Since the Black Ops 1 & 2 ports came to PS5 a couple months ago, I have been playing the zombies mode quite a lot and often when I do, I like to hop on the mic and just talk about whatever with whoever I happen to matchmake with. Zombies games typically last at least half an hour and sometimes multiple hours so as you might be able to imagine people tend to open up, share stories and share their views on the world.
Unfortunately, in my experience, racism, the horrible fucking casual and sometimes not so casual racism of these people always seem to shows itself just as I am growing fond of them. And if it isn’t racism, it’s homophobia, sexism, transphobia, islamophobia, anti-semitism, ableism and so on.
And so it is clear, I am not talking here of a shitty offensive joke that I don’t like, I am talking of calling muslims talibans, shitskins, pa-is, claiming Jews are all Epstein Islanders that rule the world, the worst slurs you know coming out their mouth like it’s nothing, using gay as an insult, complaining about blue haired trans women developers ruining Call of Duty, making really degrading toxic comments about women that I don’t even wish to share here, calling me a r**ard or sp-z for doing something they didn’t like.
I am so sick of it guys, like the disappointment every time that I am getting hopeful of making a friend and the fascist hatred crawls out… it’s the frequency of it you know? Once or twice a month, so be it that’s CoD I guess, multiple times a week? Fuck, fuck, fuck I hate it so much.
I just quit the game immediately when it happened to me again, and if you’re host on BO1, which I was, then it ends the game. Hopefully the guy will learn there are consequences to being a piece of shit.
Yeah that’s cod for you, just avoid the most popular of games from every genre but especially shooters. And if you’re into milsims you straight up have to go to private communities. Unfortunately it’s an unavoidable thing that just keeps getting more rampant and more extreme, something has to change meaningfully irl.
On a more positive note I do want to shout-out Guild Wars, I have almost 900 hours in GW2 and like 350 hours in GW1 but still have not run into this issue a single time. That community really does an exceptional job at keeping the toxicity out, you’ll see some ignorance but never a full blast of pure dumb hatred.
Your mistake is getting involved with gamers.
On that note, like 10 years ago I was the one doing racists jokes with friends, one of my friends is a black guy and he liked to do the jokes a lot. His older brother play with us only one time and was really pissed off with the jokes. It’s was a reality check of what is acceptable and what is not, so maybe some people can still learn.
There was a post only yesterday (https://hexbear.net/post/9629021) with a similar experience but in a different game. Sadly shooters attract a certain type of person and probably even more so on console :(
Racism is a lot more common that people realize and I think it’s because the liberalsdid a fantastic job at getting us to believe it’s a personal failing – instead of the much worse institutional racism – so it ended up going underground.
I suppose it’s worth mentioning I’m a white guy and it’s noitceable in how I talk, I’m sure that plays a part in this problem - As in, “hey fellow cracker that I assume is as deeply bigoted as I am, lets talk about all these groups of people we hate!”
