Tying this to politics is odd to me.

Online gaming has been toxic since day one. Anything that depersonalizes is going to be toxic and that is inherent in the online space. In the smaller communities you can actually get to know people and have some kind of reputation but as the community size grows, the consequences of bad behavior fade because nobody can remember.

Sorry.

Do you think or have noticed that bad behavior is less likely to occur in smaller communities, or is simply swept under the rug or ignored due to some other dynamics at play?

With counter strike, I frequented one server and got to know the players on it a bit. You'd chat a bit after you died but, mostly, I'd just see the same names most of the time. There was usually an admin online and bad behavior (mostly not game related but social behavior) would be banned eventually.

In UO, there was a lot of player interaction where I would actually make friends and aquatintes with people I interacted with a lot. You end up building a community within a community of people you like to play with.

Both of those groups had different ways of filtering bad behavior but, I think the key difference is that they both had a pretty significant social interact component. CS seem semi-accidental but the post death chatting gave it a little something I never got from other fps games.

MMOs have really gone completely away from social gaming. They've streamlined so many processes that actual relationships aren't really that important.

I agree completely but I'd also add that those changes weren't always intentional, I think. MMO changes, in particular, have greatly stifled the social aspect of their games, not intentionally, but through adding convenience.

The advent of fast travel across the world (for cost), auction houses, mailing items at no or little cost, etc. In UO, you'd walk into a town and find a blacksmith to repair your gear because they were just pasting in an advertisement over and over. Each hub would have different prices based on who was on because travel wasn't painless. I remember making a deal with someone to buy ore I mined at a specific price. It was below market value but it took away the burden of finding buyers all the time so I did it. And just like that, a casual friendship was formed.

Now, an mmo without a global (or even cross server!) auction house would be unthinkable.

Giving into the conveniences that players ask for ruins the social aspect of the game. It's cool that I can jump online and queue for an instance with a bunch of randoms in 10 minutes but it's at the expense of me actually communicating with the people and that's a shame.

The friends who all played vastly more often than I did and had all their techniques and edge jumps and recoveries and stuff practiced were furious.

Lots of "you can't do that" "that's not fair" "that's not the way you're supposed to play" etc.

edit: oh, I see your edit. Yeah, it's definitely not new.

I personally can feel that analogy about you winning in a way that made others feel wronged or offended or have their models about the game broken, and see it connect to the theme of the thread. Which is that people forget and mistake games for serious ventures. I don't know when exactly that happened, if it was a bigger cultural shift, a shift in incentives and behavior by game producers, and also by players I suppose, and or if its just how adults shift in their playing of games as they grow in age.

Either way I think thats fun, and cool that you made it so far with a strategy like that! One of my favorite ways of playing games is uncovering strategies like that =)

You can even see it in tabletop roleplaying. Where you're "not supposed to meta-game" or "you can't have a lawful good lich (who's ultimate goal is to live long enough to save the town from evil collegues)" or "someone's got to play healer" or whatever. I always like subverting norms to see what happens. A group of clerics on a quest for an ancient tomb might need to convince/coerce some local muscle. The lawful good lich lets everyone play with themes of racism and prejudices. A group without a healer is kind of just playing on hard mode because there's no safety net.

But lots of groups won't go for those kinds of things, or will only allow them occasionally.

I just play for fun. I win by having fun. The score is somewhat irrelevant.

I found my groups and communities in odd, niche areas like mindfulness communities and men's groups therapy - maybe you relate? Are you also selective with groups and friends, and keep a smaller circle perhaps?

You blame gaming as a scapegoat and escape from real life. I'd like to differ. The reward-effort-sense of a regular job is getting worse and worse over time. Take a job for example - you take guides and classes and interviews worth an examination only to do low level stuff. Then you find out the humans governing you are incredibly flaky on their promises. It's just not as satisfying compared to finding a guide and getting your worth out of it.