The most recent online game that I have is Call of Duty Black Ops II. I have not really played it much since it came out due to its lack of customization potential. I re-installed this game and played for some time. There did not seem to be much talk over the audio during the game play. There were several people however that did engage in the use of this function.

The game is a first person shooter type which is intended to represent some of the conflicts in foreign countries from recent times. There are generally two sides to the battle and it seemed that my enemy always had a foreign language sound that resembled Middle Eastern languages. Of course in the game, there is a large amount of violence. This is expected from this genre.

The in game audio comments ranged in their denigration of different groups of people. The people that were on the voice chat seemed to enjoy throwing around terms with negative intent regarding homosexual activity. There were statements made about races of people that had no bearing on the game itself and seemed to be used to try to belittle the other people in the game. This to me represents two issues on the part of the speaker; 1) he either is racist or does not understand the ramifications of such speech, 2) he believes that the race he is using to label the other person is below his own race. Most of the audio taunts used by the players in the audio chat were of this type. During the down time between matches, there was sometimes visual chat that was sexist in nature. Talk of women and their use by men for pleasure rather than as partners in life.

I think the main issue at hand here is that these people are either young and have yet to develop the understanding that comes with age and experience that this kind of activity is inappropriate. I also think that there is a component of underdeveloped thought due to a lack of education, and social interaction on the part of some of the participants. I do have hope that games evolve into a more positive experience which becomes more of an educational tool than is the current trend. Developers need to start thinking of ways to include this idea into the popular game types in order to make this possible.