It is interesting because there are a large number of players who feel at home in the Call of Duty voice lobbies. Some people's banter and camaraderie is other people's toxicity.
the way guys chirp each other, those aren't slurs, they are intimacy. I'd challenge it a step further and say the people who try to police the language are trying to police and supervise relationships. the critical ideas they use are the lever, but what they are fundamentally lacking is consent and desire.
that view is more than reaction, or backlash, I think we're in a period after one of suppressed volatility, and sublimated desire. my pet theory is that generationally it was much easier for millennials to not be racist because almost none of them drive. in intimate, physically dangerous, or unmediated relationships, these words have no lasting meaning, but in neurotic, artificial, and affected relationships, the words are all they have. the shared intensity of gaming is intimacy. what are slurs to an outsider are terms of affection to someone who is a participant- and not merely a critic.
> the way guys chirp each other, those aren't slurs, they are intimacy.
This relies on an antiquated model of bilateral communication that requires both context and intent. Recent [0] developments [1] have demonstrated that neither context nor intent are necessary for establishing the meaning or value judgment of language; "intent and impact are not equivalent" [0], and certain words inherently have (negative) impact, independent of the way in which they are used.
This viewpoint also has the advantage of letting an outsider unilaterally read whatever meaning they want into any words whatsoever, since context and intent are no longer necessary determinants of meaning - only the impact on the audience.
Hence those foreign to gaming culture seeing these words and imposing their own outsider value judgments onto a culture that they are not participants in.
> I'd challenge it a step further and say the people who try to police the language are trying to police and supervise relationships.
Those who speak the policed and controlled tongue will become indistinguishable from LLMs and AI, and will be the first to be competed out of the cognitive marketplace. Forget Worldcoin; so-called "problematic speech" and "perceived-negative behavior" will soon become the only reliable markers of humanity in a dead internet of sanitized LLMs. You cannot build relationships based on sterile language bereft of emotional impact or value.
I am reminded of "the Savage's" climactic conversation with Mustapha Mond in Huxley's Brave New World:
"[...] We flood the whole system with adrenin. It's the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences."
"But I like the inconveniences."
"We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
> Recent [0] developments [1] have demonstrated that neither context nor intent are necessary for establishing the meaning or value judgment of language;
Necessary, and for establishing to whom, other than the strawmen of your model? I'd recommend a cognitive defrag. rethink it and make it brief and pointful.
