Toxicity

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This week in class, we discussed gaming toxicity in the online social video games. For those of you that are unfamiliar, toxicity is essentially hatred, profanity, or slurring that occurs in online games from players to other players. A person is labeled as a toxic player when they display such behavior. I myself have been playing online games since high school such as Halo, Call of Duty, and more recently Overwatch. After years of being a decently invested gamer, I have seen many cases of toxicity displayed from other players, whether they be enemies calling you trash, or teammates calling you trash, lol. Sometimes on occasion there is a female playing and they experience toxicity on a daily basis. Gamers will take it so far as they will threaten female with rape and other disgusting acts. Now of course its all talking with the safety of the internet in between the players, so people feel like they can say anything they want and get away with it, which they can for the most part. Overwatch, as pictured above, is an extremely complicated, team oriented, strategy fps game which can be a very frustrating game to play when the one player on your team isn't cooperating or is throwing (purposely loosing the game). Nerves of gamers get even more stressed out when they are playing the competitive mode and are competing for a world ranking. Blizzard, the makers, have cracked down hard on toxic players recently after just about a year of the game being out. Here is an article on how Blizzard has had to put so much time and resource into this subject, that it has hindered game development. Bans are now in full effect along with player suspensions. As good as this all seems for the overwatch community, I have always been skeptical of a non toxic online social game. To me it seems somewhat impossible, as long as there is no real repercussion for toxic behavior, what is to stop a angry gamer from being toxic over the mic. This topic of toxicity in games doesn't only apply to games, but also to reddit and the internet in general. Will toxicity always be something that users will just have to tolerate?