Gay Bashing in Halo
Videogame players are homophobes.
That's the lesson you're likely to take away from watching Halo 3: Homophobia Evolved, a 2-minute YouTube collection of clips culled from one gay man's experience playing the Xbox game Halo 3 on Xbox Live. The clip shows several instances where the players, who can talk to each other during online sessions through voice mics, repeatedly taunt the clip's author, who was playing using the gamer tag xxxGayBoyxxx.
Is xxxGayBoyxxx's experience a common one? As a Halo player myself, I can say that "gay" and "faggot" are probably the most oft-used words in the light banter and sometimes aggressive verbal jousting in the game. It seems as though every slur and piece of invective can be whittled down to those words. Or "nigger". Or something having to do with Arabs and horses. It's not pretty, and I don't condone or tolerate it.
But while it's tempting to explain away homophobia online as a function of the (mostly) young gamers' indiscretion or outright prejudice, I think there's something else going on here. While I agree there's an unfortunate substrate of prejudice among the gamers and general populace, the hate speech can also be contextualized by the unique online environment in which gamers play.
To wit: When you "meet" someone in Halo online, you have only two indicators of who they are -- their gamer tag and their voice. You never see their face, you probably don't know where they're from (unless you look at their profile), and you don't know their age. Your competitors are probably from an entirely different city, state, or nation. Faced with this absence of context, people rely on the basest of psychological tropes, i.e., homophobia. How else to deny the sameness of the other than by inverting his/her sexuality.
And then of course there's xxxGayBoyxxx's name. It's a goad, akin to approaching someone on the street and confronting them with your sexuality. It's as if he's saying "here I am, judge me." His gamer tag is an invitation. I have no doubt, should xxxGayBoyxxx change his tag to xxxZealousDemocratxxx he'd be on the receiving end of red state rage.
