The politically incorrect heyday of noughties gaming

Some years ago, a childhood friend of mine was playing the racing game TOCA on the Xbox. It had, for its time, a decent line in realistic car collisions, allowing an inept driver to ruin the race of a competitor. Such was my friend’s dexterity, an irate Australian man said he hoped my friend would get ‘nonced’.  Character building, as my mum would say, though I doubt she’d be entirely approving of the rambunctious culture of online gaming during my teenage years. Playing online in those days meant exposing yourself to commentary that could at best be called ‘robust’. And luckily for today’s denizens of Mumsnet, the government is here to help. 

Recently, the elusive online safety minister Kanishka Narayan suggested the government’s impending plan to ban youths from social media might be extended across the myriad gaming platforms that youngsters are whittling away their best years on. Going further than even the draconian Aussie restrictions, young British players could be barred from speaking to unfamiliar players on Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft, as well as third-party messaging platforms like Discord. 

Like his peers abroad, Narayan hopes to stop predatory men from speaking to minors. In the case of Roblox, a kind of virtual Lego world where players can build and play their own games, the risk of stranger danger has become the controversy that launched a thousand lawsuits. 

The platform has been linked to several grooming scandals, including one in which a 14-year-old girl in the UK sent sexually explicit photos of herself to an 18-year-old man, convicted this April. Authorities are also concerned that minors could also be exposed to illicit content, including games set up by other players that host virtual sex and promote Neo-Nazism. Western regulators are already amid months of lucrative work, while authoritarians in Russia, China and Turkey have gone straight for the ban hammer. 

In response, developers including the one behind Roblox have been upping their safety features, hoping to jump before they are pushed. An age-verification system to sequester different age groups was rolled out on Roblox at the start of the year, though the cutting-edge AI behind it was about as effective as separating children from adults as a UK border officer on the coast of Dover.  

Both regulators and developers are trying to tackle real problems, I’ll grant. But like an emphysema-ridden pensioner who started on the cigs at 12, I will continue to maintain that gaming in the Wild West of the noughties internet was great fun, and I’d do it all again. 

Back then, concern about online harms was a mere twinkle in the eye of a future cabinet minister. While online gaming was to some extent curated by developers, much of the running was left up to the players – and especially so in the case of the standalone ‘mods’ spun off from corporate creations. 

In practice, this meant that community-run servers were governed on the whims of mildly psychopathic internet dweebs – incels having yet to be invented. What is now called toxic masculinity was essentially a guiding philosophy, expressed through profuse swearing, casual bigotry, and wallpapering the game environments with hardcore pornography. Americans being the dominant group, the word ‘fag’ was the insult du jour. Racial slurs abounded, alongside every amalgamation of dick joke and insult to opponents’ sexual capabilities. As for female inclusion, a popular modification to Counter-Strike had an orgasmic woman lauding players for their ‘godlike’ skills. 

A meeting of the Woman’s Institute it was not. And frankly, the unruly atmosphere was a great part of the fun. No doubt some of the banter was expressions of genuinely held antediluvian attitudes, but much of it was done entirely for the thrill of provocation, and the esteem of one’s peers in saying the most outrageous thing. Had more teachers peered into this world, the educational establishment would have been mistakenly scandalised about radicalised young men a good two decades earlier. 

Age has obliged me to put away childish things, but my sense is that much of this has already been swept away. Online video gaming seems much more sanitised to me, with user interaction more tightly corralled. It is conceivable that many games will end up like those of Nintendo, whose family-friendly online offerings have always disappointed due to an unwillingness to let the players talk to each other. 

That online video gaming is blamed on atomisation among the young makes this trend even more lamentable. Back in the days of Team Fortress 2a group of my friends played regularly with twin brothers in their early twenties. These friendships weren’t deep, but they were wholly positive. The regulators’ plans probably will make children safer, but at the cost of these social connections. 

Where I think it might live on is in smaller independent games who escape regulators’ clutches. Holdfasta Napoleonic era shooter I’ve been playing of late, reminds me of the best of the old days, with players chattering amicably and eccentrically, trading slurs about French bastards and perfidious Albion. The worthies will tut, but this is what online gaming is supposed to be.