Have you ever asked yourself that exact question,”Where do gaming trolls come from?” If you’re like me you remember the days where mutli-player games weren’t online. You and your buddies would stay up until the sun came up eating candy, junk food, and chugging gallons of soda each night. However sometime in the past 20 years games and their reach began to explode. We soon found ourselves in games with strangers from distant countries, often identified by their inability to walk without rubberbanding, and generally much less candy. As time progressed into present day we find ourselves playing games daily just like we did when we were young, but now there’s a much more evil force than that dreaded boss fight, trolls.
Where Do Gaming Trolls Come From and How They Developed
Where they come for sure, I haven’t quite pinpointed but I think I got it narrowed down to a time. That time just happens to be when Call of Duty modern warfare gained popularity. I’m not saying Call of Duty created the troll, but I’m rather confident they made it popular. I’ll get to that point here soon, but first lets examine the evolution of the gamer troll.
First Generation Troll (1985-1999)
Oddjob from Goldeneye 007 on N64
I like to think the first generation troll started sometime around N64. Mainly that guy who always picked oddjob when you did a 4 person match on Goldeneye 007. That bastard knew what he was doing, and often went around pissing everyone off with his short bodied self. Then of course there was the guy who was just flat-out better than you and often caused someone to break a controller or leave the house in an early fit of rage. This troll however was easily handled, and often times punished with a swift hit to the side of the head with a pillow minutes later. You were still friends afterwards, and the night went on. However the next generation of games/trolls was just around the corner once we began to merge gaming with the internet.
Second Generation Troll (1999-2007)
CSS Hacks
After Nintendo 64 the PC gaming age really started to boom. We were no longer limited to single player games and started to evolve to first person shooters and early MMOs. As the games evolved, so did the trolls. We were now exposed to exploits and glitches being abused over and over. With MMO’s this often only gave them an unfair advantage for a while until they were either banned or the game was patched. With first person shooters this wasn’t always the case. With invisible walls, poor player animations, and an abundance of other issues that often plague first person shooters today the trolls began to really wreak their havoc. While that was often frustrating, it was usually easily dealt with. A player could hide being a collision wall, but he couldn’t hide from a well time grenade. We found out how to deal with these new breed of trolls and we did it while still enjoying our games.
So what really made the “second generation troll” a bad one was hacks. With this era in gaming we developed hacks almost as quickly as we developed games. Counter Strike is notorious for its horribly abundant hacks, but the community was still able to secure their servers with good admins, and some anti-hacking software. Either way the hacks left their mark and often left their plays with much frustration. While the hacks would soon be under control, we weren’t ready for the opportunity to achieve bragging rights through… well achievements.
Third Generation Troll (2007-Present Day)
Noooooooooooooo
Ahh… the troll that we have learned to hate. The feared third generation troll… or gamer if may. If you found yourself asking “where do gaming trolls come from?”, well this is where the ones you know today came from. I fully believe they are from two games. The first being Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, and the second being World of Warcraft. While there were games like them before their time, those games were often played by an older crowd that had a lot of respect for each other as human beings. With the introduction of online gaming with consoles the younger player base seemed to bleed over to computers and with that so did the bullying many of them likely received everyday at school.
Okay, the present day troll isn’t a direct product of a certain game, but I do feel they contributed to the way gamers act today. For instance with the Call of Duty series kill streak rewards a player was able to call in a nuke. So what did most players try to do if they had the skill to do it? Call in a nuke of course. Now with that nuke you got achievements, and with those achievements you got those little banners that went with your gamer tag. Now we have players with bad attitudes with banners with enticing graphics or text which only seem to be there to taunt or anger you. So now you’re already getting poked at before you even enter the game which only starts the fire of frustration, especially when they added in voice chat. Once in the game you often found yourself facing players using cheap tactics, trash talking, and generally trying to just ruin your experience in order to make themselves look cool/feel better about themselves. Many gamers I know that really just enjoy playing a fun game with friends haven’t bought the Call of Duty series in years because of this and have moved on to the Battlefield series instead due to its lack of pro-troll mechanisms.
World of Warcraft is placed on the pedestal o’ troll due its competitive nature. Players are taught from an early character age to hate the other faction, and at time even hate your own. As you progress it becomes more and more about getting gear before other players to give you the leg up, or accumulating massive amounts of wealth to buy whatever everyone else wants. Here in lies the spawn camper, and the corpse camper. While spawn camping had monetary games, often times player corpse camped for the sheer enjoyment of knowing your getting frustrated. Logging on after working a hard day only to find someone being a complete jerk while you try to enjoy some good downtime is rough on just about anyone. While this wasn’t the first of its kind when it came to either spawn or corpse camping, it was the most popular and therefore bread more trolls than we had ever seen before.
Where Do Gaming Trolls Come From Really?
In reality a Gaming Troll is formed from our own personal behavior in a game. When someone is griefed so much they tend to eventually learn that behavior and begin doing it themselves. We are the cause for the decline, and we are the cure for it as well. As a human race and as gamers we need to reflect on how our actions will affect the people around us. If you enjoy your experience being ruined while playing a game then you should continue that behavior, however if you a normal human being and just want to enjoy some downtime, I’d suggest attempting to help others around you. I guarantee your experience will be much more pleasant.
