I had read a lot about online racism but the first time I actually witnessed it was when I was waiting for a Gears of War multiplayer game to begin. It was a 3 on 3 execution match and three of us were ready to chainsaw the crap out of one another but for some reason the server wasn’t starting the game. Even though the round had not begun I could hear a lot of commotion coming through my headset and I thought that some of them were maybe debating on which map to play or what mode to play but what I heard was a bunch of British kids ganging up against an American abusing the crap out of him while passing comments like "Americans can suck my ***", "You guys deserved September 11" and so on. Exasperated and not to mention irritated I logged onto another server and started playing.
Another time (and this is when I experienced it first hand) I was playing some GoW yet again on an American server when I asked one of the guys how to change teams since I joined in late and instead of, I don’t know, giving me an answer one guy thought it would be funny to continuously keep saying "Thank you come again" in a very Apu-ish accent to which I replied "Hey dude, that’s exactly what your mom told me last night". While that childish retort did make me feel a bit better (ok a lot better), I was appalled at all the stereotyping going on over here. Ok! so tons of Indians own departmental/convenience in the States but that really don’t mean all of us speak like that now do we?
Besides racism, blatant ignorance is yet another problem that plagues online gaming. I log onto Live for a quick game of Burnout Revenge and I’m all ready to kick some ass with this one dude when we start making small talk and he asks me where I was from, to which I replied I was from India, and he was like "Oh, so can you guys understand our English?" Umm, our English? As far as I can remember Americans have always been raping the language making up all sorts of slang words that would give their forefathers nightmares. I was waiting for him to ask me something like "Do you guys still ride on elephants out there" but luckily the game started and we lost track of the entire conversation.
I'm a member of 360i too
