My first blog post on ScrewAttack yay! I'm hoping to create a series of blogs talking about the cultrual differences between gamers in the east and west. Being an Asian-American gamer there are several instances I find interesting and some that really bothers me such as the topic I want to talk about today: Online behavior We live in a time when the internet can literally do everything, ranging from searching up info, watching videos and music, downloading pr0n, and one thing that we all love, being able to play games with anyone around the globe. For me, I play DOTA competitively, I'm also a fairly hardcore Final Fantasy XI player and I also enjoy various games over xbox live. However, as I broaden my horizens to playing with gamers overseas, I began to notice a big difference in our attitudes online. Generally speaking, I would say that more than 90% of Western gamers are extremely rude and obnoxious online while Japanese gamers tend to be much more polite and respectful. This might offend some of you.. You might read this and think to yourself.. "Hey I'm always respectful to other players" but of course there are always going to be exceptions to this. I've been playing online games ever since Starcraft, and then moved onto diablo2, counter-strike, and what I play today. Over these many years, I have grown accustomed to what online gamers here usually behave like. Usually when an underskilled player makes a mistake, people would be angry and insult him, calling him n00b and other stuff. To a typical gamer in the western region, this is common practice, you can hardly join any online game without hearing the word noob or any other kind of insult at least once. I played a few Halo3 games earlier today and almost every game I've joined had a fairly new player in it. And every one of those games another teammate will start throwing out F bombs and what not at the guy. The funny thing is the people who're making the insults are just as bad. But like I said, this is so common in the online gaming community here and why am I bringing this crap up? Well, a few years back when a local arcade near my house first got a King of Fighters 2003 machine I was stoked to play it, and even though I played KoF 2002 to death I was unfamiliar with the new system and at the arcades, there was a Japanese player kicking everybody's *****. Even though he probably only knew 2 words in English he was damn good in the game. I thought I'd give it a try with my best characters (Leona, Mai and Iori btw) I got obliterated. While other people at the arcades are like "wow this guy is so noob, he got pwned" the Japanese player slightly lowered his head and said "Thank you for the match." I was quite shocked that that happened. When DoA ultimate came out on xbox1 the first thing I did was sign up for xbox live and took it online (I was pretty decent). Of course, nothing really changes in the American community (I can't say much about the Europeans because I don't understand their language). But when I joined a Japanese game the players are usually much more respectful, every match ends up with an "otsukaresamade****a" from both sides, win or lose. One may ask, why would you even care about what somebody says on the internet? But I must say that because we are human beings, we should all treat each other with respect. I really think that USA is the greatest country in the world, but not every aspect of our culture is perfect, but at least in the gaming world, the Japanese culture is superior to ours and there is nothing wrong with learning from them. So the next time you sign on xbox live and a noob is in your team in CoD4 and you really have the urge to talk ****, just think about this for a minute.. Will talking **** to this kid make the game more or less fun for me? We're forgetting what games are truly about - fun! So why ruin someone else's as well as your own fun experience at playing the game? If you can look beyond that, I guarantee that playing online will be much more fun than calling everyone n00b.