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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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I assume a fair share of you have played competitive multiplayer games, and in those games, have been surprised at the amount of "toxicity" and "inting" that is present in these games. Most people find these behaviours annoying and consider them to be universally wrong. Instead, I will present an argument for why in some cases making these decisions is not only amoral, but justified using League of Legends games as an example.

When you make decisions in League of Legends, you are doing things that can be classified as cooperating or cheating. Cooperating would be playing the game to win like any other, while cheating would be doing things such as spam pinging, flaming, inting, playing overly selfishly, and voting to not surrender a clearly lost game. How much these actions annoy me or other people is context dependent; inting in a clearly lost game and inting a game you would have otherwise won are obviously different in scale. Similarly, a fed jungler smiting the red buff away from an ADC who is out of the game is obviously different from a jungler that is behind smiting it away from a fed ADC. In fact, we have a word for collectively inting a game that is lost, and that is called "opening", which is standard practice in Korea if a game is lost.

Another time where I would consider "cheating" acceptable if it is done in retaliation to other behaviours that you find unacceptable, done in proportion of course. For example, lets say you are playing Lee Sin and you are ganking for your Syndra, he stuns the enemy mid and you miss the q, he starts spam pinging you. While he is being a dick by pinging you for making an honest mistake, throwing the whole game by feeding the enemy mid would not be acceptable. A more proportional form of retaliation would be to steal away his cannon minion or blue buff, which will make him mad but wouldn't meaningfully change the course of the game. This kind of proportional retaliation would likely reduce the amount of "cheating" in the game because people would be less likely to cheat in the first place if they received some sort of punishment for it.

This kind of proportional retaliation would likely reduce the amount of "cheating" in the game because people would be less likely to cheat in the first place if they received some sort of punishment for it.

My own experience and reading on this subject leads me to believe that this is an absurdly wrong conclusion. Retaliation tends to be disproportional, because people tend to underestimate harm caused to the other in doing so. This is the reason behind the common saying, "an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind".