This guy never says the word “EVE” but it’s obvious what game he’s talking about. And he’s dead right — there are strong practical reasons why you shouldn’t let your alliance trash your coms with language that demeans and excludes and offends an unknowable but real percentage of your members:

I play an online game where the most commonly-heard phrase for “destroying the enemy” is “raping their faces.” Usage notes: “we really raped face last night”, “we caught them by surprise and raped their faces”, “who’s online and ready to go rape some face?”

By no particular coincidence, the voices you hear in your headset when you play this game are overwhelmingly male.

The politics of managing voice coms for a group so large are intricate. The more people using coms, the more social cohesion you have and the better your gaming group will fight together. But if coms are shitted up in ways that make various groups feel unwelcome (gays, women, ethnic minorities) these people will not use coms and may not stay in your group. So when your people start using “gay” as a derisive adjective, calling the folks who aren’t combat-oriented “Jews” because they are busy earning in-game currency, throwing around words such as “cunt” and “bitches” like the unsupervised 14-year-old-boys many of them are, or using “rape” as a laudatory verb of victorious combat, it’s important to push back.

That’s from ErosBlog, which is emphatically NOT a link that’s safe to click at most workplaces.

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