at the crossroads of GIFT and teamwork

So, I'm reading Playable Pedagogy, specifically Alex's comment on being a noob in Dota 2.

I hesitate to play any real matches against real opponents because my teammates warned me that if I play with others, I will be verbally torn apart if I can’t play decently. This is the main reason I stay away from collaborative gaming.

As a friendly gamer who regularly joins pick-up groups in MMOs, this is incredibly disheartening to hear. I know what she means; Gaming in multiplayer for nearly twenty years has given me my fair share of interactions with the slime and human detritus that lie waiting in the gutter of the gaming community. What I mean is that it's incredibly disheartening to hear that yet another person has been turned off from gaming with strangers because of this. I hear it all the time and, unless it subsides or we can change the conversation, it's going to continue to damage the reputation of the hobby and turn away the more thoughtful people who might help make great games and great multiplayer experiences.

Maybe I'm different in not being as bothered by these things. I grew up in Quake II, where trash talking was simply one of the rules of the road. You didn't have to instigate—I never did—but you at least had to tolerate it. There was also respect there if you could bite back sharply and cleverly after you were bitten—but only once; making a big deal out of it was seen as getting emotional and thus embarrassing. I'd liken it to the way stand-up comics are expected to deal with hecklers by making a joke at their expense and then moving on.

But trash-talking is probably the least disquieting form of internet abuse in most cases, especially because you expect it coming from the other team and because it has a long history in competitive activity outside gaming. It's another thing entirely to hear your own teammates rip you open and tear out your entrails.

This is a phenomenon that's fairly unique to internet competition. For example, can you imagine what the reaction would be if, during a post-game interview, an NFL quarterback blamed his offensive line for folding up and his receivers for dropping clean throws and also refused to address what he could have done differently? He'd be canned before they could get him off the air. There's no place for this in athletic competition, so I don't buy the often stated argument that people playing Dota or other MOBA games are more aggressive because they're more competitive.

One of the things at work here is clearly GIFT. In 2004, Mike Krahulik, who draws and sometimes writes for Penny Arcade, articulated in a simple formula what internet veterans had unconsciously known on some level for years: why people are jerks on the internet.

Fig 1. John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory

This is, of course, comedy, but it's important because it articulates in an extremely accessible way a foundation for further understanding. Personally, I think it's an oversimplification that is essentially true nonetheless. On the academic side, psychologist John Suler was writing contemporary to Krahulik and published a well-cited paper on what he termed the Online Disinhibition Effect, citing six primary factors for the change. Whatever the specific reasons, it is well documented that online interactions do cause people who otherwise might be reasonably helpful, or at least neutral, to become hostile.

So how does this influence Alex's concerns about being a noob and the particular brand of hostility directed at new players? She has a point there:

I think what experienced gamers get out of noob-shaming is more self-serving than that. I think experienced gamers reinforce their experienced-gamer-culture in part through noob-shaming.

Maaaaaaybe. I'd need to know in more detail what she means by "experienced-gamer-culture," but I'm skeptical. I know many experienced gamers across many different games and in many different communities and only very rarely is a part of that culture an exclusion of outsiders. A preference for insiders and a respect for knowledge and expertise, possibly, but not a closing of the culture.

What makes more sense to me is to explain it as a form of blaming the thing. There's a video of a chimpanzee eating a lemon, clearly disliking the sour taste, and then attempting to smash the lemon in apparent punishment for the foul flavor. You can see this in humans too sometimes; people who stub their toes very hard on an object will sometimes kick the object out of a reflexive anger that comes from a wholly irrational place. By shifting blame onto others, we can avoid the shame of our own failure.

I mentioned that I wasn't as bothered by these things; I game with strangers in spite of their occasional hostility to me. For a long time I felt like getting used to this was a process that everyone had to and would go through, a forging-in-fire that resulted in stronger people and the ability to shrug off trolls. But if the number of friends who have vocally expressed their aversion to gaming collaboratively is any indication, I'm clearly wrong on this.

We need more thinking and scholarship on the issue as it relates to gaming if we want to create a more welcoming environment for people who aren't willing to go through that fire. Playable Pedagogy, "tag you're it."