Valve update Team Fortress 2 to deal with bots and chat abuse

Quoting: TheSHEEEPThe problem is that nowadays everything can be called "hate-speech" and get the perpetually offended raging, calling for mommy (aka whoever runs the game) to restrict others so they can have their completely opposition-and-adversity-free safe space.

Nowadays? Since the beginning of the online communities there have been arbitrary norm of conduct dictated for these places. This is not new and the owner of each community has the right to set them and enforce them in whatever way they are pleased. In fact, GOL has many of this rules.

Quoting: TheSHEEEPEven terribly uncreative insults. Like, really, whoever programmed these bots had a gold mine that could have been used for Monkey Island-style insult banter, but instead they went with lame stuff. Meh.

"Hate-speech" really has lost most of its meaning, it's just a "whatever I don't like"-term used by people who are unable to deal with words of opposition and some lame insults. Meanwhile, real hate-speech is still rampant on Twitter, Facebook, etc. and rarely penalized.
Some people should really learn to internalize the "sticks and stones" and grow some skin.
Or disable the chat, especially voice chat (not because of insults, but I just find babbling people annoying as hell when I play). Which they now can in TF2. Hooray!
Besides, what happened to the good old ******ing of words?

Facebook has a lot of censorship (try to post a nude picture). Twitter the same. Anyway, is kinda stupid to compare this social networks with a game. The main purpose of the former's is quite different to the latter.

In any case, whatever annoys people a generates fights will be removed by Valve like it or not. TF2 is game and the idea is that people have fun playing, so if a bot starts spawning shit on the chat and affects people communication then I think it is completely expected that the bot will end up being banned from the chat. And the same can be said for a human writing shit on the chat, if someone just want to insult other people in a chat, there are better places to do so.

TF2 is a FPS that has a chat, not a chat that includes a FPS.

Quoting: TheSHEEEPBeing German, I used to get lots of "nazi!" comments in online games when I still played them (and had a more obvious accent than I do nowadays), but I was only amused by the lack of creativeness of my opponents. Also, it was generally a sign that I was playing well to get anyone feel the need to vent bollocks.
But - and that's the important part - I'd never, ever, have called for anyone to silence them (except if they just spammed and made chat unusable with it).
If they need to vent, let them vent. Also makes it easy to identify sore losers.
Then again, I'm just not one of the people who want to silence all opposition because I don't like their words, nor do I feel so insecure about myself that I'd need a "safe chat" free of people calling me names...

Good for you, but not everyone can handle the same way verbal attacks. And that capacity varies a lot with the age so enforcing community rules in a game that is played by kids makes a lot of sense to me. In fact, whenever a kid or adult start saying shit in a game chat I think that getting banned is a good way to put them in their place.


Last edited by x_wing on 19 June 2020 at 1:08 pm UTC

Quoting: PatolaThank you for making it explicit that you believe in the many fake news the international press makes against Brazil's president, due to sheer ideological differences. These scumbags do not have any shame in downright lying or distorting every word uttered by Jair Bolsonaro. On the other side, you likely do not know that in an important meeting which was not meant to be released to the public, he said those words: "What those sons of b* [some rival politicians] want, it's out freedom. Look how it is easy to impose a dictatorship in Brazil, how easy it is. People don't even care. That's why I want, minister of justice, and minister of defence, that People get in arms. That will be the guarantee that a son of a b* will not be able to impose that dictatorship. Because it's easy, very easy. A shithead mayor makes a decree and everybody is forbidden to leave home.".

Take notice that Brazil is very different from the US, and saying those words there is kind of a scandal. Very different culture and firearms are still largely outlawed in Brazil, although this very president improved the situation a little.

Bolsonaro is a politician -- thus he is no saint, rest assured of that. But he's absolutely not the monster your ideologically distorted news outlet told you. On the contrary, he is being the one doing some freedom-related stuff I've never seen any other politician do, which makes me cautiously admire him.

But now, back to the subject matter. He says stuff. You think his sayings will have nasty consequences. What about if they don't? What about the people who disagree on your take on it? You just cannot know. You should not filter. You should allow people to choose in what they believe. You and your ideologically-agreeing manipulative media cannot expect to be the ones with the key for expression of others. THAT is a big part of the problem. Your ideology seeks cultural supremacy, disguised as a good will against (sometimes imaginary) victims of certain discourses. Do not try and cancel your buddies because they think and say things different from what you want.

Finally, one curiosity/question I have. You just said his words have negative consequences. You never even touched the merit of whether they are true or not. Doesn't it matter? If he says something that is absolutely true but it has "likely negative consequences" according to your take on the subject, must Brazil's president should also be censored/cancelled/deplatformed? And we're talking about one of the most powerful persons of a culture you don't even belong to, imagine what you want to do with the little joes of your own culture.

Is a fake news that Bolsonaro minimized the virus (the quote was "gripezinha")? Is a fake news that he ask people to keep working no matter the labor activity? I'm not saying that Bolsonaro should be censored, but his words are quite dangerous and he must take responsibility of the results. The world cannot be black & white but everyday more and more people get into this train (I don't blame them, having to choose from two options requires a lot of less brain effort) and I think that in this context we all know of the consequences of fanaticism...

Either way, the main topic of this debate is if Valve has the right to remove any hate-speech they detect from their games and AFAIK, they have all the right to do so.

Quoting: Patola

Quoting: Purple Library GuyNo, shit in my lap would not hurt, damage or kill me. It would be gratuitously nasty, but not violent. Much like shit-talking.

You might disagree, but throwing poop on a non-willing person has always been defined as violence/harm and you being oddly "somewhat OK" with that does not make it less of a violence.

Dear me, now you're just misrepresenting me. That, and really reaching. First, I specified that although I wouldn't define it as violence, I nonetheless am not somewhat OK with it. My point was precisely that something being violence is not necessary for it to be bad.
Second, you're the one who gave the definition. I pointed out that the act in question does not meet that definition. Now you just want to say that the act in question "has always been defined as violence". OK, give me a basis on which it's been defined as violence, which somehow does not include aggressive foul language. If you can just handwave and say it can be defined as violence because, then there's no reason anyone can't define anything they want as violence, and that would surely include racist trashtalk.
The two things are very much analogous, they are both pretty much entirely an attack on someone's state of mind; if you object to one, you need to start wondering why you don't object to the other.

QuoteThe internal feelings of the person receiving that actual physical abuse do not really matter

Don't be ridiculous, of course they do. First because duh. Second because otherwise surgery and all contact sports would be violent crimes.

QuoteYou can't equate saying nasty stuff to violent attacks.

First, I very specifically did not; you are once again misrepresenting what I said. You seem very prepared to make an argument (although not very well) against a position I did not take, and utterly unwilling to notice the position I did take.
Although second, you certainly can, many people do.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyBut words are actually more dangerous.

QuoteYou are really going down that road? Like, really? Words more dangerous than real, physical violence?

Um, no, I said words were more dangerous than an action I was specifically saying was not real, physical violence. Just because you claim that same action does somehow amount to violence doesn't mean you can put words in my mouth.
Nonetheless, I am indeed saying that words are quite dangerous, so I'll engage some of your further misconceptions.

QuoteLook, I can seem from where you're coming from, since words guide our actions, but they do not define our actions. Words, when they "cause" hurt, is through indirect means and that makes the whole difference.

Really? What whole difference does it make? If I pollute a river used for drinking water and over ten years a thousand people die, I'm only killing them "indirectly"--I don't know any of those people, had no idea just exactly who or how many people would die, didn't walk up to them one by one and hit them with an axe. I still killed a thousand people; does it being "indirect" make them less dead?

QuoteApart from an order or a threat, they do not have immediate, clear causation to violence, no matter how harsh they can be. And most times, when people try to analyze the outcomes of words, they err it grossly, be it due to ideology, be it due to unaccounted factors or unintended consequences. And that's the lesson you should know at this time: the very doctrine of freedom of expression exists because of that.

The very doctrine of freedom of expression exists to defend political speech from government repression.
So here's a question: Is racist language, or sexist, or Hindu supremacist, "political speech"? To the extent that it isn't, it's just worthless crap and it doesn't matter much if it gets censored. To the extent that it is, it must advance a dangerous and repugnant politics. At which point we have to ask ourselves if we agree with the American idea that free speech is the only absolute value that cannot be balanced against any other, or if we want to balance it with others.
(actually rather hypothetical because they don't do it in real life; the US supreme court has ruled repeatedly that while corporate dollars are speech, a whole lot of actual speech isn't; also consider Julian Assange)

Here in Canada, we do balance it with others, so we have hate speech laws. They are pretty lenient so we still had a white supremacist radicalized by shit he read on the internet murdering people at a mosque a while back. I probably don't want to strengthen them because sure, if you make such things very broad you get a lot of unintended consequences, with the authorities using them as an excuse for repression. But I think the idea that you should never regulate speech, or that you should assume speech is always harmless and so cannot conflict with other rights, is bankrupt. You can't have an absolute right to anything and have things work because different rights do conflict and some accommodation between them must be reached.

Of course if we get back to the supposed context of the discussion for a moment, creating bots on online games for the sole purpose of filling it with stupid trashtalk is not political speech, and the game company is not the government. So free speech issues aren't genuinely engaged any more than they are when Liam moderates a post here.

QuoteYou can't hope to be the one to scrutinize every ideology and take on the subject and filter which is worth and which isn't based on your own ideology of what is wrong and right.

I can't do anything else. Neither can you. The question is what you do about your value judgements. Society and government are never neutral--they are always controlled by some ideology or other and they always promote some values and suppress others. You can't decide whether to do that, you can only decide which ones and how hard. Washing your hands is not neutral--ask Pontius Pilate.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyYou're Brazilian, are you not? How many people are likely to die in the next few years because of Bolsonaro shit-talking about various groups? Not, mind you, because he ordered troops to do anything, just because he set a tone that made various shitheads and interest groups feel like some people are fair game. How many other people will repeat what he says, creating a climate of dehumanization?

QuoteThank you for making it explicit that you believe in the many fake news the international press makes against Brazil's president, due to sheer ideological differences. These scumbags do not have any shame in downright lying or distorting every word uttered by Jair Bolsonaro.

Oh, I see.
Don't be ridiculous. The international press goes easy on Jair Bolsonaro, because he's on side with the United States and with international moneyed interests. Since the international press is itself an international moneyed interest and its major advertisers of course are also international moneyed interests and the international press is nearly always broadly on side with the US in its role as international cop for big money, the international press has every reason to go easy on Bolsonaro and none to create fake news against him. The fact that minimal standards of decency still force them to admit some of the bad things about him makes it clear what an incredible scumbag he is.
Bolsonaro obviously cares nothing for freedom--give your head a shake. He was an official in a military dictatorship and says the only thing wrong with it was they didn't kill enough people! The man is an unrepentant fascist and he encourages fascist behaviour, and for all your talk of Brazil's culture being so different from US culture his take on the virus seems to be motivated by exactly the same things as the US right: The need to keep making profits, and the fact that most of the people dying are black or at least poor so it doesn't matter. And his base is very American: Evangelical Christians, members of a religious group which is entirely created by American missionaries and money and whose ideology is a transplanted American one. Bolsonaro's politics are to a fair extent a branch plant of the American Christian right, which meshes well with the other part of his politics, a military authoritarianism deeply intertwined with American institutions like the Army School of the Americas (now under a different name) which indoctrinates Latin American military men in how and why to properly torture people.

You know, since Jair Bolsonaro took office, the already incredible rate of police killings in Rio de Janeiro has more than doubled. And you are complicit. Have a nice day.

Quoting: TheSHEEEPSucks for you that your experience makes you unable to deal with even the slightest forms of verbal abuse in the form of "kaka-language", but this isn't true for most people who actually play these games and there is therefore no need to censor anything or restrict anyone playing these games.

I'll leave aside the little shot, I understand that you're coming out as addicted to verbal abuse and so arguably can't help it. And clearly, the notion that being nasty might somehow be bad is in some way a threat to your identity. So it's cool. But as to your argument--
Bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, isn't it?
--Allow lots of verbal abuse
--People who don't like verbal abuse don't play the games
--Hey presto, no reason not to have verbal abuse, people who play the games like it!

Just a tad bit circular. Might be interesting if some popular game instituted two separate sets of servers, one with verbal abuse and one making strong efforts to stop it, sort of like how some games have separate sections with and without PvP, and publicized this fact. Then we'd be able to see which servers were more popular, whether the non-trash-talk servers attracted new players or not and so on.

Incidentally, when my daughter went to school I was amazed to discover that schools can socialize kids not to be bullies--they just never bothered in my day. This has implications.

Quoting: TheSHEEEPThe problem is that censorship generally starts out as something "innocent" and well-meaning. But never stays that way.

What, never?
I'm not actually aware of the history of censorship being shaped that way . . . at either end, come to that. Censorship is often introduced for explicitly authoritarian reasons, going back to medieval Europe that I know of and probably far further back than that. In Alberta we currently have censorship being introduced to stop people from saying nasty things about the oil industry and pipelines, while in Ontario they're introducing a law basically to stop people from going to work for factory farms and then releasing video of what happens there.

And censorship introduced for more or less innocent and well meaning reasons is sometimes taken advantage of by the state to do repression unintended by the framers of the censorship laws, but also often is gradually relaxed as social mores change. Censorship is often introduced during a "moral panic" about some issue, and so arrives in relatively strong form. Once the moral panic subsides, the rules gradually respond to the different social situation and weaken.
The US has seen movements in both directions; take the "comics code", and similar rules that were in place to control the movie industry, which were thrown out by late in the 20th century. Now the movie industry doesn't really have explicit rules about how their plots can go, but on the other hand more recently they do have police and CIA liaisons who vet movies that involve police or spies, and this is rarely called "censorship" because it isn't associated with any laws about what can and can't be done.
But every country has a bunch of relatively mild censorship rules that just sort of noodle along, in fact "staying that way"; it's the norm.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 19 June 2020 at 6:31 pm UTC