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new media & society

The meanings of racist and

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DOI: 10.1177/1461444818814252
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approach to studying gaming

culture

Stephanie M Ortiz
Texas A&M University, USA

Abstract
Scholars have documented how people of color experience gaming culture as violent, yet
it is unclear how this violence shapes conceptualizations of gaming culture. Undertaking
a cultural sociological approach that foregrounds meaning-making, I demonstrate that
trash talk is a useful site to explore how social actors construct and negotiate gaming
culture. Analyzing data from 12 qualitative interviews with men of color, I argue that trash
talk is a practice of boundary-making that reproduces racism and sexism. Respondent
narratives about gaming culture vis-à-vis trash talk thus show how gaming culture is socially
constructed in everyday interactions, and bound to cultural repertoires and structural
conditions that exist outside of gaming. This study provides a potential avenue to explore
the socially constructed and dynamic nature of gaming culture and gamer identity.

Keywords
Boundary-making, gaming culture, racism, sexism, trash talk

Introduction
Despite the increasingly critical examination of gaming that highlights interpersonal vio-
lence and structural inequality, how racism and sexism shape the construction of gaming
culture has not been adequately addressed. Some scholars have explored the racial and

Corresponding author:
Stephanie M Ortiz, Department of Sociology, Texas A&M University, 311 Academic Building, College
Station, TX 77840, USA.
Email: Smo07007@tamu.edu
2 new media & society 00(0)

gendered violence gamers experience and the strategies they develop in response (Cote,
2017; Fox and Tang, 2017; Gray, 2012a, 2012b, 2014, 2017). However, within the litera-
ture more broadly, gaming culture is often taken for granted in three ways. First, scholars
define gaming culture solely as the practice of consuming the medium of gaming (Shaw,
2010). Second, the socially constructed nature of gaming culture is assumed, but the
mechanisms through which this construction occurs are largely unexamined (Shaw,
2010). Finally, scholars do not interrogate how their respondents conceptualize gaming
culture within their analyses. Combined, these oversights work to downplay how racism
and sexism are woven into and reproduced in gaming practices. Without an analysis of
the meanings of gaming, especially from the perspective of marginalized social actors
who create, negotiate, and contest gaming’s cultural practices (Sewell, 1999), the litera-
ture is missing insights into the mechanisms through which gaming culture is socially
constructed.
Culture and identity must be treated as separate, but relational, social processes
(Grimson, 2010; Lamont, 2001), and scholars cannot assume that all social actors relate
to particular conceptualizations of community/culture in the same ways. I undertake a
cultural sociological approach to examine how social actors understand gaming culture
in relation to their gaming experiences, which often includes trash talk. I examine gam-
ing culture as both a practice and a system of symbols and meanings (Sewell, 1999). This
is not an argument that frames gaming as a subculture with a fully coherent set of sym-
bols that span across the diverse player demographics and genres. Rather, I focus on how
gaming constitutes a set of meanings, however loosely bound, that players actively con-
struct and contest. This shift in operationalization allows me to focus on how gaming as
a culture is constructed by social actors, despite such diverse practices and experiences
within gaming. I examine the role of trash talk as a practice of boundary-making, and
argue that experiences with trash talk provide one mechanism through which social
actors create and negotiate gaming culture.
In general, trash talking in competitive sports arenas is understood as verbal insults
toward another player, which can include racist, homophobic, and sexist language
(Dixon, 2007; Eveslage and Delaney, 1998; Rainey and Granito, 2010). Trash talking in
video game spaces has been examined in competitive and cooperative situations in rela-
tion to gamers’ motives and personality traits, and the contextual elements of game genre
(DiSalvo et al., 2008; Lin and Sun, 2005; Wright et al., 2002). Trash talk that is racist,
sexist, and homophobic is considered a key feature of gaming communities (Gray, 2014).
In this article, I am concerned with how respondents make meaning of trash talk, as
opposed to the specific content of speech acts, trash talkers’ intentions, or the role of the
video game content itself. I contend that trash talking as a cultural practice is a tool used
to categorize people and can reproduce institutionalized social differences in a space
where racism and sexism are already inescapable realities (Lamont and Molnár, 2002;
Nakamura, 2013).
Since racist discourses operate alongside and co-construct sexist discourses
(Embrick and Henricks, 2015), an examination of both provides a more nuanced
account of the varied meanings of trash talk, demonstrating that sexist trash talk draws
men of color “in,” while experiences of racist trash talk complicate respondents’ feel-
ing of belonging. Trash talk ultimately shapes and puts at risk overarching meanings of
Ortiz 3

community by marking who belongs in a space and when, a process that partially
constructs gaming culture.

Literature review
Through a discourse analysis of press and academic articles on video game culture, Shaw
(2010) argues that discussions of video games as culture tend to use conceptual insights
from cultural studies but largely ignore the theoretical and methodological insights of the
approach. For example, many studies of gaming culture are undertaken by insiders who
tend to rely on common sense, taken-for-granted understandings of gaming as a subcul-
ture whose boundaries are defined through the practice of gaming (Shaw, 2010). Gaming
culture is then most often studied in relation to who plays video games, what they play,
and how they play. This framework leaves critical examinations of how gaming culture is
constructed outside of its scope (Shaw, 2010). Consalvo (2007) also takes issue with the
subculture framing of gaming, arguing that the term is too broad to encompass the diver-
sity of gaming practices. Instead, Consalvo (2007) introduces the concept “gaming capi-
tal” to capture the systems of knowledges that constitute membership to gaming culture.
Thus, gaming culture is not about playing games, or even playing them well, but rather
about knowledges of game releases, walkthroughs and Easter eggs, opinions about gam-
ing magazines, and the ability to share this information with others (Consalvo, 2007: 18).
Gaming culture is also defined as toxic (Consalvo, 2012; Gray, 2017) or as hegemonic
such that it reflects and reproduces racism and sexism within gaming spaces (Gray, 2014,
2016). Gray’s work has demonstrated how heterosexual people of color (Gray, 2012b,
2016) and Black lesbians (Gray, 2017) are linguistically profiled and harassed by White
gamers, and outlines the strategies respondents develop to resist racism. Gray (2012a)
has also documented the process of trash talking, the deviant label gamers may internal-
ize, and how they resist this labeling. The meanings people of color construct about gam-
ing culture vis-à-vis understandings of racism and sexism have not yet been examined.
That is, while people of color experience everyday racism and sexism in the form of trash
talking (Cote, 2017), scholars take for granted the meanings people then associate with
gaming culture itself.
Encompassing these insights of how scholars define gaming culture, I privilege
Sewell’s (1999) concept of culture in this study because it focuses on how culture is cre-
ated. Sewell (1999: 52) argues that culture should be understood as “a dialectic of system
and practice … as a system of symbols possessing a real but thin coherence that is con-
tinually put at risk in practice and therefore subject to transformation.” Culture is shaped
by overarching power relations, economic and political realities, and the different mean-
ings attributed to the culture by social actors (Sewell, 1999: 48–51). That people can
share in an understanding of a set of symbols does not mean that all social actors morally
or emotionally agree with those symbols, nor does it mean that those symbols form the
basis for solidarity (Sewell, 1999: 50). Rather, individuals form a cultural community
insofar as they recognize a set of symbols and can engage in symbolically meaningful
action (Sewell, 1999: 49). Since symbols and discourses are not stable, close-ended
truths, practices can shift meanings altogether. At the same time, institutions, forms of
organized resistance, and individual social actors can contest and (re)define boundaries
4 new media & society 00(0)

and norms. Sewell argues that scholars should aim to analyze how cultural coherence
exists, and especially how institutions and social actors create cultural coherence through
exclusionary practices.
One avenue to examine the construction of culture is to examine boundary-making,
which refers to symbolically meaningful actions undertaken to categorize people, prac-
tices, objects, time, and space (Lamont and Molnár, 2002). Structural theories of race,
while disagreeing on the exact mechanisms through which racism persists, and the roles
of everyday social actors in those processes, all address the function of cultural dis-
courses in establishing, reflecting, and reinforcing racial hierarchies (Bonilla-Silva,
1997; Feagin, 2013; Omi and Winant, 2014). As systems of meanings, values, and ste-
reotypes, race and gender can become the subject of denigrations in speech acts that
mark groups as “other” (Gerson and Peiss, 1985; Hill, 2009; Lamont and Fournier, 1992;
Nagel, 1994). Inherent in defining an “us” within a community is a practice of defining
“them,” outsiders not included within the moral and symbolic boundary of “the” com-
munity as insiders see fit (Lamont, 2001; Rafalow, 2015). Within youth gaming culture
specifically, boundary-making is a practice to regulate communities based on behaviors
to maintain a civil community (Rafalow, 2015: 261). Examining how gaming culture is
constructed requires that we examine the meanings/practices through which players
negotiate these boundaries, including acts that are perceived as harmful (Rafalow, 2015).
Trash talk is one such practice, mobilizing sexist and racist discourses and functioning as
a form of exclusion that separates “us” from “them.”
Examining discourse as a mechanism of boundary-making is also useful because it
reveals the extent to which the dominant groups’ understandings and meanings have
become hegemonic (Huvila, 2011; Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). Discourses are “boundary
objects,” which inhabit, and adapt to, different social locations but nevertheless remain
recognizable across space (Star and Griesemer, 1989). This literature suggests that the
meanings of racist and sexist trash talk might reflect what White men, as a dominant
class within gaming (Gray, 2014), impose. The maintenance of discourses around White
men’s meanings might then sustain cultural coherence (Star and Griesemer, 1989).
Tracing inductively how social actors understand these raced and gendered boundaries
vis-à-vis discourses thus demonstrates how gaming culture is constructed, and relies on
broader cultural repertoires and structural conditions in which gamers are embedded.

Methods
These data are from a broader study designed to understand how men of color cope with
trash talking on Xbox Live. I chose Xbox Live to add to Gray’s (2012a, 2012b, 2014) work
in understanding racism within anonymous multiplayer gaming. I conducted in-depth
semi-structured interviews on the video conferencing software Skype and ooVoo; semi-
structured interviews were an appropriate method for this study because they allow
researchers to determine how respondents place specific meanings on processes in their
everyday lives (Miles et al., 2014). I recruited through ads purchased with my own funds
on Facebook and Tumblr, as social media sites are spaces where marginalized gamers can
participate in gaming culture on their own terms, which provides opportunities for recruit-
ment (Gray, 2015). I sought people of color who resided in the United States and who had
Ortiz 5

Table 1.  Respondent demographics.

Pseudonym Age Race/ethnicity

Oscar 41 Puerto Rican
Martin 18 Mexican American
Brian 18 Mexican American
Leonard 23 African American
Cesar 35 Tejano
Wallace 25 Black
Emiliano 23 Filipino
Karl 22 Lebanese
Rohan 32 Black
Donnie 23 Puerto Rican
Frederick 20 Black
Nico 29 Puerto Rican

experienced trash talking while playing in English. I avoided using the term “gamer” in my
recruiting materials, since there is no evidence to suggest that identifying as a gamer would
implicate one’s experiences with trash talking, and therefore be an identity critical for
recruitment. Rather, I was aware of the stigma that this label carries (Shaw, 2010) and did
not want to dissuade potential respondents from contacting me.
While trash talking is not specific to a United States’ context, my broader study was
focused on race-making and gendered coping strategies within the United States where
respondents develop their racial common sense (Omi and Winant, 2014). My recruiting
material specifically stated that the study was on the experiences of people of color, yet
I was contacted by 16 self-identified White men who sought to “explain” to me that trash
talking was not “common” or “problematic.” Many attacked the premise of the study,
referred to me as a “bitch” who knew nothing about gaming, and continued to email me
after I had told them they did not fit the inclusion criteria. A study of how Whites make
meaning of and justify trash talk within a colorblind context would provide important
insights; however, my research questions were focused on the experiences of people of
color. Recruiting on Twitter may have increased my sample size, yet I sought to avoid
additional harassment; this is becoming a reality that feminist and anti-racist scholars
recruiting online must contend with (Vera-Gray, 2017). I ultimately found it difficult to
recruit a larger sample size as I offered no incentive for participation. Nevertheless, my
interview data reached saturation after I interviewed 10 respondents, and my final sam-
ple consisted of 12 heterosexual men of color. Table 1 provides respondent demograph-
ics; all names are pseudonyms. This sample is not representative of the multi-million
network of Xbox Live; however, the exploratory nature of this project provides the foun-
dation for additional analyses using a cultural sociological approach.
Interviews lasted between 45 minutes and 1 hour, and were audio recorded. I asked
respondents about how long they had played on Xbox Live and with whom, the fre-
quency and types of trash talking they had overheard or experienced, with whom they
discussed these experiences with, and the attitudinal, emotional, and behavioral impli-
cations of trash talk. Early in each interview, respondents asked about my own
6 new media & society 00(0)

experiences on Xbox Live and my racial/ethnic identity. I told respondents I was

Puerto Rican and that I had regularly experienced and overheard trash talking. This
may have produced an insider status and worked to foster an environment where
respondents were more comfortable discussing experiences of racism (Dwyer and
Buckle, 2009; Lofland and Lofland, 1995). Immediately following each interview, I
transcribed the audio recordings and began coding utilizing Braun and Clarke’s (2006)
thematic analysis approach. This is not the same analytical strategy as grounded theory
or phenomenology, both of which are theoretically bound (Braun and Clarke, 2006).
Instead, thematic analysis is a contextualist method, focusing on meaning-making and
the role of social context, and is paired with an existing theory to examine the signifi-
cance of themes within a dataset (Braun and Clarke, 2006). I was guided by Sewell’s
(1999) conceptualization of culture. This theoretical orientation focused my analysis
on how respondents described meanings of trash talk, cultural repertoires, and the
structural conditions that shaped trash talking in general. While homophobic trash
talking has been noted in the literature (Gray, 2014), and trash talking can also draw
upon classist assumptions of work ethic and morality, there were no robust findings in
my study to analyze these types of trash talking. My findings thus outline how respond-
ents understand trash talk as a form of gaming capital, how they justify and explain
racist and sexist trash talk, and the role of Xbox Live as an institution in shaping
respondents’ understanding of trash talk.

Findings
Trash talking is a form of gaming capital that is an outcome of competition and wanting to
be “the star” of a match. Respondents note that racist and sexist trash talking are argued to
be the key feature of gaming culture, consistent with Gray’s (2014) findings; a discussion
of how respondents responded to and coped with this trash talk is the subject of another
paper. While video games rely on racial and gendered logics (Leonard, 2006; Young,
2016), gaming culture itself produces and justifies these logics through trash talk. Trash
talk is a practice of domination that constructs boundaries between players based on race
and gender. These boundaries both reproduce and rely on racist and sexist discourses. As
Sewell (1999) and Lamont (2001) note, however, cultural meanings are not disconnected
from structural conditions. Respondents were critical of how anonymity shaped their expe-
rience of gaming and the role of Microsoft in encouraging trash talking. Respondents’
understandings of gaming culture consider issues of power and group boundaries in ways
not reflected in the literature (see Rafalow, 2015, as an exception). By demonstrating how
men of color actively negotiate sets of meanings around racism and sexism, some of which
are contradictory, I show how gaming culture is not a singular conceptualization of belong-
ing or community that respondents passively accept.

Trash talking as gaming capital

Gaming capital shapes the interactions of players in a gaming space by delineating what
forms of currency are relevant and meaningful at a particular time in a particular context
(Consalvo, 2007). For respondents, trash talking is most common within certain game
Ortiz 7

genres, and the added dimension of peer pressure to win and maintain a reputation of
skill suggests that trash talk is a form of gaming capital. First-person shooter, fighting,
and sports games, as described by respondents, were often the site of trash talking. Many
games that fall under the genre of first-person shooter simulate military combat and
require players to coordinate, cooperate, and move quickly to win the match. Fighting
and sports games further intensify the gaming environment to the degree of such frustra-
tion that trash talking was almost inevitable. If a game required domination and massa-
cre, taunting during gameplay was seen as a normal outcome of that environment. As
Donnie notes,

Part of [Call of Duty] is really fucking with people. You’re killing people, so it becomes a
natural part of the environment to aggravate people. You feel this rush, and your blood pressure
goes up, and it’s high stakes! It’s easy to get angry and crazy! Any game, but mainly with first
person-shooters, you’re going on a killing spree, you’re getting killed, and it aggravates you. I
think for me it’s an on-and-off thing, but some people really get aggravated! And I guess that’s
the point, to one-up someone and kill them for killing you, then talk shit to rub it in and add salt
to the wound.

Heightened emotions and “blood pressure spikes” make it so that trash talking other
players’ skills becomes a rational response. The first-person perspective of simulated war-
fare in Call of Duty, Halo, and Gears of War provides participants “fast-paced,” “competi-
tive,” and “high-stakes” games that construct the environment conducive to trash talking.
Fighting games and sports games also offer players avenues of “owning” and imitating the
trash talking behavior of real athletes. These games require various degrees of physical
domination over opponents in the forms of “shutting people out” (not allowing the oppo-
nent to score any points), beating through the mastery of a martial art and mystical power,
and the violent repeated extermination in many first-person shooters.
I do not seek to add to the moral panic surrounding aggression and video games that
already shapes public opinion and the scapegoating of people of color (Welch et al.,
2002). Instead, according to respondents, the norms seen as appropriate during gameplay
within certain game genres may contribute to experiences of violence in game. The per-
petration of this violence but also silence in response to trash talking demonstrate a level
of skill by marking those who have the knowledge of how to appropriately interact in the
space. The ability to not only win but also trash talk to “make your boys laugh” adds to
the prosocial experience of multiplayer gameplay. Some participants viewed trash talk-
ing as detracting from the gaming experience, particularly when it was used to discipline
losers and regulate winners. However, all respondents understood trash talk as a skill that
positioned some players above others through humiliation. Trash talking distinguishes
“us” from “them,” gamers who are shocked or offended by trash talk from those who
have learned the inevitability of trash talk and therefore are silent in response. This real-
ity of trash talking-as-capital exists even among friends, as Martin notes:

When you have people who are watching you play, or there’s that pressure to rank, it gets
hostile really quick. Some gamers are big into public shaming, making you feel like a flea in
front of your team. It’s part of gaming culture to want to win, but it’s also about making you feel
worthless for not being a top scorer.
8 new media & society 00(0)

Cesar further captured this sentiment, stating that “some guys have a fan club, they
got guys who they constantly play with … you have to know to expect the trash talking.
Enter at your own risk, you know?” Even among people a respondent usually plays with,
trash talking as a practice remains a powerful mechanism that shapes interpersonal inter-
actions. Consider Rohan’s experiences:

I started playing Xbox Live specifically because, as I play online with friends, especially as I’ve
gotten older, it’s a good way to keep in contact with them. That experience is important to me.
And I can say the people I met on there five years ago are good friends … and because we’re
so close we can get away with talking shit to each other, but it’s never a malicious attack. But
it’s funny because that same closeness in our crew actually led to one guy getting really hurt by
us, and he just dropped off. He literally became a running joke to the rest of us, and this guy,
who was in junior high when we started playing with him and now he was in college, he just
fell off. He stopped playing with us, and has never took an invitation to play with us again.

Rohan acknowledges the personal significance of his friendships with men he has
played with on Xbox Live for years. While the trash talking was never “malicious,” as in
racist, and it was in a cooperative setting, it was still interpreted as negative and resulted
in this player leaving the group. Rohan expressed remorse but nevertheless justified this
trash talking because belonging was overall a precarious issue within gaming culture.
Any person who enters these spaces must expect trash talk, and responding with anger,
or choosing to leave the space altogether, signifies a rejection of the currency that trash
talk provides. This is largely deemed an undesirable outcome, as the risk of humiliation
from peers puts at risk respondents’ feelings of belonging. As I explore below, racist
trash talking is the only form of trash talk that respondents morally condemn and overtly
reject, as their compounded experiences of everyday racism both online and offline
shape their perception of this practice as harmful. Sexist trash talk, while acknowledged
by some as “the worst” form, ultimately remains the mechanism through which many
respondents can showcase or gain gaming capital by remaining silent when they over-
hear women being harassed.

Gaming culture and the justification of sexism

Trash talking as a cultural practice maintains a specific logic within gaming that rational-
izes racism and sexism, but in vastly different ways. The articulation of the goal of domi-
nation respondents discussed regarding gaming genre becomes hyper-visible with rape
threats (Salter and Blodgett, 2012), as rape is viewed as a severe form of “physical own-
ership” that is justified and uncritically accepted as merely an offshoot of the competitive
nature of gaming. Consider how Emiliano explains rape threats and distinguishes this
discourse from other forms of sexism:

It’s gaming culture … this taunting is considered a part of the sport, even when at the cost of
someone’s wellbeing … and people learn to talk like this! We all know rape is bad but you hear
it all the time being used against other fighters, and you slowly start saying it. In the gaming
community with guys, we say it and we use it all the time. And my girlfriend will hear it and
call us sexist, but we’re not sexist, it’s just gaming. What’s sexist is when desperate men harass
Ortiz 9

women, like when a woman has a nice voice and guys ask them out or describe things they want
to do to them. Being treated like a sex object is sexist.

Indeed, most respondents justified sexist trash talking by referring to its frequency.
While acknowledging the possibility that “some people” may find sexist trash talking to
be in poor taste, these respondents made it a point to explain to me how there is little
“wrong” with this practice. As Leonard notes,

The whole point of fighting games is to beat someone’s ass, you know? [He laughs] You want
to dominate, so yelling out threats of rape fall into that atmosphere of owning someone. One
time I was watching this Street Fighter competition, and within that community telling someone
you have beaten “oh, you got raped” is really common, it’s a part of the culture. A female
fighter was playing and she already wasn’t really favored, but one of her opponents yelled out
“rape that bitch!” And she took offense and made a big uproar, but it was something the gaming
community always uses, so it was a case where no one was wrong.

Sexist trash talking relies on meanings of domination over those viewed as weaker, but
in the context of gaming, this is not seen as an inherently sexist or exclusionary practice.
Respondents simultaneously acknowledged that “rape is bad,” and “isn’t something that
should be said lightly,” yet they also justify sexist trash talking by referencing its frequency.
The uncritical use of rape threats fosters an environment wherein sexist trash talking relies
on meanings from sexism more broadly, such as domination over women, but it quickly
loses its relevance to this broader system once used, becoming “about the game” and not
about power over women. Wallace’s statement that both the use and critique of rape threats
within gaming is a clear case where no one was “wrong” captures this position on rape
threats and trash talking. Emiliano’s qualifying of what sexism actually is also demon-
strates how players negotiate meanings of power to fit their narratives of gaming culture as
competitive, but not sexist. Sexist trash talking is about distinguishing between weaker and
stronger players, with the role of gender playing little significance. Rohan and Karl, how-
ever, were critical in their discussion of sexist trash talking, mentioning that women “have
it the worst” and that they would both leave a match if they heard women being harassed.
Yet, not one respondent deemed it necessary to speak up, confirming Gray’s (2012b)
respondents’ discussion of men of color as bystanders to their harassment. Rather, speaking
up might bring negative attention, or as Frederick stated, “No one will wanna play with you
if you walk up and say stop that! They’ll think you’re corny.”
While my data cannot speak to the specific pressures respondents felt to participate in
sexist trash talking, these interviews do suggest that men’s need for heterosexual self-
presentation may be exercised within gaming culture, shaping and justifying discourses
of rape and sexist attitudes (Fox and Tang, 2014). Boundary-making around sexist prac-
tices is then a performance of masculinity, an enactment of gaming capital as an aspira-
tion of belonging and as a form of privilege (Nakamura, 2012). Thus, the theorization of
sexism within gaming as an everyday practice and not merely a large-scale attack on a
select group of women as in the case of Gamergate (Gray et al., 2017; Shaw, 2014) must
also consider what active trash talkers and bystanders see at stake in these situations.
Scholars may seek to explore how men justify sexist everyday practices within gaming
and what they understand to be barriers to their intervention.
10 new media & society 00(0)

Gaming culture and the logics of racism

Racist trash talking was not conceptualized as articulating physical domination, but
rather about Whites exploiting their anonymous environment to express pent-up aggres-
sion toward people of color. While sexist trash talking was something many respondents
participated in or “shook off” if they heard, racist trash talking took on an entirely differ-
ent meaning of pain, humiliation, disrespect, and anger. To be sure, men of color are not
a homogeneous, monolithic group, and there are some differences in experiences of trash
talk based on respondents’ perceived race (Gray, 2014). However, in terms of how
respondents made meaning of racist trash talk as an exclusionary practice, only one dif-
ference arose: one respondent, Cesar, morally agreed with racist trash talking, arguing
that if people experienced it in “real life,” then it “shouldn’t” be an issue online. The
other respondents felt strongly that racist trash talking was taking the competitive fun
“too far.” Respondents explained that racist trash talking is justified by discussing the
role of anonymity in “protecting white men,” which highlights the coherence of gaming
culture for men of color. That is, despite different experiences of racist trash talk, all
respondents understood the practice as a form of gaming capital for Whites. The use of
racist trash talk toward men of color was considered emotionally harmful, but neverthe-
less “just the way gaming is.” Consider Karl’s statement about White racists:

White people dehumanize other players. They no longer insult the player’s skill with the game,
but their personhood … They have racist sentiment that they only feel comfortable releasing
online where no one can see them and they can’t see their victim.

For respondents, racist trash talking is linked to Whites’ broader sentiments toward
people of color and is a clear delineation from trash talking, in general, and sexist trash
talking, in particular, both of which are about a player’s skill. As Nico notes,

Xbox Live gives people a platform to show their dark sides. Gamers know the people they’re
talking to don’t know their real identity and that they’ll never meet in person, so they show
sides of themselves they wouldn’t dare show in public where they’d be judged.

Participants believed anonymity provided trash talkers with the resource necessary to
insult others without the consequences of in-person confrontations. Most respondents
believed that this anonymous trash talking was worrisome because it revealed a larger
issue of hidden hate among White gamers. While my data cannot speak to White gamers’
intentions, or the meanings of trash talk to Whites, that my respondents understand this
practice as an exercise of Whites’ power further suggests that trash talk is a form of gam-
ing capital. Offline, Whiteness is conferred with status in the form of advantages based
on racial resources; this racial capital, like other forms of capital, is linked to social
structural conditions but is uniquely tied to communicating insider racial status (Waring,
2017). In the absence of a physical White body, the use of violence via racist trash talk
acts as a form of gaming capital that is tied to defending the White racial boundary.
Overall, White men were viewed as using Xbox Live to express their resentment
toward people of color that cannot be expressed out in the “real world.” White children
were mentioned as testing racial boundaries without the presence of overseeing parents.
Ortiz 11

Recall that these insights and critiques of racist trash talk were not extended to men in
general or even themselves when respondents discussed sexist trash talking. There was
no discussion of “a bigger picture” or real, deep-seated sentiments that extend to the
outside world. Two respondents considered the dehumanizing effects of rape threats, but
overall, there was no theorizing of how men may use anonymity to expose their “inner
rage” toward women. While both racist and sexist trash talking were inherently tied to
gaming culture, as linked to the broader practice of skillfully trash talking to “psych”
other players out, racist trash talking took on a different set of meanings for respondents
who were often left exhausted, angry, and sad. Indeed, because broader cultural reper-
toires frame racism as “struggling like a white person never has,” men of color report
feeling as if they are “never protected” neither outside of Xbox or within. Gaming cul-
ture is therefore a space of exclusion based on race, and intermittent moments of inclu-
sion when silence toward, or participation in, sexist trash talking provides an “in” to the
gaming community they otherwise experience as another site of alienation.

The structure of Xbox Live

Sewell (1999: 56) cautions against exclusively examining the everyday practices of indi-
vidual social actors because communications media and business corporations are them-
selves cultural actors. Within this framework, Microsoft and Xbox Live also shape and
participate in practices to “order meanings.” Indeed, part of the structural conditions that
shape respondents’ experiences and understanding of gaming culture are Microsoft’s
policies. Eight respondents believed that Xbox was not “doing enough” to protect play-
ers from verbal harassment, which added to the normalization of trash talking. Xbox
Live provides an option to block and report other players, but banning a player from the
system is not as simple. Respondents believe that there are no consequences for harass-
ing others. Interestingly, most participants did not think that Microsoft should fix this
issue in fear of infringing on players’ right to free speech or causing Xbox to lose profits.
As Oscar stated,

If Xbox really wanted to stop this, they would. But they don’t want to. Why? They know people
pay for this service to talk to each other, even to talk shit and say awful things. Taking that away
would cripple their market. People are allowed to say what they want, and it’s kind of up to the
person hearing it to deal with it. Is it fair? No, but that’s just our burden.

Brian echoes this concern for the economic context in which trash talking is bound:

On paper, it looks like Xbox is doing enough. You can block and report players for being
offensive. But then if all of the trash-talkers were to be kicked out, who would be paying for
Xbox? Too many people say racist things, it would inevitably just make Xbox broke. So they’re
not in a hurry to fix this.

While some respondents argued that Xbox would be “overstepping people’s rights”
by forcefully moderating and blocking racist trash talkers, Rohan was particularly criti-
cal of the implication of these efforts, arguing that, ultimately, if Xbox “puts tools in
place” to block trash talkers so one does not have to play with them again, it is within a
12 new media & society 00(0)

customer’s rights to use racist speech. Many respondents also mentioned players’ agency
in reporting trash talkers to absolve Xbox Live from the responsibility of alleviating
trash talking at a structural level, which would “put a strain on staff” who would be
forced to “moderate too much.” Donnie’s scathing critique of Xbox as overwhelmingly
concerned with profits instead of the well-being of marginalized players is a stark con-
trast to the rest of the sample’s concern for Xbox Live staff:

Xbox promotes it and supports it by not adding any filter system. I don’t know how they would
do it, but everything is possible so that’s not an excuse. It helps them make money, and they
don’t care … Microsoft honestly does nothing. I don’t believe in their system … if you’re
making people feel terrible, which is bullying, you should get banned. I think they should even
charge a fine. We have such a huge bullying problem, suicides left and right, but yet here you
go online and no one cares. It’s not right. People only take it seriously when it’s a little white
kid being hurt.

Participants weighed the costs and benefits of more thorough strategies to structurally
solve trash talking. There was primarily a concern over the effectiveness of the strategies
Xbox uses to protect players from trash talking. Players have the option of blocking a
trash talker so that they will never be placed in a game with them; however, there is no
direct consequence for the player who has been blocked. The benefits of “punishing”
trash talkers would create a more enjoyable environment for players, yet participants also
expressed concerns for the possible ramifications of doing so. Participants believed that
Xbox could plausibly find better ways of disciplining trash talkers through establishing
stricter banning policies, rigorous moderating within games, or fining. However, there
was also a concern of infringing on players’ rights to free speech within a space that was
paid for. Institutional hegemonic control, a major concern for Sewell (1999), emerged
throughout interviews, as respondents considered the rights of a corporation to seek prof-
its in exploring how to ideally moderate racist trash talkers. Xbox Live thus directly
shapes the cultural practice of trash talking by doing so little to advocate for and protect
victims. Respondents then use this reality when constructing meanings about the severity
and personal consequences of trash talk, and the understanding of gaming culture as
something you cannot change, but rather, you “enter at your own risk.”

Conclusion
While race and gender within gaming operate as (1) forms of exclusion through prac-
tices, such as trash talking, and (2) as sources of resistance (Gray, 2012a, 2012b, 2014,
2016, 2017), they are not merely stable categories of identity. Race and gender as sys-
tems of meanings are subject to negotiation through cultural practices that are tied to the
political domain of social life (Omi and Winant, 2014). Thus, racism and sexism, and not
just identity, must be examined as a powerful tool of marginalization and exclusion that
play out in cultural practices (Daniels and LaLone, 2012; Gerson and Peiss, 1985) and
shape the meanings that actors construct. In this article, I examined the role of trash talk-
ing as one mechanism through which meanings are organized.
Boundary-making shapes the social fabric in everyday life by designating and reinter-
preting distinctions between groups, with important consequences for the contours of
Ortiz 13

inequality at a specific point in time (Lamont and Fournier, 1992). Using the theoretical
tools of cultural sociology, I operationalized gaming culture as a set of meanings and a
practice (Sewell, 1999). I explored how trash talk, a practice of exclusion often rooted in
sexist and racist discourses, was interpreted across a sample of men of color. Trash talk
maintained a level of coherency despite varied and conflicting meanings. That is, trash
talk was understood as a form of gaming capital, or a form of social currency within
gaming spaces regardless of how, or if, respondents participated in, responded to, or mor-
ally condemned the practice. How trash talking shapes meanings of gaming culture is
linked to (1) contextual setting; (2) broader discourses of racism and sexism, and the
repertories respondents use outside of gaming to negotiate those meanings; and (3) the
structural conditions that Microsoft’s moderating and banning policies shape.
Sexist trash talking is an inclusionary practice of boundary-making that respond-
ents justify by drawing upon cultural repertoires used offline, such as minimizing
misogynistic speech by qualifying “real sexism” and by largely ignoring women’s
harassment. However, respondents do not morally disagree with this practice in the
same way they do of racist trash talking. Respondents downplay the broader impact
of sexist trash talking, but cannot so easily ignore the implications of racist trash talk,
an experience they confront offline. How respondents made sense of, normalized, and
even justified the practices of sexism and racism suggest that trash talk as a form of
boundary-making is one cultural mechanism that constructs gaming culture itself.
While scholars agree that gaming culture is not entirely separate from a broader racist
and patriarchal society (Consalvo, 2012; Nakamura, 2012), we still need to explore
how gaming practices, such as trash talk, reproduce systems of inequality through
conceptualizations of gaming culture. This article demonstrates that the meanings of
racism within gaming culture are understood to be less problematic and less valid
than in-person racism, as opposed to sexist trash talking which does not even consti-
tute sexism at all. Using this framework, scholars can explore the relationship between
other meanings of gaming culture that are shaped by everyday practices, broader
societal discourses, and institutional conditions.
If racism and sexism impact how people make sense of gaming culture, and culture and
identity are relational processes, it is possible that gamer identity is also implicated by these
sociocultural realities. That is, participating in gaming culture and sharing an understand-
ing of what constitutes this culture do not mean that social actors then construct identities
tied to this culture. Although the literature on gamer identity argues that race is not a sig-
nificant factor in how people relate to a gamer identity (De Grove et al., 2015; Shaw, 2012),
experiences of racism, sexism, and the combined impact of those systems on women of
color may impact the meanings people associate with a gamer identity. Future studies may
seek to examine the meaning-making processes through which people of color relate to a
gamer identity in relation to racism and sexism, since cultural repertoires in response to
meanings can shape identity (Lamont, 2001).

Acknowledgements
I thank Dr Serie McDougal and Dr Katynka Martinez for their guidance during the study; Dr
Joseph Jewell for helping me strengthen my argument; my respondents for volunteering their time
and letting me into their lives; and finally, each of the reviewers for their invaluable help.
14 new media & society 00(0)

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

ORCID iD
Stephanie M Ortiz https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5290-7403

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Author biography
Stephanie M Ortiz is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Texas A&M University
studying race, gender and intimate labor. Her dissertation examines the dimensions of identity-based
online harassment and how young adults construct meanings of and navigate those experiences.