Common Courtesy in Online Games

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By Ravenhawk | November 1, 2006

Yes, I know I addressed all the good ole’ halloween stuff on saturday when today is actually halloween. The general idea in my head was of course that today is a tuesday, and therefore everyone is getting their partying out of their system saturday, and less stuff happens today. Thats the way it worked out for me anyway. I partied saturday night, and tonight all I’m doing in working on programming homework which is driving me to pull my hair out.
But I degress. What I wanted to talk about tonight was the general attitude of players on MMOs. Now, obviously, there are a lot of good people out there. There are quite a few people who are always polite, are good to party with, etc.
Most of the discourteous actions that players can take part in, Kill Stealing, Ninjalooting, etc. can have cures programmed into the code of the game to prevent them. However, most of the time you can’t program into your game a function to stop people from just being jerks. For instance, if I’m playing Puzzle Pirates, and I’m swordfighting, the one thing that drives me nuts is poor sportsmanship. Say I just massacred someone who is of a lower rating in a tournament. Now, regardless of how much of a challenge a fight was, it is polite of me to say that it was a good game. I feel rude if I don’t say anything. I’ve had somewhere between half a dozen and a dozen occurrences, where I will say that to someone who was a rather unever match and recieve four letter vulgarities in response. And they don’t just type it. They make sure that it gets around the word censor by separating the letters.
Is it so much to ask that people be good sports and maybe even talk to eachother in a polite and civil manner? I’m perfectly aware that good sportsmanship is generally seen as a mere formality. Saving face, if you will. But does this mean its bad? No. People need to learn to accept losses, especially in skill based videogames. Some people naturally are more adept at some things. Or sometimes they’re just more experienced. If you go around in an FPS shouting “F*** YOU!” Every time someone kills you, you’re likely going to find yourself removed from the server.
When they’re on the internet, many people don’t think they need to be civil. Well, they’re wrong. Whenever you are communicating with other people, regardless of the media, you should learn control yourself.
Obviously if they’re already in the world of gaming, its a little late to put in too much of a word to their parenting. But even if you can’t redo poor parenting, you can edit their behavior through community acceptance.
If being a jerk leads to not being able to find a guild to play with, or servers to play on, etc. etc. People will usually learn pretty fast that they have to get their act together.
The gaming community as a whole needs to band together. I don’t expect we’ll be able to annihilate poor sportsmanship and general jerkwads from the world, but at least if you shun people who can’t learn to be civil, some of them would shape up.
Or maybe I’m dreaming.
But its a good dream.

Until next time, comrades.

Edit: Oh, a quick edit.
The vague offer of reward still stands for anyone who sends me a halloween creature slaying screenshot.