Apropos of this, I started thinking about homophobia in the world.  Out of the ever-changing number of countries, a mere six allow full marriage rights to same-sex couples.  Nine hold the act of same-sex relations in such contempt that the punishment is death.  So what has this got to do with gaming?  And what is my blog doing on the front page?

Well, Infinity Ward's 'Fight Against Grenade Spam' video hits the point home that perhaps the word 'gay' and its synonyms have moved on in their definition and have just started to mean crap.  Rubbish.  Shit.  Just last week, I saw a friend I hadn't seen for ages and while in my house, she called something she didn't like "really gay" before abruptly trying to smoothe it over.  And she's a friend, she wouldn't mean it in a derogatory sense, there is still the fact that you're saying that anything gay is shit.  The fact that in some people's heads the words are synonymous isn't necessarily indicative of a change of definition, but a move towards enshrining homophobic sentiment into our language.  And it's no real surprise that this would be so prevalent in the online gaming community.

If you needed evidence that words such as faggot, gay, queer and homo have not evolved in their meaning and are not just generic terms of abuse, then please check this video experiment from the lovely people at GayGamer, who created the Xbox Live gamertag xxxGayBoyxxx and went playing a bit of Halo 3 online.  Just as the video title warns, this is not safe for work.

So there, among the hatred and the death-threats are the clear and unpleansant dangers of online gaming, particularly if you're gay.  There are similar sentiments towards black people, Jewish people and so on, though I would like to hear about how lady-girl gamers get on in the harsh world.  And the world of online console gaming is a harsh one, where evidently nobody monitors servers or voice-chat and anything goes.

Back in the day, when UFO was a gaming clan, my server was pretty constantly monitored.  We had admins who would kick and ban people for being homophobic, racist, sexist and so on.  I would sit there on the train to work, reading through server chat logs and that was me, one person, running one server.  So why can't Microsoft or Sony employ people to monitor their servers?  We're talking about the protection of children, the protection of people from prejudice and verbal abuse, it's very important indeed, particularly when Microsoft charges £40 for online play.

And Infinity Ward should look at the above YouTube video and understand that their advertising offering is just fanning the flames of prejudice and helping to institutionalise it; if a developer does it, it has to be okay, right?  No.  I mean, can you imagine if it weren't Fight Against Grenade Spam, but instead National Institution Giving Grenades Enrichment, Reducing Spam.  How many people would say, "ahh they're just whingeing for the sake of it"?  Nobody, because homosexuality isn't a black-and-white issue; people don't understand the reasons why like they do with ethnicity and the uncertainty allows ignorance to take over.

So if Microsoft and Sony aren't going to police their servers, then should we not do our bit to report such vile abuse to the bods behind the servers?  Yes, we should.  I should, and I will, but will you?