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Message: <blockquote data-quote="evilbob" data-source="post: 6253138" data-attributes="member: 9789">Gaming's key demographic across nearly the entire hobby are younger males.  Younger males tend to be a little more nasty than the general population, gamers or football fans or whoever.  Probably something about maturity level and emotional intelligence and hormones and blah blah blah.Then you have the idea that many gamers tend to come to this hobby because it gives power and feelings of power in ways they may not otherwise get - the super stereotype being the non-physically competing intellectual - and you have people who are given power over others (or who have their power challenged) for relatively the first time.  This can make people defensive.  They also may not have experience dealing with challenges to their abilities.And you have the idea that gaming - certainly not all gaming, but especially single-player gaming or non-team competitive gaming - tends to be a very self-focused hobby.  You spend a lot of time and effort and energy increasing your own abilities and your own achievements; there is a correlation between that type of behavior and general selfishness (although it's hard to say whether selfish people are drawn to self-focused hobbies or if self-focused hobbies make people more selfish).Toss in the generally HORRIBLE communication medium of the internet - both with the lack of social cues and social taboos - and you get a pretty awesome storm (maybe not perfect) of bad behavior by people who tend to behave badly.But the real key is the additional component of numbers.  Maybe the same percentage of people are jerks, but when you have more people, your total number of jerks go up.  Like, if you go to a convention and there are 1000 people there, if 10 people are jerks they just get ostracized and the problem can be contained.  But if there are 50000 people and 500 are jerks, it's a lot harder to avoid all contact.  Then other people see jerk behavior and think it's ok to be a jerk, too.  It's like a virus, and the loud, few examples get more attention than the 49000 people who are just having a good time.So, yeah:  lots of reasons.  And as long as we continue to tolerate bad behavior amongst ourselves, it will continue.  These boards are actually a GREAT example (in my opinion, anyway) of how you CAN keep a lid on things if you try hard enough and continue to be vigilant.  Something like the WoW forums are a great example of how things can get horrid if you don't keep on top of them.</blockquote>

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