The NBA 2K League has recruited some of its players based on how well they can talk trash to their opponents. But where is the line?
Elevated to an art form by Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan, talking smack is now a massive part of competitive videogaming, for better or worse.
So goes the ancient art of trash talk in 2023. After blowing up in boxing rings and basketball courts in the 20th century, the sport-within-a-sport of enraging your opponent has met the roughly $180 billion-dollar-a-year video game industry, where tactical insults can fly at the speed of mics between players on different continents.
There’s also what Donohue calls the “WWE part of it” — the marketing potential in viral clips of players shouting and badmouthing each other, which the league“The beauty of it is that they trash talk and go at each other, but then after the game they’re hugging each other,” he added. “It’s all part of the game.”
“The NBA 2K League does not tolerate any hate speech inside or outside of competition,” a spokesperson for the league said in a statement. “We require all players to uphold the code of conduct and behave respectfully and professionally in all interactions. If any player engages in trash talk that involves hate speech, that player would be disciplined accordingly.
Nonverbal methods of humiliation were also invented, the most famous being spamming the crouch button over a downed opponent to squat on their virtual face. The move recalls NBA veteran Allen Iverson’s iconic step over of Tyronn Lue in the 2001 NBA Finals, but gamers know it as teabagging, after a sexual act we won’t describe in a family newspaper.
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