What Does BM Mean In Gaming?

Imagine playing a game of Fortnite, Call of Duty Warzone, or any first-person shooting game. You’re having fun playing with friends, and all of a sudden, you get dropped from a mile away by a headshot. As you’re spectating your body, you see the one who killed you approach and repeatedly made the sitting and standing movement right over your face.

You see this go on and on for a few seconds before you respawn, and then just when you think it’s over. You die again, and two other opponents join in and start to do the “sitting and standing” movement right on top of your face again.

This is a prime example of BM or Bad Manners (bad manner, if you will), and it’s one of the biggest problems in the video game community.

What Does BM Mean In Gaming?

BM stands for Bad Manners or Bad Manner, and is a gaming term or slang referring to any form of toxic, unsportsmanlike conduct, and disrespectful behavior towards other players.

The gaming community, as a whole, is made up of good people. But there are other players out there who make the game unnecessarily a bad experience for their fellow gamers. In other words, it’s being a bad sport before, during, and even after a game.

With the rise of esport’s popularity and becoming more mainstream, popular games are gaining more players who’re just in it to play casually. These are the players who aren’t into gaming that much, but would love to take it up as a new hobby.

What Does The Prevalence of BM Mean For The Gaming Community?

BM is one of those new slang terms that refer to any action that may give the other player a negative experience in any game. For new players just getting into a particular game, BM means a lot of things.

For one thing, a new player being exposed to bad manners early on within that game’s gaming community is a form of gatekeeping. In gaming terms, gatekeeping is when older or veteran players are trying to stop new players from enjoying the game because they don’t like to share the experience. These older players hope that these new players will just give up on the idea of getting into the game.

For example, let’s have World of Warcraft. When new players are flocking towards a new server, older players will take advantage of them by making characters from the opposing faction. In this case, if the server is predominantly Horde, these older players will make Alliance toons. Then they’ll basically try to make these new players’ lives a living hell by taking their kills or ganking them. Any negative behavior that prevents new players from having a normal and decent experience in-game is considered as BM.

What Are The Different Types of Bad Manners?

More often than not, there are different types of bad manners exhibited by different players across different games. This article will categorize these different bad manners into the following:

1. Verbal
2. Action-Based
3. Mind Games

Verbal

Verbal BMs, or bad manners, manifest through trash talk, or making negative statements in a negative way that target the other players’ religion, race, and sexuality among other things.

It’s one thing to have friendly banter with opponents, but it’s already considered BM when the trash talk is already personal or directly attacks the player outside of what he or she has done in game.

What does verbal BM mean in gaming? Well, it’s a gateway to cyberbullying. Apart from putting the player in a bad mood, there is a tendency for the perpetrator to constantly throw out racist, sexist, and other derogatory statements.

Action-Based

What does action-based BM mean in gaming? This category of BM is carried out through various actions, emotions, or tactics within a particular game that will affect the other players’ negatively.

Going back to World of Warcraft as an example for an action-based BM, your opponent will purposefully kill all of the mobs that you need to kill using his or her higher level toons. With this action, you’re unable to move forward with your quest and you’ll end up losing your patience or motivation to continue on with the quest as long as the opponent is still around.

Other examples of action-based BM is tea-bagging, which is a common occurrence in first-person shooting games. When a player gets killed, the opponents stands on top of them and proceeds to repeatedly press the “crouch” and “stand” buttons. Tea-bagging is a disrespectful way to celebrate a victory against an opponent, and is often a bannable offense for some games.

Spamming taunts in an MMORPG is also considered an action-based BM.

Mind Games

Bad manners that fall under this category are very discrete, so much so that you don’t even realize that you’re already a victim of it. We say discrete because this type of BM doesn’t attack a player directly, or even in a disrespectful way.

This type of BM is meant to affect the player’s performance or mindset heading into the game. One common type of mind game is called “Dragging It Out”, and we’ll use Magic the Gathering: Arena and Hearthstone as examples.

An opponent dragging it out is making you wait for a long time unnecessarily. In Magic The Gathering, it’s called Roping. The opponent will literally take their sweet time wasting one turn by consuming the allocated turn-time. If a turn is 30 seconds long, he or she will make one action and proceed to consume that turn or phase until the next reset. As a result, you’ll want to quit the match because you want to move on to the next one.

In Hearthstone, players are often spamming taunts and premade statements from their characters repeatedly to drive you nuts. The point and meaning of spamming taunts and one-liner is to make you lose your focus or concentration for that match, among other things.

What Games Are Most Popular For BM?

Video games that are competitive in nature have a higher occurrence for toxicity, bad manners, and unsportsmanlike conduct. Prime examples of games that are known for being toxic are League of Legends and Dota 2, with players quitting left and right just because of the BM they get from the enemy team.

Bad mannered players will always proliferate different games, and these types of people are just unavoidable at this point.

What Can People Do Against Bad Mannered Players?

Bad mannered players are found in all games, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t do anything about them. A gaming community is only as good as the people that knows what to tolerate.

When it comes to bad mannered players, the logical thing to do is to just ignore them. They’re playing the same game like you are, but the goal of their gaming is far from yours. These BM players aren’t in it to enjoy the game, but they just want to deal as much damage emotionally and mentally to their fellow players in game.

Another thing to do for the worst types of BMs is to report them to the admins. Gaming publishers aren’t exactly lenient to people who like to play the BM card every now and then. Depending on the nature of their actions, bad mannered players get banned or suspended for a period of time. Worst case, their account gets deleted or removed completely.