Cleaning up Thunder Bluff 524
An anonymous reader writes "Colleen Hannon at Gamers With Jobs is mad as hell, and she's not going to take it anymore. 'Unless you're playing Neopets, online servers are full of foul-mouthed, racist junk-monkeys. The hate-filled miasma they spatter around them has reached the point where many people who could be on those services won't go, and those who do brave it won't go without a posse and riot gear.' She plays out every side of the argument: why things have gotten as bad as they've become, what publishers have and haven't done about it, and why she thinks things are now at unacceptable levels of incivility. She's calling on us gamers to get together and figure this out, because: 'If we wait for the new sheriff in town to fight this battle for us we might not like the town we're left with.' Is it as bad as she says?"
Just give us the option (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:They are just words. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:They are just words. (Score:4, Interesting)
Plus I love the English language. If you have to put profanity in every sentence, you're doing a lousy job of speaking it, and that annoys me. It's like watching someone drive a ferrari without knowing how to shift; it makes me wince.
Go home care bear! (Score:4, Interesting)
I blame anonymity myself. I mean I think that everyone from the Pope down to Jimmy Swaggart is pretty much an asshole at heart. Most of us have a handle on it most of the time and some people even try to avoid pushing other people's "buttons". But lack of accountability is a huge problem, add anonymity and some abstraction to the mix and many people loose their only reason for not being a jerk. It doesnt help that many people refuse to accept or assign accountability based on their own political motivations or worse, whim.
It is believed by some that many people are perfectly nice in person but for some unknown reason they become animalistic online... I think this is flawed logic. It's far more likely that said person(s) is a jerk, but concequences keep them from acting out.
So yea, a meaningful identity online would help tremendously. But that's a can of toxic, radio active worms, even if you did open it and balance exposure/anonymity in a way that kept people happy. Eventually (and not very long I'm sure) some politician somewhere would wreck it for everyone in a dead of nigh bill, or simply declare it their purview.
In the long run I think I would prefer to live with it as-is, and if I want decorum I'll get within arms reach.
My advice - move on (Score:2, Interesting)
For example, I play COD2 exclusively. I belong to a online gaming "clan" that hosts this game and a number of others (BF2, BF2142, UO). In support of these games, we maintain game servers, a Vent voice chat server, forums, and a public website. Our overall philosophy is to provide an environment for fun and cheat-free play. We do not allow in-game typed profanity or harassment of other players. As far as voice chat goes, we only allow profanity in our 16 and older Vent channels. All other channels are rated G. Also, regardless of what channel you are in, harassment (sexist, racial, or otherwise) is NEVER tolerated. How do we manage it? Mature RCONs and Vent channel admins...who are on most of the time and available via IM, email, and phone when necessary.
Are we unique? Not at all. There are many mature groups of players who have banded together to form such positive playing environments.
If you are stuck on a Blizzard server, my sympathies.
Other party-line systems solved this long ago (Score:3, Interesting)
However, the designers realized that letting people lock on their mics could get pretty annoying in a hurry, for exactly the reasons you mentioned -- everybody else on the circuit doesn't need to hear you breathing, swallowing, talking to people not on the 'com, etc.
So they have a feature where the person at the master console can hit a button, and 'unlock' everyone's mics that are locked on. The way this is done is actually a pretty neat use of analog electronics, but it's not really relevant. The point is that the PTT-lock is a "soft lock" (the button doesn't lock down mechanically or anything), so it can be remotely unset. So that way if the person at the master console needs to break in, or just gets tired of hearing you breathe into your mic, they can just hit the button and shut you up (at least long enough to reach down and hit the button again).
Seems like this would be a good feature for video games that feature a team 'com, because essentially they're doing the same things as ClearComs in a production studio. You'd have a team leader, and they'd have the capability of unhooking people's stuck mics if they started yelling at their mom.
The only hardware change is that you have to have the PTT switch as a separate control line, rather than as part of the audio feed. (You have to have separate "headphone out," "mic in," and "PTT" lines, like most 2-way radios, rather than just "headphone" and "mic," with the PTT switch installed in the mic line.) This allows the mic keying to be done in the console, rather than in the headset -- which is really where it should be, even on a full-duplex connection. Also, it would let you actually use the PTT switch as more than just a switch for your own mic; you could set it up so that a quick double-tap of the PTT by the person in charge would unset other people's mics, and/or you could put the PTT switch any place you wanted, not just on your headset. (You could use it via a footswitch, or on your controller, or any other place you wanted.)
Anyway, 'teamspeak' and other systems are relatively new in the video game world, but the problems you're describing aren't new or very unique; they're all solved issues in other mediums, and hopefully someone in the video-game world will eventually take a look at some of those other systems and borrow the solutions.
The U.S. Army solution (Score:5, Interesting)
America's Army still has the best solution. Their in-game implementation of the United States Army Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. They just put griefers in a barred cell from which there is no escape, and keep them there for a while. There's nothing to do in the cell, except peer out the little barred window and watch the sun go down.
Re:Just leave general chat (Score:5, Interesting)
Not saying that there isn't good people on WoW, over the year or so that I played I managed to get a nice friends list, and join a guild filled with very adult people. I did manage to have some very nice conversations while sitting around in Stranglethorn being bored at 3am. But the more populous places were almost unplayable, like the Crossroads.
I'd say this would fall into the "tragedy of the commons" ideology. Just because you can be a moron, doesn't mean you HAVE TO be a moron. Arguments of character building aside, why should I accept being called a "fag", ever? How is this acceptable in a polite society?
Re:Just leave general chat (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, I know my aruguments are guild centric...
Re:taboo words, racism, and trash talk (Score:3, Interesting)
Online, there are no 'fighting words'. There is no barrier, no repercussions for actions, no tarnishing of your actual name by your behavior in game.
Saying 'it's just trash talk, it's your own fault for caring' misses the point.
Re:Maybe... just maybe... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's the nature of the games themselves, which is of course a side effect of the people who work in the game industry, but also a cause. It's a vicious cycle. However, there is hope on the horizon, and it comes from the (unlikely) direction of Valve software and Team Fortress 2. Have you seen the latest trailer for Team Fortress 2 [teamxbox.com]? The facial animation software is nothing short of incredible. This is a key tool that has been missing from games for years. If it can be merged with a procedural animation system, Valve will have finally brought down the barriers to creating movie-quality character development and plots in games.
Team Fortress won't have a movie-worthy in-game plot, to be sure, but the personality and above all *humor* infused into Valve's characters is already a welcome change from typical FPS fare. OTOH, something like Portal could be a breakthrough game.
Re:Just leave general chat (Score:2, Interesting)
So basically, spammers are getting killed next patch.
Filtering Fun (Score:3, Interesting)
Because this was a family service, we had to try to police conduct in the general channel, and because we didn't have the staff to monitor it live 24/7, it fell to me to try to automate some of this. That actually worked fairly well. We had a very large dictionary of naughty words and phrases. When you said something, my filters basically looked for any of those things, and '*'ed them out. The filter ignored whitespace, and it also considered certain characters to be equivalent, so if you wrote 5h17, that would match 'shit', since it knew a 5 could take the place of an s, and so on. However, before filtering, it did a spell check on your text, and marked all the words that were spelled right and were not on the bad word list as safe. For example, if you said "wash it", it would not see the "sh it" as something bad.
This worked surprisingly well. It caught it when people tried tricks like inserting spaces to break up the bad words, but usually did not get false positives, because of the spell check protector stuff. Well, unless you were a lousy speller, but if a lousy speller got kicked off incorrectly for profanity, it still improved things. :-)
One other little trick it did. When it filtered out something in your message, it only did that on the message sent to other people. The copy that echoed back to your system was uncensored.
When you got caught, it would send you a message warning you to watch your language. If you ignored the warning, an admin bot would ban you for a period of time. Repeared bans would be for longer times.
One thing that disappointed me: no one ever tried to use Klingon profanity to get around the filters. I had that covered in the filters, and was hoping to see the reaction when the users discovered that.
Re:Just leave general chat (Score:1, Interesting)
Basically what your seeing in online games is what you will be seeing in real life eventually. Games took out PVP and made safe areas because people whined that it was unfair that they got killed several times that by running thier mouth there was consequences. School playgrounds used to be the same way. Kids that ran thier mouths got beat up every bully eventually got what was coming to them. Now we have playground where every kids is playing games where everybody wins, everyone is equal, if someone acts up on the playground well then they get a talking to. This is what happens folks.
While yes I killed people in the games for money there was a penalty as well. Since I was labled in the game rules as a murder if I died I lost twice what someone else would I gained experience slower it was my price I was willing to pay. So if someone runs thier mouth in games they should be willing to pay the price of being rerolled by the mobs.
Re:The U.S. Army solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Example:
Offensive Language/Behaviour - your toon is locked in prison for X number of hours. 2nd Offense, its X *days*. Plus you get fined say 20% of your current bank account.
Racist Language/Harassment - your toon is locked in prison for X number of days, lose all current in game bank account.
Buying in game credits from a Credit spammer - Delete the entire account.
I think it would work well overall.
I think in Pirates of the Burning Sea they are planning on Hanging offending griefer types publically. I hope they do it, even if it encourages people to get hung, at least it will publically demonstrate that something is being done. I think in game pillories would be excellent as well. Spending the next 2 hours you are logged in with people abusing your toon in a public market might be annoying enough.
Sure, in RL this stuff doesn't work that well, but in game I think it might work quite well.
Re:Just leave general chat (Score:3, Interesting)
The Internet is not a polite society. As the GP said, you just have to accept the fact that anything can be said there at any time and adjust to it.
In a way, the idiots are doing you a favor. How hard is it to find out that a random stranger is a sick loser who should not be trusted or associated with--if they are being restrained in what they can say and do? It can be hard enough to end up costing you.
Every time somebody lets you know they are a waste of space at no appreciable cost to you, you have profited by how easy you got that information, and you can act accordingly.
Re:Just leave general chat (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: spamsentry (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you happen to have a reference for that? I wouldn't be suprised if their logging is that lackluster. Seems security is often an after-thought (and by then its really difficult to deal with).
Thanks for the tip! Reporting spam was sort of loosing its novelty value anyway.
Ain't no privacy here (Score:2, Interesting)