The team over at Xbox has been hard at work to improve the overall online experience for users on Xbox Live. As part of this initiative, they released the Xbox Community Standards. A guide which shows everyone the dos and don’ts of interacting online with other people. Settle in, it’s a wild ride!
Trash talking is as old as gaming in essence. Whether it’s the heated atmosphere of local competitive gaming in arcades of yesteryear, the intimate struggle on the same couch or epic battles between people across all over the world. Playing mind-games on your opponents is a long-hailed tradition in video games.
But what naturally received a limiting factor by way of local proximity to your adversary got lost on the vast plains of the internet. With seemingly no consequences to bear, trash talking quickly became one of the most toxic aspects of online gaming. Platform holders have long been moderating their online infrastructures for offensive talk and many games have their own system in place to keep the experience as civil as possible.
Enter a new chapter today with the Xbox Community Standards, Microsoft’s own guidelines on how to converse with other users online. It shows great thinking by Microsoft to publish such a thing and make users aware at the dangers of toxicity, but we can’t help but smirk at the level of detail Big M went. Namely, stating specific acceptable trash talk. Just read it for yourself and have a laugh going in the weekend.
Acceptable trash talk includes
Get destroyed. Can’t believe you thought you were on my level.
That was some serious potato aim. Get wrecked.
Only reason you went positive was you spent all game camping. Try again, kid.
Cheap win. Come at me when you can actually drive without running cars off the road.
That sucked. Get good and then come back when your k/d’s over 1.
Now, we’re not trying to make light of the real issues gamers are causing everyday by going way overboard during their online interactions but hearing this kind of sanctioned trash talk in the real world is simply too hilarious.
Either way, we hope that Microsoft’s Xbox Community Standards do get the attention from the gaming community it deserves. Who knows, maybe it’s these amusing acceptable trash talk which gets the ball rolling.
