“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

"Even though I live in closer proximity to my college friends than I did to my high school friends when I was in high school, in college everyone has different schedules, so it's just harder to coordinate," she said. "I would call instead of text, but it's just easier and more convenient to shoot off a quick text than to have a phone conversation because I'm always doing 20 things at once here, and my life is much more hectic in college than it was in high school."