negative social behavior in games topic
I like to write down this point again every once in a while, usually when I start seeing examples of it popping up again
from personal experience playing them and seeing how the playerbase behaves outside of the game on big forums like reddit or twitter, the distinction in what form this manifests often gets flattened. to put it in few works: people don't act mean in the same way across different games
I'm honing in on TF2 here because it gets a reputation of being the scrappy underdog compared to the big competitors like overwatch or w/e, despite having a player count in the same ballpark, likely making comparable amounts of money, and (along with CSGO) continuing to benefit from a form of loot boxes far more unethical than anything in the era where those were common
from having played TF2 more than any other game in my life, playing dota 2 a considerable amount, and playing CS for a bit; bad behavior is less common due to the slower formats of those games but more extreme stemming from a combination of them having one foot in older generations of PC gamers, while also having an owner with next-to zero care for moderating their platforms more than they absolutely need to
if it's obvious to other players in an average match of TF2 (this goes for matchmaking servers and many big community servers) that you are any deviation from being a straight white male, you will get 4chan levels of aggression and features like votekicks will get abused to target you
the other big games have a more "guy in a giant ford truck screaming at you on the highway" flavor to their harassment, and don't get me wrong here, those games still have very nasty people and consistently fail to dole out punishment to them.
though they're not the same thing, there's no less bad choice between the pervasive and insidious. one is often the kind of dude who can't control their anger, the other is someone with a learned casual sociopathy. you've got overlaps between the two, but it's easy to notice when certain games have more of one personality type than the other
I don't have a call to action here. disable every form of in-game communication in any game you play, stick to communities where you know that hateful types of people aren't welcome. you will not become stronger by being exposed to varying genres of harassment, none of these games actually need verbal communication with randoms
