Women and Gaming Culture

Comments are moderated. If your post contains any sexist or pro-harassment sentiment it will be deleted before it even hits the page, and no one will ever see it at all.

A few months back I was sadly not surprised to hear that women suffer a lot of abuse and harassment in the gaming world. What did shock me is that this abuse was widely defended as "part of the culture", and the chorus of "if you don't like it you should just leave". 

This is a subject that hasn't gone away and pisses me off more and more every time I hear about it. I have female friends who refuse to talk to me in-game because they don't want to deal with all the crap they get just for opening their mouths.

I'm going to address the second common argument first because it's marginally less moronic.

When confronted with abusive trash talk, most of the time people are simply told "if you don't like it just leave". If you spend zero time thinking about this, it kind of makes sense - if you don't like Chinese food then don't eat it, amirite? Except the difference is that Chinese food won't come into your house and jam itself down your throat. When someone says "if you don't like it just leave", they're shifting the fault to the victim. It essentially says "it's your fault for being abused because you chose to be here".

Imagine going to Wal-Mart to buy some new pants, and as soon as you walk into the store, staff and customers alike start laughing right in your face about how fat and ugly and stupid you are. And then they have the audacity to tell you that if you don't like being verbally abused it's your own damn fault because you're the one who walked into the store and that's just how things are here. This is the only nearby store that sells what you want, and you have a right to go shopping and buy some new clothes, so what the hell do these people think they're doing? 

Well you know what? Women have the right to play a video game. They're allowed to choose and enjoy a hobby, same as everyone else.

This whole "if you don't like it just leave" thing? If you were to say that about, say, rape you'd be ripped to pieces. Perhaps literally. It would be a bloodbath of epic proportions. It's not your responsibility to avoid abuse; it's everyone else's responsibility not to abuse you.

Which brings me back to the first argument: "trash talk is just part of gaming culture".

Now, there's a distinction to be made here. Trash talking someone's skills in good fun is one thing. When a player misses a grenade toss and blows herself up, by all means, send her a "lol, great throw".

But when your target is not the skill or the actions but the person, or that person's sex or gender or race, that's crossing the line. That kind of targeted harassment is completely unacceptable, especially when it happens over and over. The thing is, the people who say the worst of these things would certainly never say them in public in the real world. Even if they believe them to be true, they'd be too scared of the repercussions to actually say these things. They're simply cowards hiding behind a monitor. 

The people who say they're fine with trash talk and that it's just the way things are are not the people who constantly receive private messages demanding a blowjob or a sandwich. They're not the people who are met with "what are you, twelve?" every time they try to help out the team via voice chat. They're not the people who ask the moderators or admins for help and get nothing but a shrug and a "deal with it".

What's sad is that gamers - especially MMO players - have been seen as social outcast nerds for years, so they really should know how it feels to be treated like crap for their hobby. And yet, despite that, we still see stuff like this.

If abuse and harassment are part of gaming culture, they shouldn't be. If targeted discrimination is part of gaming culture, I don't want to be part of that culture (cue the comments and emails telling me to "just leave then lol").

It really amazes me how these people don't realize they're assholes.