Ugh.
I know the response I’ll get for pointing this out, or for bringing it up. “It’s Xbox Live, deal with it or don’t use it,” everyone will say. “Pointing it out is useless, we already know it’s like that,” everyone will say. “I don’t want to live in political-correctness world,” everyone will say.
Ugh.
You know what, I don’t care what people think: this kind of overt hate speech is wrong. While I’m generally okay with a lot of forms of trash talking, I think there’s a line between that and 99% of what the people are talking about in this video:
Make no mistake, the things that are said in this video are said by people with no ounce of respect or decency. Just because you have the right to say something, or you feel like you can say something, doesn’t mean you should attack someone over Xbox Live because their name is something like “proud to be gay/Muslim/black/a girl” whatever. Attacking people for being proud of something like that, something so inherent, is asinine.
Realistically, no, I’m not out to stop all hate speech everywhere. Realistically, all I would really like would be a wake-up slap to the gaming community, and have some people decide that attacking people is wrong. Realistically, that’s not going to happen at all. But that isn’t going to stop me from trying.
I have to unfortunately stop short of commending the people that made the video. While the result turned out great, their inspiration, I believe, was faulty.
On the Gambit blog, you find that the reason they made this article was as a way of responding to the controversy surrounding the “Dickwolves” Penny Arcade comic which I’m sure you’ve heard about a hundred times by now. And this is where I believe they are incorrect.
There’s a crucial difference between saying something and attacking someone. Penny Arcade was making a comic, not an attack. Regardless of whether or not you felt offended by the comic, you obviously understand that the comic wasn’t attacking anyone, and especially not attacking rape victims. It wasn’t making any point about rape victims, that wasn’t even the subject of the comic. So I think that that comic has a right to exist.
If they had attacked rape victims, or even made fun of rape victims, I would be saying that the PA comic is cruel and insensitive. But they didn’t. Sadly, any logic I try to get into on this matter will make people think I’m a sexist, or insensitive to rape victims, but I hope readers will understand that it is not my intent to appear that way. (Actually, I’ve done speeches on sexism in gaming, but that is another story.)
I think that the group of people that were outraged over Penny Arcade’s comic would be better spent actually being outraged by the attacks that are the subject of the video rather than the inspiration for it.
This has been a tightrope walk like no other. I fully expect to have pissed three different kinds of people off:
- People that defend those ridiculous attacks at people over Xbox Live will be pissed.
- People that think the comic was wrong, and it was wrong for them to post will be pissed.
- I’ll somehow make a bunch of people think that I care about racial and sex (gay/straight) discrimination, but not gender, which is absolutely not true.
To those people who make those unnecessary and ridiculous attacks to other people on Xbox Live, you know when what you’re saying is too much. So, as everyone else has asked you, stop it. It’s stupid. You know it, I know it, so just stop it.
But to those that hated the Penny Arcade comic, your hate would better be used on the former category, because they are people that truly have an intent to hurt, demean, and demoralize.
