"All gamers are equal." - Iron Ribbon

Iron Ribbon's website is incredibly simple — Spartan, even — with no color, fancy graphics or animation. The site is dedicated to a new initiative that hopes to promote exactly what its tagline preaches: equality. Equality among all gamers regardless of gender, race, age, sexuality or disability. To be accepted. To be welcomed.

Six points sit in the middle of the website, each no longer than a sentence.

"I believe gaming is for everyone," the first point reads — a statement unlikely to be met with resistance. "I believe trash talk and overt trolling using gender/race/sexuality/disability is a form of verbal assault and harassment," the second point reads. This one might be a harder pill to swallow.

Inception The birth of iron ribbon

Herbert sees this kind of behavior as a roadblock — an obstacle that not only gets in the way of players wanting to join the gaming community and enjoy the experience, but also prevents gaming from reaching the heights it has the potential to reach.

"In some cases the current gaming culture is openly hostile to new players. All the recent press around some high-profile Twitter and Facebook cyber-bullying incidents are mild in comparison to the type of abuse and harassment that goes on in gaming. To make it worse, this is considered most of the time to be 'just part of the game.'"

"That was the problem," he says. "The culture of cyber-bullying and trolling present in current gaming culture is limiting growth of the sport.

But just as he began imagining all the doors that could open for eSports, he saw potential for the gaming community to lock itself out.

The reports that came by his desk suggested that not only would the next generation of gamers be the most tech-savvy to date, but with the imminent launch of a National Broadband Network to enable faster download speeds and growing public acceptance of gaming, opportunities that were once unfeasible due to slow internet and an unaccepting public would finally be possible. Opportunities, Herbert thought, like eSports taking off in an unprecedented way.

"What I was seeing coming through the [behavior reports on the types of devices the Australian people use] is that the next generation of gamers, people who have grown up with gaming from age five (most with casual gamer parents), is going to be like nothing we've ever seen," he tells Polygon.

By day Kym Herbert works for one of Australia's largest telecommunications firms. By night he indulges in a hobby full of pixels, polygons, crosshairs and virtual loot. The two worlds rarely intersect. One day, they did.

Deep Issues The Problem Isn't Only Skin-Deep

At one point there was no such thing as trash talking.

The various gaming communities that have come together to support Iron Ribbon have all agreed that while harassment and abuse is rampant within certain gaming communities, it is not possible to paint every gamer with the same brush stroke, nor is it fair to accuse all gaming communities of perpetuating discrimination. Of the many video game community leaders and event organizers Polygon spoke to, all agreed that it was a tricky problem to tackle and there is no quick fix.

Jonathan "JayTee" Tiong is the founder and owner of the Sydney Online Gaming Community, an Australian organization that runs local competitive gaming events and tournaments. The Syndey Online Gaming Community was among the first organizations to support Iron Ribbon because, like Iron Ribbon's tagline states, Tiong believes that gaming is for everyone. But he understands that with the level of poor behavior that exists within certain gaming communities, not everyone is going to feel welcome.

"These problems can affect all levels of eSports and online gaming communities," Tiong tells Polygon. "It's especially terrible at the higher levels of management in the communities because there's a trickle-down effect of influence. It really starts to snowball."

Tiong says that one of the most visible problems facing online gaming is trash talking. While it may seem like a superficial and harmless activity, he says that when communities fail to draw a line, trash talking can quickly escalate and become abusive, hurting not only individual gamers but also the wider community.

"Trash talking has been part of gamer culture, true; but it hasn't always been a part of gamer culture," he says. "At one point there was no such thing as trash talking in the early days — pre-Doom, back in the Wolfenstein era, even — it developed into something accepted and wrongly encouraged."

Tiong believes that trash talking can be done, but it came back to drawing a line. To him, talking about a player's poor performance in a game is fine, and that is where the line should be firmly drawn. Personal insults about a player's appearance, gender, family, race or education is not OK.

"You're not there to judge people's entire lives based on the scarce moments you spend with them in a game," he says. "You're there to play with them, not to hurt them."

It also goes beyond causing personal harm.

Daniel Grzelak is the CEO of the Gamer Institute, an organization that aims to educate gamers in the field of competitive gaming by connecting players to professionals so that they can push each other to improve. He says that widespread poor player behavior doesn't just affect individuals — it can hold back eSports as a whole.

"Major League Gaming will never reach the status of Major League Baseball while it is plagued by behavior that isn't acceptable in wider society," Grzelak says. "The line that people are crossing isn't blurry — in fact, it's very clear. The litmus test is if Shane Warne or LeBron James were caught saying it or doing it, would they get in trouble?"

With eSports attracting major sponsors, competitions operating with millions of dollars in financial backing and prize money growing year on year, Grzelak says that more and more is at stake. Harassment and abuse isn't just a matter of whether or not one player upsets another player — it's the difference between having sponsorships and being dropped.

For the most part, Grzelak says that sponsors, professional teams and event organizers have no tolerance for behavior that might hurt their brands. "Take one step down to minor events and within minor teams the boy's club mentality rules," he says. "It's a completely different story. This is where the anonymous, pre-pubescent culture is allowed to fester and spread like the flu in a kindergarten."