Sexism and other forms of bigotry in gaming.

[Aron_DeTomado]

MajorFreak, "confirmation bias" is an actual scientific term, it's not something TDATL just made up. Also it is not the same thing as subjectivity.

Also I agree with pally. In fact, one might go so far as to say that the very concept of children is rather new - certainly not much older than industrialism. The concept of "youth" (as a pronoun) is even younger.

Also anyone who doesn't think children can be rude and obnoxious in face to face conversations has clearly never had a face to face conversation with children. They're like goblins: They become bolder in packs.

[TDATL]

@MajorFreek: Confirmation bias is basically the tendency of people to remember things that confirm what they believe and disregard things that don't. An example is that "I think I'm being watched. oh crap I am! I think I could feel them looking at me." scenario lots of people find themselves in when in a public place.

It isn't that you actually have some special power to detect people looking at you. You are actually unknowingly manufacturing the situation. First you have the feeling (likely the result of a subtle air current across your back) and then you look around to see if someone is looking at you. People around you see the motion of your head moving and look at it. That situation seems so special at the moment. You thought you were being watched and (from your perspective) you were! That sort of thing sticks in people's minds. What you don't remember is all the times you had that same feeling, looked around, and didn't see someone looking at you. After all, from your perspective there was nothing note worthy to remember about the time you didn't see anyone looking at you. You simply went back to what you were doing and promptly forgot about it.

The same thing happens when dealing with people online. People don't tend to remember all of the "faceless" players they play against/with once or twice (or even dozens of times) that don't say anything to them. Someone generally has to do something to stand out for people to remember them. Being a jerk most defiantly makes someone stand out. It also makes the memory of dealing with them very clear and distinct. I know I played with tons of people on tons of games but remembering dealing with a specific person is nigh impossible unless they were particularly talkative (for good or ill.) Furthermore I know I've had dozens of good spirited conversations in the games but that knowledge is just general. Meanwhile I can recall almost word for word dealing some particularly nasty jerks.

Basically something that doesn't challenge the "norm" doesn't get it's own reserved spot in your memory. It get's glossed over at best. Things that upset the norm (or just upset you) get front row seats in your memory.

Now because you can clearly remember individual times you dealt with people who upset you but only have a general idea about people who behave properly you form the mistaken impression that there are more jerks than none jerks. The confirmation bias comes into play when every time after that you see a jerk and go "see I was right!" meanwhile seeing non-jerks doesn't trigger the "everyone online is jerks" theory in your head. After all, people behaving properly is how it is supposed to go. There is nothing note worthy about that. So you continue to file away experiences with jerks as "proof" while unconsciously dismissing/not-taking-note-of things that don't reinforce that thought.

Every now and then from now on try and make a small mental note to yourself when playing with people who behave properly. When you run into a jerk take count of how many people are not jerks in the match. It won't take a lot of effort or even that much consistency before you start to realize how few and far between the jerks are compared to the normal players. The difference is stark enough you likely won't even need to keep any sort of records of it to see how relatively few jerks there are about.

[Edit] I should note that if you don't actually keep numbers and records of all your interactions then you are actually opening yourself up to confirmation bias simply in a new direction. Meticulous records are one of the most important things to prevent this but that is cumbersome and I didn't think you would be likely to do that. [end edit]

Of course keeping actual numbers and records of the interactions would be best but it is unlikely that people will go to that effort. After all you aren't playing the game to do "work" you are doing it to relax and taking your hands off the keyboard to write something will quickly become cumbersome for most people.

[edit2: somewhere along the way I forgot who I was responding to and why in this post. I started it to simply explain confirmation bias and it just kind of spiraled off on it's own and became me just rambling about things you didn't even say. Sorry about that.]

[Starfisher]

I'd also like to point out that this "Nuuuu, the problem is that we have to interact with kids instead of sealing them away in their own isolated world where they never interact with grownups like it's always been done before" idea is a bit wrongheaded. Bubblewrapped insulation of children from the adult world is pretty new in human history (A hundred years old at most), and the recent total isolation of children from the adult world where people actually get morally outraged when they see people letting their kids mingle with adults at all is very new, probably just 30-50 years old.

Who said any of that at all?

The point is that prior to the internet, adult-child competitive interaction took place from the perspective of establish social roles with clear and obvious hierarchies. If I play a sport with a 15 year old, unless the 15 year old is astonishingly gifted, I will have all sorts of advantages and be the benefactor of all sorts of social pressures to suppress the sorts of behavior that 15 year old might engage in with peers.

Put us both in the same game of Halo3? I have no status advantage, I have no social advantage, and there is zero repercussion for that 15 year old flipping out like it's 1865 and he just lost the Civil War. That is unique and new. We've never had a tool for ripping people out of their social structure/social context and throwing them together the way you can with a multi-player game.

[Paladin]

The point is that prior to the internet, adult-child competitive interaction took place from the perspective of establish social roles with clear and obvious hierarchies. If I play a sport with a 15 year old, unless the 15 year old is astonishingly gifted, I will have all sorts of advantages and be the benefactor of all sorts of social pressures to suppress the sorts of behavior that 15 year old might engage in with peers.

You are looking at this entirely through a modern perspective. 100 years ago you'd be competing with that 15 year old for a job, and your very survival.

[Starfisher]

And you're apparently completely ignoring the fact that society also existed back then. Or not reading my post. Seriously, what's hard to grasp here? I'll requote the important part:

Put us both in the same game of Halo3? I have no status advantage, I have no social advantage, and there is zero repercussion for that 15 year old flipping out like it's 1865 and he just lost the Civil War. That is unique and new. We've never had a tool for ripping people out of their social structure/social context and throwing them together the way you can with a multi-player game.

A hundred years ago being even verbally lewd in public would be not be tolerated by society. But yeah, I'm sure he'd randomly go on an insane rant when I got a base hit in our pickup baseball game outside the factory.

[Akranadas]

100 years ago, men were men and woman were woman, and that wasn't sexism.

[GeoffS]

When you are talking about sexist/racist/abusive rants behind Internet anonymity in online games,the only way you can look at it is from a modern perspective. The circumstances simply did not exist at any other time in history.

[Paladin]

/me eyerolls.

Fisher, you keep talking about game contexts, but what I'm saying is that you would have been competing with "children" on an even footing (And in many cases even been at a disadvantage to them) in just your everyday life. The entire reason that child labor laws came into being was essentially to allow adults to get and keep industrial jobs, because at the time kids were winning that particular battle, as they were cheaper to employ...

Admittedly, children were better integrated into society at the time, as they weren't being forcibly isolated from it. I'd argue that the isolation we impose on children nowadays is the root of the problem, not the existence of avenues in which they can interact with us.

[Starfisher]

Ok.

So do you think that ten year old taking my job would launch into a screaming offensive rant at me for five minutes as I was standing in front of him in the factory, either because he just took my job or because he perceived that I had slighted him in some way?

If not, why not?

You don't seem to be grasping the fundamental point I'm making, and you're managing to fail to grasp in it a really fucking dickish way. You continue to ignore and apparently are refusing to address the concept of social roles and mores relating to age and social groups, which would have very much been in force even in the situation you cite - and which is completely integral to my argument. So, please, either respond to that in some way or expand on what you're trying to say so that I can see how it relates at all to my argument.

[TDATL]

@Paladin: That is a different type of competition you are talking about. A kid back then would have no reason at all to interact with the adults they were taking jobs from. Competing for a job and competing in a sport are very different.

It wouldn't matter that they were equal in the workforce. They were unequal socially. As an example, I had a fellow student attend college with me who had served in Vietnam. As students we were equals but I still addressed him Mr. (last name) and not just his first name like I did my age peers. It didn't matter that we attended the same classes and made roughly the same grades addressing him another way would have felt completely wrong. If we had only interacted through an online class then I would have addressed him like I addressed everyone else because it is unlikely it would have 'clicked' for me that he was significantly older than me.

While there are certainly kids that will curse out adults I do think that it is likely that the faceless nature of the internet lends itself to kids treating everyone like they would their peers. Unfortunately kids are often massive jerks to their peers.

It is important to note that a lot of the people we play with that don't cause any trouble are potentially very young. So again we are likely only noticing the bad apples in the bunch.

[Paladin]

@Fisher: /me eyerolls again.

Perhaps you missed the part where I pointed out that children were better integrated into society at the time, and my postulate that the bad behavior displayed in online games nowadays is less a problem created by their sudden access to interaction with adults and more an artifact of their segregation from adult society in the first place?

I mean, aside from the obvious confirmation bias problem of taking "I played CoD and a lot of little kids were shouting abuse and swearing" and generalizing it to "All kids who play games act like asses"... I'm questioning your apparent assumption that the problem is allowing children to engage in a social activity with adults on an equal footing, and suggesting that the problem is their pre-existing lack of socialization due to leading their entire lives up to this point shut off from adult society and what "socialization" they have undergone revolving entirely around interactions with children their exact age and a handful of adult authority figures in a wholly artificially constructed environment.

[Starfisher]

I'm questioning your apparent assumption that the problem is allowing children to engage in a social activity with adults on an equal footing

I'm not saying it's a "problem". I'm saying that it allows what happens naturally inside peer groups to happen across peer groups. That's it.

I was reading an account of some hunter gatherers and how they reared their children. It mentions how the kids jockey amongst themselves for position all the time (more play fighting than killing each other) but they obviously don't challenge adults in the same way until they're much older. This is not "new", it's probably older than even being human. The root of someone screaming abuse at you is the nature of the human animal and the search for status; COD or some other online game simply removes just about every evolved and learned social cue you have to regulate that behavior. So, suddenly, you have 25 year olds on a level playing field, or more accurately, an ambiguous playing field, with 12 year olds. The 25 year olds generally forget that they were dicks at 12 and are shocked to encounter the random asshole 12 year old that rages at them constantly.

The only new thing here is a technology which rips you out of your social context.

You still haven't answered my question. Does the 12 year old rage at me and gloat when he takes my job from the factory? Or not? And why?

[Paladin]

Gah... Is it difficult to read "no" in "better integrated into society"? Let me put it in completely spelled out explicit terms: The child in that circumstance is not likely to pile abuse upon you because he's already been socialized and internalized most of the rules of adult society by actually interacting with adult society on a daily basis.

The entire construction of "peer groups" meaning age brackets, let alone single year brackets, is modern and artificial. Middle school aged kids, who we think of as barely out of diapers, were considered pretty well full adults just a few hundred years back. My point is that the problem we're discussing is not the result of an environment with a lack of social cues, it's the result of kids who honestly have no accurate concept of what adult interaction is like, because they've never seen it.

Look at it this way: We've all seen kids who behave poorly in competitive multiplayer games, but we've all seen adults who behave that way as well. Those adults who behave that way are fewer and further between, because the only adults who act like that in a game are those who are immature and never really properly adapted to society. The reason we see it more in children is that we don't give them a chance to adapt to and integrate into society. When a 12 year old whose sole social interactions have been with other 12 year olds interacts with adults in a game, he's just going to assume that adult society works like 12 year old social interaction, because that's all he knows.

How can we expect kids to know how to act in a society they've never been allowed to interact with in a meaningful manner, or even been much exposed to?

[Starfisher]

So you would predict that a modern 12 year old would scream abuse at me in person, because they were never socialized?

[Paladin]

If they thought there would be no consequences, sure. In fact, you can see examples of this in practice if you go down to a place where a bunch of youths are congregating (And therefore feel safe due to the weight of numbers in their advantage) and you do anything remotely inviting ridicule.

I'm not denying that anonymity/security (And the illusion of that, at least, can be provided by a crowd as easily as it can by an Internet medium) don't contribute to specific instances of this, I'm simply suggesting that such circumstances don't create the problem, they merely provide a moment where a random adult may actually come into contact with a much greater and widespread problem of which he would otherwise remain ignorant.

[Starfisher]

That's exactly what I said on the last page:

Prior to the invention of online gaming, I don't think this sort of social interaction actually existed. You simply didn't have a widespread venue for young kids and adults to play on a level playing field without any physical or social consequences for behavior. Within age groups, yeah, this sort of thing happens all the time, but I don't think that there's ever been a way for it to occur across age groups like it does now.

[Paladin]

I would argue that 100 years ago kids--and in particular, teens--interacted with adults on a much more peer-to-peer level than any kid ever does nowadays. So some circumstances of peer level social interaction between children/adolescents and adults is not a brand new invention that's never happened before in history, as your quote would indicate.

[Starfisher]

I'm going to bold the part that should change your response:

You simply didn't have a widespread venue for young kids and adults to play on a level playing field without any physical or social consequences for behavior.

This is a new phenomenon in human sociability. The technology never existed before. The scenario never existed before. Well, unless you want to argue that video gaming is not a brand new invention that's never happened before in history, in which case, please continue.

[MajorFreak]

Aron: obviously you didn't bother to read my entire post, but thank you for being arrogant. I like smashing trolls.

TDATL: it just seems like the definition of 'subjectivity'

influenced by or based on personal beliefs or feelings, rather than based on facts

and is the same sort of thing scientific experimentation tries to weed out.
Can you elucidate the subtlety? Or maybe i should try it another way: why DIDN'T you pick the word 'subjectivity' or just say it's semantics? I'd happily accept the latter explanation simply because i enjoy learning new things.



***

BTW, WTF are these guys yapping about for god's sakes? Akranadas: Is that some sort of involved socratic irony?!?!

[Paladin]

Dude, thread's been inactive for two weeks. Let it die.

However, I'm not conceding your point Fisher (I hadn't read your post before this). The anonymity of the crowd was a very new phenomenon that changed how society worked and regarded young people... At the start of the Industrial Revolution and urbanization. It's just more widespread now, but it's no different from youth gangs or the behavior of unruly children when cities first began to exist in a recognizable form. It's perhaps more reliable (Though that's arguable, especially for kids who are likely to leave traceable fingerprints everywhere due to ignorance), and certainly more ubiquitous, but it's not new.