TruthScape.com  9  The Truth About RuneScape's Community and Its Impact on Children       9  Specific Dangers and Behavioral Concerns in the RuneScape Community

Immoral Acts and Desensitization Even Worse Lessons - Player-Versus-Player Combat and The Wilderness

“STFU, noob!” - something heard far too often in RuneScape.

The term “noob” is short for “noobie”, which comes from “newbie”, a fairly standard online term for someone is new to a game or community. In RuneScape, however, the name has taken on a life of its own as a generic insult—you can get called a “noob” for doing almost anything. Most adults and veteran players are smart enough to laugh off such petty insults, but it bothers kids. For some who are playing the game for the first time, being called a “noob” by a higher-level player is their first exposure to the general nastiness of the community. (You can't report someone for abuse for calling you a “noob”, incidentally.)

As players proceed through the game, they discover that insulting and degrading other players is very common. Not all players are rude and nasty but a large percentage are, especially in the free version of the game where most kids play. The incidence of abuse has risen so much that it is hard to ignore, and new players are the most common targets, ensuring that they “learn” this behavior and pass it on to later new players.

Simply put, pretty much any time you do anything in the game that someone else doesn't like, or finds amusing, or thinks is not the right way to go, you can count on getting some abuse over it. Often, you even get abused for doing nothing at all, even for just losing a fight. This is most common again for newer players, and serves as an indirect impetus for them to spend as much time as possible on the game raising their character's levels, which exacerbates the addiction problem.

Jagex has a chat filter in RuneScape that blocks common profanities and sexually-themed words. However, players are resourceful and find ways around the blocks with little difficulty. Jagex blocked the word “gay” since it was commonly used as an insult, so the nastier kids just started using the word “gai” instead. Jagex blocked that, so now they use other variations like “gaye”. Jagex rightfully blocked “sex”, so kids instead starting talking about “cex”. That got blocked, but “seks” gets the point across. You can't drop the “F bomb” in game, but “STFU” works. (Let's all pretend that we don't know what the “F” stands for…)

There isn't much actual “serious” sex talk, though sexual harassment can be an issue for some players, especially females. Most sexually-themed comments are of the typically childish variety, and is particularly often heard when players are sitting around doing something boring, like fishing or woodcutting. One of the more notorious locations is the Catherby fishing spot, where it is routine to hear kids calling names and making taunting sexual references to each others' mothers (see Figure 82).

Much of what you see in the game is reminiscent of schoolyard taunting and cruelty, but here the bullies are emboldened by their anonymity and the inherent distance of the Internet. It's much easier to forget—intentionally or unintentionally—that the other character you see in-game is controlled by a real live human being, not unlike oneself.

Along this vein, the profound lack of sympathy for the victims of bad luck or scams is very striking to any reasonable, ethical person. This is seen often both in-game and in the official RuneScape forums. As a typical example, in one of the many threads on the forums posted by someone who was scammed, nearly all of the replies were sneering or blaming the victim. Here are two of the more noteworthy replies:

“lol nub i gawet scammed 5.4m but i aint cryin so stfu”

“ha you lost stuff!!! lmao noob in your face”

(“Nub” is an alternate form of “noob”; “lmao” means “laugh my ass off”.)

Heart-warming, isn't it?

Immoral Acts and Desensitization Even Worse Lessons - Player-Versus-Player Combat and The Wilderness