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.
