Quote From: lashruI've been playing a variety of multiplayer online games since 1999 (as an adult, I must add), and have experienced cyber bullying and griefing from a variety of perspectives including enforcement against the bullies. It's a difficult issue but there are a number of measures game providers can, and have, taken to reduce the incidence of bullying as well as to punish the offenders.
I originally played Everquest, and experienced a variety of harassments and griefing, most of which fell into the context of the game. Within EQ, players had the ability to give a command that would capture the last ten lines of the current chat window and send it to a secure database for the EQ game masters to review for policy violations. If you reported a violation, the GMs would then check the report database and examine the actual text. If it was found a player had violated the rules, s/he was treated to anywhere from a 24 hr to permanent suspension. If a player's character had an obscene name, that character could and would be deleted outright, without the opportunity to preserve its possessions or transfer them.
While I was a guide ( a volunteer in-game support person below a GM) in EQ, I frequently dealt with petitions complaining about obscene and harassing remarks, emotes, behavior, and character names, both within and outside the context of the game. In general, if you wanted to go on an anti-elf racist rant in game, that was perfectly acceptable because elves don't exist in the real world. However, if you wanted to say those same things about Arabs (as happened on 9/11, when I was a senior guide), you were in violation of the TOS, and you could and would be punished up to and including being banned from the game permanently. I know for a fact that Sony/Verant (EQ's publisher) and the GMs (Sony employees) took the real-world harassment and threats very seriously, and acted on them as swiftly as was possible.
That's what's lacking in the game I play now, World of Warcraft, published by Blizzard. Several months ago, I was a victim of cyber harassment of the most offensive kind. As I was adventuring in-game, minding my own business, I encountered a couple strangers, one of whom challenged me to a duel. I declined, and he repeated the challenge a few more times (what we call spamming), which I ignored. Then he emoted raping me.
Don't get me wrong: in no way did I ever feel I was personally at real-world risk of being raped. Unless the person on the other side of the rapist toon was a GM or Blizzard employee, there's no way at all for him to obtain my personal information and track me down in real life.
I reported his behavior, and basically got the usual line from the GM who responded: well, it's not a real-world threat, he doesn't have your information, it only happened the once, so just ignore him and move somewhere else.
The problem with that "resolution" is, it isn't. At all. When someone emotes something so totally objectionable, the last thing the victim needs to be told is, hey, shrug it off and move yourself elsewhere. You want, and need, to see that the other person is punished. I was told, as well, that it was my word against his, and it was only one incident.
Why was this so objectionable? I've had friends who were raped, and I can well imagine the psychological effect that twerp's emote would have had on them. And, in addition, I'm acutely aware of the social implications. Here's some twerp who thinks rape is funny, that it's amusing to pretend-rape someone because, heyyyy, it's "just" a game. I seriously doubt he'd go up to one of his sister's friends, ask her out, and if she refused, pretend to rape her. And I would bet a fair bit of money he would never have done that had his mother been watching over his shoulder. Nor would he have found it as funny had it happened to his mother or sister.
The problem is, many online forums (whether chat sites, games, or other ways in which people communicate, simply cannot afford the real-time monitoring necessary to ensure that these venues remain completely safe and user-friendly. Nor should they have to. That's like expecting an adult-chat party phoneline to ensure that none of the participants says anything offensive to any of the other participants.
The central problem is, you cannot FORCE people to behave themselves
from the get-go. All you can do is provide something of a
foul-language filter, and ensure there are meaningful consequences in
the game when they do (and trust me, they will) misbehave. Not monitoring, but rules, enforcement, and meaningful punishment.
I'm personally not in favor of limiting free speech on the internet, I think it's un-American. I think you parents out there have a responsibility to ensure that when your children are allowed online, they are monitored and their content is vetted by the adults responsible for them. If your child has a subscription to some chat site or game that you don't know about, you have larger issues than whether someone on that site is a pedophile lurking. I think adults should be free to communicate online however they like, up to and including "hooking up" and cybersex, if that's mutually agreeable.
However. Any company that provides any kind of communication forum, where the communications can be captured in text form, should provide its subscribers (paid or free, shouldn't matter) with the means to capture proof of harassment, to document it, and report it to some authority which has the power to verify what happened, then punish any violations of the Terms of Service. And if the violation includes a threat to visit real-world violence or harassment upon the victim, that should be reported to the appropriate authorities for additional criminal or legal action.
What we need is to ensure that people currently abusing the anonymity of these fora face real consequences, and that their victims have the tools to prove violations have occurred.
And then we all need slightly thicker skins, and to teach our children that anonymity is never an excuse for bad behavior :)
It is physically impossible to really emote rape on WoW. The most you can do is say "username" rapes "username." I mean I could see you being upset with Blizzard if they had actually animated an emotion where you could rape someone but blaming them because someone in the game said that isn't fair, and, by the terms and conditions that that player agreed to, they haven't broken their contract. I understand that, yes, if certain people were called certain things or encountered certain experiences it could hurt them, but people do and say rude things to me in that game all the time and I don't think it's Blizzard's job to kick everyone out of their game that says something that MIGHT be offensive to someone else. I do know that if there is an extended amount of time that a person is harassing you in this game they will do something about it. Anyway, I just don't think it's fair to condemn a company based on one event to which you, personally, did not enjoy the outcome.
You've heard the saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” But what happens when someone posts malicious comments about you on the Internet? This trend, known as e-vengeance or cyber bullying, can have deadly consequences. Thirteen-year-old Megan Meier committed suicide after being taunted on MySpace by “Josh,” whom she believed to be a cute teenage boy. Unbeknownst to her parents, Ron and Tina, Josh’s profile was fake, which they believe was created by an adult neighbor to monitor Megan. Was this a case of freedom of speech, or harassment? A state senator proposing anti-cyber-bullying legislation and a First Amendment attorney weigh in. Then, Colorado councilwoman Sandy Tucker made national headlines when she posted a controversial joke online. When the mayor asked her to remove remarks he considered offensive, Sandy refused and then resigned. She doesn't feel the need to apologize and says people need to lighten up. Holly lives in Sandy's town, and joins the show via Web cam to tell the former councilwoman why the joke is no laughing matter. Plus, meet a man who says he's constantly taunted by racist slurs while playing Xbox Live. Join the discussion.
