I play a ton of online competitive games, and i think anyone that also does is more then familiar with the rampant trash talk that can occur. (I affectionately refer to it as 'Xbox Live Syndrome')

I don't really have much of a problem with it, and my philosophy is to usually tune it out (I've got a bit of a professional gaming history- shhh!- so this is easy for me to do) or if it seems like the person is particularly easy to throw off their game, I'll counter the trash talk with unwanted flirting. So much Xbox speak is 'this is gay' 'make me a sandwich' 'fuck you fag', etc every time they get hit, that they usually don't have much of a reply to it and are a lot more thrown of thier game then anything else I could've said to them.

A few times in my life though a game of gay chicken has resulted from this (yay!) where they have counter flirted. This happened very recently with someone I thought sounded particularly homophobic/heterosexual and it escalated.. very far in the other direction, delightfully so. Not to get too heady about hormonal things, but I find it pretty interesting that the gayest interaction I've had in a video game thus is with someone that called everything that went wrong a 'ho' and sounded like they were doing reps as they were pressing buttons.

Do you have any similar experiences? How often do you think the line between in and out of the closet just someone shouting into a headset?