"Teabagging", or "tactical squatting" has long since been a form of communication in online games, namely first-person shooters like Call of Duty and Halo, though whether it should be is a different matter altogether. Typically, this is performed by crouching repeatedly while standing over an enemy player's body or face. Most players see the action as a form of trolling opponents or asserting dominance, though recent arguments in the gaming community have called into question whether or not "tea-bagging" is sexual assault.
According to the dictionary definition, teabagging is "the act of placing one's testicles in the mouth of another person, often repeatedly, raising and lowering it like a person dipping a tea bag." However, whether the video game equivalent can truly be called sexual assault is still being heavily debated.
The History of "Teabagging"
Referred to as "corpse humping" by the Halo Wikipedia, "teabagging" to their community is often utilized "as a 'victory dance' to insult and aggravate the victim." The action probably originated somewhere in the late 1990s, likely when the multiplayer shooter Counter-Strike came out, and it became even more prominent in 2001 with Halo: Combat Evolved. The original Halo truly changed the game when it came to cooperative game modes and multiplayer, but it also helped initiate the rise of online toxicity as more people began to join the community. By Halo 3, "teabagging" was in full swing and the ragdoll physics that allowed players to move an enemy's corpse around whilst performing the action certainly didn't decrease the appeal.
Inclusions of "teabagging" coded into the multiplayer Halo games themselves could also be found from time to time, such as in Halo 2, a Scarab in Sungheili Ultra exists that would occasionally "teabag" players if they died within a close range to it. In Halo 4, projecting a hologram onto a corpse would reward players with the sight of the hologram humping the corpse. Seeing as the original developers of Halo were a group of college students by the name of Bungie, such events make sense - though they may have enabled the corpse humping action that the gaming community knows so well today.
Teabagging in Games Controversy
The controversy originated from a Discord server where one user commented "if [they] do not consent and someone rubs their genitals on [their] face, that's sexual assault" in response to a person proudly claiming that they were a "repeat offender" of "teabagging" in video games. Screenshots of the heated conversation have spread across social media, to the point where even the popular YouTuber and streamer MoistCr1TiKaL got involved. His final verdict was that "video games aren't real" and that watching someone, or being "teabagged" in a game is not necrophilia or sexual assault.
A different Twitter user responded with their own opinion on the matter, writing "as someone who was a victim of r-word, teabagging in a video game is not sexual assault. Please do not speak from our behalf if you did not go through the same stuff." Others added on to this statement, questioning if "teabagging" in video games counted as sexual assault, then killing in games would by this definition qualify as murder.
Some games have put restrictions on the action, at least at the professional level, such as when the Killer Instinct World Cup decided that anyone caught performing the act would be banned from the season. Further,The Elder Scrolls Online team cited in 2021 that the action would not be allowed as it intentionally humiliates or shames other players. It's even rumored that in Riot Games' FPS Valorant, "teabagging" may become a bannable offense in the near future.
While the overall consensus is that crouch spamming is not a form of sexual assault, letting players do this and even coding it into games does encourage a certain type of toxicity and behavior that occurs in bad taste. With games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare rewarding "teabagging" and Halo players infamously known for it, it doesn't seem tactical squatting will be done away with any time soon.