Comments on: Is Online Gaming Creating Citizens or Monsters?

By: ZNF ‘Round The Web

ZNF ‘Round The Web — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:15:25 +0000

[...] Is Online Gaming Creating Citizens or Monsters? Davis, in some of the ZNF comments and the TCF I’ve seen at least one or two mentions of adult gaming groups – I assume it would limit some of the silliness. I traded in my Xbox for a PS3 and the Xbox at least allowed me to rate asses and in extreme cases report them. No such feature on the PS3 as far as I can tell. I’ve been playing CoD4 and SOCOM withOUT my headset – less community feel, but less stupid people. [...]

By: Dave Zatz

Dave Zatz — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:13:18 +0000

Davis, in some of the ZNF comments and the TCF I’ve seen at least one or two mentions of adult gaming groups – I assume it would limit some of the silliness.

I traded in my Xbox for a PS3 and the Xbox at least allowed me to rate asses and in extreme cases report them. No such feature on the PS3 as far as I can tell. I’ve been playing CoD4 and SOCOM withOUT my headset – less community feel, but less stupid people.

By: Dan Rubin

Dan Rubin — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 07:03:52 +0000

Kaboom and Wing Commander engaged more of my formative years than certain school grades. Who can forget the joy of editing autoexec.bat and config.sys files so that you could get such incredible game enhancements as seeing the pilot’s hand moving my ship’s stick? My pilot, the cleverly named “CatSlayer,” was the envy of the Tiger’s claw.

On topic, I played CoD online for about ten minutes before I realized that getting head sniped by racist pre-teens just wasn’t the charge I was looking for. That followed a 30-minute exploration of Gears of War, an experience enhanced not only by getting chainsawed every 45 seconds, but also the constant racial slurs.

There are reasons I play Rock Band, by myself, at home.

By: Davis Freeberg

Davis Freeberg — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 05:27:01 +0000

I’ve tried to get into online gaming, but always encounter two issues. The first is the hostility that you point out. To a certain extent this is a problem for other things (like blogging and message boards) that also allows for anonymity, but you’re right about Xbox being a sewer. The second issue that I run into is that online isn’t well suited for the casual gamer. Even the games that I’m good at, I get schooled in and it sucks all of the fun out of the game when you are winning less then 10% of the time. I’m not sure how others are able to get help from the more seasoned players, but have found that they are more interested in blowing me out of the water then in helping me get better.

A while back, I think that you had suggested a casual gamer community or maybe it was an over 40 league and I think that that could really help. 14 year olds are the ones who have the time to get good at a game and their behavior reflects their age. If I had an opportunity to go up against other working stiffs who want to relax after a hard day’s work, I think it would be a more enjoyable experience. As is, online gaming is less of an option for me now because I’m not willing to pay $15 a month for 6 hours of entertainment on a game like WOW and I’m not willing to pay Xbox anything because the experience is so frustrating.