Toxic

No, not the Britney Spears song. There is plenty of reasoning as to why people say that online gaming or any kind of gaming where you are able to talk to one another whether you are showing your face or not could be pretty harsh at times. Bullying is nothing new and it's so easy to say whatever you want when you are behind the screen since you are anonymous... for the most part.

Image available via Wikipedia Commons

At this point, we have ALL either experienced or heard stories of people who are bullied through social media or through gaming. After so many instances of certain cases turning horrible, social medias and many companies for that are beginning to take bullying even more seriously. They are all becoming creative in their own ways when it comes to cracking down on those who unfortunately do it. With companies becoming more creative in finding bullies on their sites/ games, the bullies themselves are also getting more creative. 

Riot Games hired Jeffery Lin, who is the lead designer for the company and the face of the research done for bullying in their own games. League of Legends is a widely popular game bringing in 27 million users more or less every year and even hosts worldwide championships. Lin always wondered why people felt the need to be so harsh online. With Riot Games bringing Lin into the loop of what they had planned for finding all of these people who were being reckless and rude online, they created 'The Tribunal" which was basically a group of people who were gamers that became the judge and jury and people who were found to be rude online would go through them and instead of the company itself banning them, they let the gamers decide. Doing this made things go by faster and be more fair. Riot Games of course had other ways of finding these people online, but it was a much slower process. 

Other companies have obviously began to find ways to make being on their sites and games more of a community and more inviting. Twitter recently started giving people the option to "mute" certain words or phrases to mute off of their timelines and you are also able to mute accounts so you don't see any of their posts at all. Facebook allows you to be in your own "personal bubble" and a lot of social media sites like asking follow up questions when you decide to report an account. People do find this annoying at times because they wonder why they should have to explain every single thing, but they also understand that with more explanation and proof they are able to suspend the account faster. 

Image available via Pixabay

Bullying is a much bigger problem than most people think and it all branches out to racism and sexism. It is such a horrible thing that so many people face all day and everyday and it ultimately does not fix anybody's life or problems they are facing. If you see something, say something.