It's Saturday night. My wife and I just get back from a rehearsal dinner for a friend's wedding and I'm still a bit restless. So, having just beaten Red Dead Revolver, I figured I'd give the multiplayer a spin. Now, I'm still fairly new to the XBox and up until this point, my sole online gaming experience is pretty much limited to a few games on Steam and Ultima Online back in the day or meeting up specifically with friends and people I know over Live. I play a hell of a lot of TF2 and, for the most part, people are pretty decent.

So imagine my shock and surprise when it takes approximately two minutes before I'm called a "nigger fag" by some squeaky-voiced 13 year old who proceeds to berate my supposed lifestyle choices and imagined skin color. The kid actually started repeated "oogie boogie!" at me.

Up until this point, I wasn't using the headphones and this was all coming unsolicited through my television speakers. So of course I reached for my headset and asked what the kid's problem was. And to my amazement, people started defending the kid and repeating his accusations of "nigger fag"dom.

So that was infuriating and awful. But when it got downright depressing was when another kid joined who sounded like he was probably black. Once the kid spoke, everyone forgot about me and started spewing the most hateful, awful, racist shit I've ever heard in my entire life. I couldn't believe it. I heard the black kid telling someone what they were saying and the kid's dad hops on and starts playing and, to a degree, trying to verbally fight back against these horrible racist hillbillies. They jump on him even worse. Telling him to go back to Africa, that they should find him and hang him from a tree.

Is this what online gaming on an XBox is? Why and how does anyone put up with this? It's enough to make me go back to my PC games and never look back.