By Vanessa Hague
My experience with online gaming is love-hate at best. When everything goes right, it's glorious, the experience you have is unlike no other. But when it goes wrong, and it does more often than not, then just the mention of online gaming is one that has me reaching for my controller, ready to fling it into the nearest hard surface in a fit of frustration and desperation.
My experience with online gaming is love-hate at best. When everything goes right, it's glorious, the experience you have is unlike no other. But when it goes wrong, and it does more often than not, then just the mention of online gaming is one that has me reaching for my controller, ready to fling it into the nearest hard surface in a fit of frustration and desperation.
When I sit down and think of all the games that I play, I find that I tend to gravitate towards a particular type of gaming experience - co-operative play; more relaxed, easier to approach and less likely to make me rage quit.
I've racked up countless hours on Mass Effect 3, Uncharted 3, Borderlands 2, GTA V, Saints Row the Third and SR IV and all of these have co-op play. That's not to say that I don't like a good bout of competitive gaming from time to time, I have to be in the right mindset and sometimes the planets align for a few moments and I'm actually good at it. I sit back and relax and can enjoy the, mostly friendly, competitiveness that I usually find when playing this mode. Apart from my apparent bias towards co-op gaming, when I strip away the types and look at online gaming as a whole, there are more uniform reasons as to why, at times, online gaming pushes me away quicker than Usain Bolt can run the 100 metres.
It's not so much the games themselves that turn me off as it is the community that has sprung up around them - how certain members of this community react to certain aspects of gaming culture and how they handle online gaming etiquette.
I've racked up countless hours on Mass Effect 3, Uncharted 3, Borderlands 2, GTA V, Saints Row the Third and SR IV and all of these have co-op play. That's not to say that I don't like a good bout of competitive gaming from time to time, I have to be in the right mindset and sometimes the planets align for a few moments and I'm actually good at it. I sit back and relax and can enjoy the, mostly friendly, competitiveness that I usually find when playing this mode. Apart from my apparent bias towards co-op gaming, when I strip away the types and look at online gaming as a whole, there are more uniform reasons as to why, at times, online gaming pushes me away quicker than Usain Bolt can run the 100 metres.
It's not so much the games themselves that turn me off as it is the community that has sprung up around them - how certain members of this community react to certain aspects of gaming culture and how they handle online gaming etiquette.
I recently bought a new gaming mic but I hardly use it outside of a trusted circle of friends, too scared and worried to how someone else would react, whether it be through sexist jokes and comments or unwanted attention. I have been around when this has happened to fellow gamers who happen to be female and I have had it happen to me, they didn't want it and I don’t want it.
Having to refrain from using an aspect of online gaming because you want to avoid harassment isn't fun - it's stressful and in a way it's also quite limiting. It would be ten times easier to take on waves of enemies if I could shout out tactical advice without fear of being dismissed by a select handful simply because I was born as a specific gender.
It's more than just the gender thing that irks me when it comes to other gamers, it's also the trash talking and bad sportsmanship that turns me away, especially from some competitive titles. I have nothing against friendly competition, but when that turns into death threats and quite nasty slurs then it starts to be problematic. Just the other day, I was playing competitive in Uncharted 3 and received a nice little message calling me a "lagging so-and-so" and that I should "go die" all because I beat them during a round or two.
I know some people will call me out and say this type of trash talking goes with the territory and that if you can't handle it, then stay away from it. I hold my hands up and will say that I downright laughed at the message when I opened it but that was mainly due to its terrible spelling and grammar. I'm sure many other people manage to brush off these types of messages and whatnot the same as I do, but that's besides the point. Whilst most of it goes no further, sometimes it can and the entirety of it brings with it a toxic atmosphere that isn't nice to be a part of.
The stigma surrounding the community around online gaming could be it's own subject for another feature, so I will refrain from going on about it other than to say that they tarnish my gaming experience in quite a significant way. Besides that, when thinking further, I find that my online gaming experience can be summed up in three neat words: lag, updates and region lock.
The gaming world likes to really test my patience - setting me up with players from Mexico so that instead of the actual game, I end up having to play more of a guessing game - will my bullets hit them? will those enemies over there kill me? will I end up in a wall? - the usual lag related issues. Then there are those infamous updates that require you to download and install - some of which can take hours - before it will let you go online, even though it was working just fine the day before and then maybe you want to play with your friends when you finally get online? Well you can kiss them goodbye if your chosen game is region locked and they live in a different country to you. God damn region locking.
However despite it's rather large faults, I do love online gaming and I do love it a lot - the gameplay, the interactivity and most of all just kicking back with a couple of friends and playing one of your favourite video games together for a few hours - it's great.
We've all seen it...
Got any particularly bad multiplayer experiences under your belt?
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