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“Trash-talking” (also known as “smack talk”) is very common on Xbox Live. However, its origins are non-digital: it has been used in traditional sports for centuries and it took the center stage during the final game of the World Cup, when an Italian player, Davide Materazzi, provoked football legend Zinedine Zidane.

Some argue that the brutal and ruthless nature of the game itself encourages rudeness. In fact, the first-person shooter is the most intense, graphic and explicit genre: in these games, players go around shooting each other in virtual scenarios that range from World War Two battlefields to sci-fi spaceships. If gameplay can be considered a language, the FPS has a very limited vocabulary. The interaction with other players is mostly limited to shooting – alternative forms of negotiation with the Other are not contemplated. The kind of language you hear during a game of Halo, Battlefield or Call of Duty evokes the crass vulgarity one can find in movies depicting military lives, such as Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. This should not surprise, considering the close links between military culture and the videogame industry [note 1]. However, the focus of this short article is not the military-entertainment complex. What I would like to discuss, instead, is the figure of the “Angry Gamer”, a player of videogames that expresses his frustration in vocally and physically obnoxious manners.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the “Angry Kids” of the world are trying to elevate their rudeness to a new form of art. They outperform each other by upping the ante in vulgarity and vile speech. Their model is the now legendary “German Angry Kid that caused a major political outcry in Germany when it was “discovered” by the mass media

To improve, we have to be constantly pushing ourselves beyond where we think our limits lie and then pay attention to how and why we fail.

I went to the hardware store and bought a pair of industrial-grade earmuffs and a pair of plastic laboratory safety goggles. I spray-painted them black and drilled a small eyehole through each lens. Henceforth I would always wear them to practice.

My first assignment was to begin collecting architecture. Before I could embark on any serious degree of memory training, I first needed a stockpile of palaces at my disposal. I revisited the homes of old friends and took walks through famous museums, and I built entirely new, fantastical structures in my imagination. And then I carved each building up into cubbyholes for my memories.