At the risk of generalising, my personal experience has been that the vast
majority of sexist comments in online gaming (and I'm mainly a MMORPG
player, so it might be different elsewhere) have come from young males,
under the age of 18, with language and communication habits that tend to
indicate a lack of education. There are also some players in that category
of course who are perfectly fine, and some who even publicly challenge such
behaviour. Among the more educated and mature members of the community, it
is not so much a problem.
The other thing, if we take World of Warcraft as a standalone example, is
that the game is splintered into hundreds of different "instances", with
differing rules. Those where roleplay rules are present and enforced seem
to have less problems. Those with rules that promote "PvP", or "Player
versus Player" with its emphasis competition between players (as opposed to
"Player versus Environment" and its emphasis on co-operation) tend to have
a lot more trash talk and problematic behaviour. I do think that in a lot
of cases its more based on cluelessness and ignorance rather than malice
(not that that doesn't mean it isn't a very serious problem though). It's
probably not practical to split Wikipedia into different instances with
different rules to create PvP and PvE projects ;-).
On the other hand, having seen some of the objectionable behaviour on
Wikipedia, the worst practitioners of sexist behaviour tend to be
intelligent, cunning, and subtle; the direct opposite more or less of your
average gaming troll. Their behaviour tends to be a lot more devious, with
more 'sailing close to the edge' and pushing at rules, creating doubt in
the minds of observers and tying up any action in protracted legalese,
rather than outright and blatant violations. So I don't think that
applying the strategies used in gaming (auto-muting, zero tolerance, etc),
are likely to be very successful in our environment.
On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 5:39 PM, Emily Monroe <emilymonroe03(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
Maybe we can learn how to (or how not to) deal with
sexism from the gaming
community, though.
From,
Emily
On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 2:37 AM, Michelle Gallaway <mgallaway(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
Sexist harassment on Wikipedia is real, but the
sort of stuff that
normally goes on in the online gaming world is orders of magnitude more
offensive and damaging.
Also Wikipedia is not a video game :-)
On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 1:04 PM, Jeremy Baron <jeremy(a)tuxmachine.com>wrote;wrote:
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/inside-sexual-harassment-online-gami…
I just caught this on the podcast. They mentioned "trolls" (that some
people say to just ignore them) but no mentions of Wikipedia.
-Jeremy
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