Recently, I started playing an online video game. Keep reading, though, even if you're not interested in video games, because really the post is going to be about community and, in some ways, America. But we'll start with the video game. The game itself is called League of Legends. It's a free to play game, and partly for that reason it's immensely popular, with millions of players around the world. It's what we like to call in the genre a "hardcore" game, meaning that it appeals to people who taking their gaming seriously. It's probably one of the top 5 most hardcore games in the world. South Korea views it as almost their National Pastime, like Baseball would be to us. One of the things it's particularly known for is being competitive. You may have heard the term "e-sports", or playing video games as if they were a team sport, and this is one of the best examples. To summarize, you play on a team of 5 against another team of 5. Each player has an avatar, an in-game persona with abilities and strengths and weaknesses who roams around on a map killing random beasts and, eventually, each other, and then eventually the enemy's home base. Whoever blows up the other base wins.
It's not the game, though, that interests me. It's the community. League of Legends (or LoL as insiders call it) is well known in the gaming community for having arguably the most toxic community in all of gaming and maybe even in all of the internet. It is the poster child for the awfulness of the internet. It is the YouTube comments section times 10. It is, quite literally, studied by academics for information on how not to create a community. Of course the maker of the game, Riot Games (that name!) fervently denies this, but having experienced it firsthand I can say, with evidence, that they are wrong: it is toxic. The players are uniformly unhelpful, discouraging, mean, petty, foulmouthed, and those are the nice ones. Nobody will cut you slack even if you freely admit to being new, or being bad at the game. It's like that's just an invitation to troll harder. The serious - and probably correct - advice of most longtime players is to simply immediately and totally ban any and all other players from chatting with you. And this is in a team-based game!
The closest analogy I can think of in the real world is when I used to play pickup soccer. We who are used to playing competitive sports are also used to taking some guff, shall we say, from the opposing team. And that makes a certain amount of sense, and can even be fun in the right context. What is interesting and surprising to me is how much garbage you get from people on your own team. It's clearly and demonstrably unhelpful. It produces absolutely no positive results; it doesn't make anyone feel any better, it is provably a negative in terms of team performance, and it doesn't even really help the person doing it blow off steam. In my MBA I studied organizational theory and the one thing that will sink an organization is a lack of trust in your teammates/co-workers, and the easiest way to do that is nonconstructive criticism and tearing down others.
Anyway, back to the America part. A lot has been written about why the LoL community is so toxic by people who have better thoughts than I, but I have a few thoughts of my own about it and how that relates to America and to our politics. Part of the problem with LoL is that it is so easy to think of the other "person" as something less than human. Normally, in a human society, when we are asked to count on other people as teammates or partners, it's after establishing some kind of bond with them. But in politics, and in League of Legends, and in pickup soccer, we're asked to try to work together with people, to count on others, with whom we have absolutely no community. League is even worse because of the added online angle; these people aren't even people, just words on a screen. At least in soccer, you have to call somebody a jerk to their face. But in politics, you never meet these "fellow citizens". And yet their decisions impact your life. You *think* you know them; you invent caricatures of who you imagine them to be so that you have someone to yell at. But of course, you don't know them at all. Increasingly, this is how modern life works. I have coworkers I have never met in person. I work out next to people I don't know. I am served food by people I've never met before and may never meet again. I have to trust a hundred people a day to help me, and I don't know any of these people. And what League of Legends shows us - with the exactitude of a giant social experiment - is the results of that, and sadly, they aren't pretty.
Now League of Legends is just a video game. Consequences are low. But the paradigm is increasingly found in situations where the consequences are not low; at work, in government, in economics. eBay, Airbnb; I can buy my goods from strangers, live in a stranger's house. I don't need friends at all to enjoy myself online, comment with like-minded folks or argue with those on the "other side". But something important is missing here; the checks and balances that experiencing people, in person, provides. It's too easy for our animal brains to just "other" these people, these strangers. The Theory of Mind holds that one reason we don't hurt others is because we recognize, at some basic level, that they are like us, that if we hurt them, it would be a lot like if someone hurt us, and we wouldn't like it. But that important social construct revolves around us recognizing the humanity of those we deal with, and when they are just a username on a screen, that is all too easy to forget.