As I have mentioned in the last post, a gamer’s tag is a very important to a person’s image on Xbox Live. As I have learned from playing on Xbox Live, if you are not a registered friend of a person, then you cannot see their Avatar. So if you are playing games with strangers, their only notion of who you are and what kind of person you are is through your gamer tag.
It’s easy to see why you might want to put some thought into you gamer tag, not only does it represent you, if you want to change it then you will have to pay extra. If you are playing with strangers it is the only identification you have. However, as of late the spectrum of vocabulary to identify one’s self through their gamer tag has been reduced. Microsoft decided it would be best to “ban any discussion of sexuality in either tags or profiles--a move that makes it impossible for those gamers who want to identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender to do so” (Fried, 2009). Though this action is supposed to be helpful and prevent immature people from using the terms in a derogatory sense, all it really is doing is injuring the gay community and making Xbox Live less appealing. The only ones who suffer from this are those with that sexual orientation.
Those who truly wish to insult are still able to devise ways to get around the rules. One way that I have seen is people substituting numbers with letters such as an ‘a’ with a ‘4’ and a ‘3’ for an 'e'. Though Microsoft is working to fix these problems, some people are still prohibited from expressing their identity through their gamer tag.
Fried, Ina
2009 Wielding the Xbox “banhammer”. Electronic document,
http://news.cnet.com/8300-10797_3-235-2.html?keyword=Xbox+360
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