Please don't use the word you had typed at the end there. It's a slur, and highly offensive.
I say people need to be exposed to that kind of language. It builds character and good Lord are people desperately in need of some character building. I see way too many youngsters crashing out over the tiniest of things not going their way. It's sad and pathetic and obsessively coddling them is doing the opposite of helping.
It also happens to be relevant to the thread since that's part of what made voice chat suck. You can't say anything these days without getting reported and banned. I don't even mean slurs but anything that isn't 100% positive and supportive is by default 'toxic'. Walking on eggshells around everyone's triggers is not how I want to live my life. I already have a bunch of people with whom I have to hold my tongue IRL, I'm not going to consign myself to doing that after hours. Don't want to be called a *slur*? Don't act like a *slur*. The irony of me complaining about the situation online is not lost on me
Other than that, the eSports angle's already been mentioned. Another thing I can bring up is that them kids, who are the bulk of voice chat users in my experience, are lame. Yeah, yeah, old man yelling at clouds and all that but seriously. I still teach in the evenings sometimes so I have a modicum of knowledge of how young folks think and the prognostics aren't great. I obviously haven't polled a sample that would be considered statistically representative but most of their perspective on both life and gaming seems to come from social media and Twitch. Met quite a few 'hardcore gamers' whose only experience was 5k hours in Fortnite and Minecraft plus watching streamers playing said games. I mean, that's great my guy but by the time I was 13 I had what I'd like to think was a decent gaming CV as it were that consisted of hundreds of titles I could talk about and swap opinions on. And it's the same with everything else. If they can't point to a TikTok that explains a concept in 30 seconds or less they have no idea what to do. You can, almost literally, see their brains flashing a Guru Meditation Error. Before it gets too bleak, I've met some very bright teens who aren't like that but there's no mincing words here - the bulk of today's youth don't inspire confidence. Par for the course, I suppose.
As an adult, I've moved on from online gaming and voice chat as a whole over a decade ago. You know how it is - responsibilities and all that. I don't have the time and energy to play for 15 hours a day like in the good old days. But then again, would I even want to? There's not much to go back to with all the
ret constrictive rules in place and lack of decent interlocutors. I'm not going to pretend that I was analyzing the finer points of Max Stirner's philosophy or the intricate details of Liszt's music with people online back in my day but for all the savage language we regularly used it was still a more civilized age of Internet discourse.
