that the Gov should have crowdsourced 9/11! I was saying that using collective intelligence techniques *within* the security and intelligence organizations that were working on the problems would have been a good idea. Would still be a good idea.

In fact they probably do use many collective intelligence techniques (but they aren’t telling me).

As to the rest speaking out is always a good thing. So is accuracy and the truth. Really looking forward to the other articles in the series.

So we didn’t agree with how the events were portrayed as going down, but it was OK. When, really, it wasn’t. It’s been needling at our side for years now. And our silence about the inaccuracies of how the events are portrayed is, actually (hilariously, ironically), one of the issues with collective intelligence. Here a group was silenced into letting inaccuracies through because they just didn’t care or they wanted the idea to be explored further or whatever.

But the real problem with Cloudmakers (or any non-governmental agency) crowdsourcing 9/11 is that we were never going to have the vast amount of information that we needed to have. And no matter how behind the idea of crowdsourcing the various intelligence agencies were, they would never go so far as to give that information up. So it would have been a futile exercise that would have led solely down the road to various conspiracy theories. (and I do think that the various intelligence agencies do utilize collective intelligence well – it’s just that they, naturally, limit the tasks that they throw out to the general public)

I wasn’t monitoring Cloudmakers during 9/11 and didn’t see those posts, but it doesn’t seem strange that a few Cloudmakers came to the idea that they should _try_ to solve 9/11.

One, as you mentioned, people wanted to help. Do anything. Even if it didn’t help at all. They wanted to try. I think that came out of a genuinely good place.

Two, I think besides the fun of the game, The Beast was the first exposure anyone had to Collective Intelligence as a practical force.

I remember right after The Beast I had a “Jane McGonigal” moment myself when I was dazzled with the idea that this could be used to solve real world problems. And it has been shown to since then. (I even tried with a few others to come up with something we could do in real life that would solve some manageable sized problem. No one ever even came to an agreement about what the “cause” should have been!)

MIT started their Center for Collective Intelligence and the Climate CoLab to solve Global Warming http://climatecolab.org/ a few years later and others were also working on similar things. And the serious game movement rolls on… etc.

So I don’t feel the Darkest Puzzle posts had that much to do with The Beast or the format of the ARG itself, but rather the basic goodness of people, the helplessness of the situation, and the exposure to the idea that a hundred thousand people working on an idea can really lead to amazing and unpredictable results.

Maybe also a culture of wildspecing and the thinking *and voicing* of “all” possibilities of everything.

I can’t help but feel that the cloudmakers who had the idea to use collective intelligence to solve 9/11 might have been on to something if they had *not* been “The Cloudmakers” and had instead been the international intelligence community.