I was in Wizard City, just crusing through the commons, when I came across three young wizards in what amounted to a shouting match, using the most awful language. Not awful because it was vulgar, however, but awful because of the grammatical gymnastics they were performing just to get around Wizard 101’s chat filters. They were all very obviously trying to insult and smack-talk one another (do people still say smack-talk? Monsters use it all the time but sometimes we’re behind the times. I still have ‘Prince’ on cassette…) and maybe to them the put-downs were flying fast and furious, but to an outside observer it was nonsensical and a little sad.
I’ve seen this before, of course, but I’m still genuinely confused by the display, especially in games like wizard 101, which seems to have a lot of chat filtering to keep it family friendly, and which isn’t a super-competitive game like some hardcore first person shooter; sure there’s some PvP, but it just doesn’t seem all that bloodthirsty. I mean, really – it’s kids going to wizard school, with unicorns for pets, not a Black Ops deathmatch…
So I want to ask the question here – is it really so hard to just be polite? Just talk to other players with respect, or at the very least don’t bad mouth others in game (or anywhere for that matter) and keep your negative opinions to yourself. It’s not that hard, honest – in fact in Wizard 101 and a few other games, it’s actually EASIER to be polite than it is to trash talk, which is a nice feature. Jumping through the chat filter hoops to curse out someone in Wiz 101 just makes you look kind of sad and somewhat illiterate…
Anyway – be nice to each other, it makes the world a much nicer place!

PLOX!