This is pretty clear to anyone who has ever played a game of Counterstrike or whatever and a woman makes the mistake of using voice chat. You’ll get the whole gamut from misogynistic nonsense to the most awkward and creepy attempts to hit on them possible, pretty much every time.
It’s just one joke, over and over again. I’m a guy, but one of the reasons I stopped going to lan parties was hearing this same few jokes again and again whenever a woman showed up. If it wasn’t a woman, it would be something else from the limited number of topics and opinions they had. When it wasn’t frustrating, it was simply boring.
Yeah, except this was irl at a lan part. Where they could see the woman’s lack of response. Whether they came with their boyfriend or alone, they never showed up to a second time.
I only ever really saw the clsssic toxic gamer behavior flourish once most games switched from having private dedicated servers ran by the players that almost always had an admin present to handle toxicity to unmoderated developer hosted servers no players have any bit of control over. Counter-Strike: Source vs CS:GO/CS2 is quite a leap in the general attitude of players you would encounter.
Wild how removing people who managed the player’s behavior makes the bad behavior intensify.
Confirmed. Counterstrike specifically was very inclusive and very open to most players of all ages, demographics, and skill ranges especially compared to other shooters of the 00’s. Then matchmaking and eventually premier got introduced and any chance of moderating the community died and here we are today.
matchmaking killed the fun in so many ways. cs got tryhardy and toxic, but so many multiplayer games are now insufferable because of matchmaking and agressive monetization.
I suspect the environment is different depending on the game. I never witnessed any of that in overwatch back when I used to play for instance. Though I pretty much never play multiplayer games without at least one friend so the numbers are skewed a bit by having at least 2 non-weirdos on the team
But if you just treat them like normal you can make some good friends. I had a group of women I played CS with for quite a while after playing with them as a random and just treating them like regular people for once.
It takes absolutely nothing to just not act like you’re amazed at talking to a woman. They’re just people trying to have fun in the game, just like you and every other teammate you’ve had. Don’t treat them any differently.
I’m not into gaming, but my wife used to be into it. When we were dating, we’d play call of duty together (side-by-side consoles). She’d get on voice chat, get teased a bit by teenage boys, and then proceed to utterly destroy them. Sometimes they’d scream and curse, accuse her of cheating, accuse her of having a guy play for her (lol her man sucks at this), and so on. She’d just mock them, call them horrible names, and then specifically target and spawn camp the little shits until they rage quit.
It was fucking awesome, and it was alway a laugh riot for the other (more mature, less sexist) folks in the match. I love her so much.
I agree that most competitive games tend to go that way. My ex and I played a lot of League of Legends in a small friend group together (where this did not happen, thank god), and if playing with “externals” it was unbelievable what bullshit she had to deal with. and although most of the time the creeps bit off more than they could chew, it must have felt pretty bad, regardless of what me and our friends did or said.
Anyone with experience in non-competitive game settings to share?
Folks in MMOs tend to be more chill in my experience. In such a large sample of people you’re going to find a few dickbags who think they’re hilarious or the kind who will DM sexual harassment, but the majority of people just do not care and are happy to play the game. Toxicity tends to crop up around entitlement to loot and perceived performance rather than gender.
That’s what I mean about the large sample size. It only takes the existence of a single asshole to ruin the experience for a target of harassment or casual phobic comment not even directed at them intentionally. Blizzard won’t ban these people, so they’re allowed to exist in the public chat channels, and they can say pretty much whatever the hell they want.
But what I mean is most people do not side with them. An asshole will drop a transphobic comment specifically because they know most people will take offense and argue with them. The general advice is to disable public communication and stick to organizing via guilds and Discord servers which are actually moderated. If the game were a democracy, those people would punished and/or removed.
I don’t doubt this but now I’m really curious about the numbers. Is it the same on PC? How do women’s experience compare to other genders in similar surveys?
For how other genders fair, it’s almost entirely dependent on your voice, so feminine sounding people almost certainly get the same treatment, and masculine sounding people just get treated like normal.
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This is pretty clear to anyone who has ever played a game of Counterstrike or whatever and a woman makes the mistake of using voice chat. You’ll get the whole gamut from misogynistic nonsense to the most awkward and creepy attempts to hit on them possible, pretty much every time.
It’s just one joke, over and over again. I’m a guy, but one of the reasons I stopped going to lan parties was hearing this same few jokes again and again whenever a woman showed up. If it wasn’t a woman, it would be something else from the limited number of topics and opinions they had. When it wasn’t frustrating, it was simply boring.
What’s the one joke?
Probably “A WOMAN is in the VC? AWOOOGA amirite guys?!?!”
Yeah, except this was irl at a lan part. Where they could see the woman’s lack of response. Whether they came with their boyfriend or alone, they never showed up to a second time.
“girls don’t play video games”
Oh, right, THAT one.
I only ever really saw the clsssic toxic gamer behavior flourish once most games switched from having private dedicated servers ran by the players that almost always had an admin present to handle toxicity to unmoderated developer hosted servers no players have any bit of control over. Counter-Strike: Source vs CS:GO/CS2 is quite a leap in the general attitude of players you would encounter.
Wild how removing people who managed the player’s behavior makes the bad behavior intensify.
Confirmed. Counterstrike specifically was very inclusive and very open to most players of all ages, demographics, and skill ranges especially compared to other shooters of the 00’s. Then matchmaking and eventually premier got introduced and any chance of moderating the community died and here we are today.
matchmaking killed the fun in so many ways. cs got tryhardy and toxic, but so many multiplayer games are now insufferable because of matchmaking and agressive monetization.
I suspect the environment is different depending on the game. I never witnessed any of that in overwatch back when I used to play for instance. Though I pretty much never play multiplayer games without at least one friend so the numbers are skewed a bit by having at least 2 non-weirdos on the team
But if you just treat them like normal you can make some good friends. I had a group of women I played CS with for quite a while after playing with them as a random and just treating them like regular people for once.
It takes absolutely nothing to just not act like you’re amazed at talking to a woman. They’re just people trying to have fun in the game, just like you and every other teammate you’ve had. Don’t treat them any differently.
I’m not into gaming, but my wife used to be into it. When we were dating, we’d play call of duty together (side-by-side consoles). She’d get on voice chat, get teased a bit by teenage boys, and then proceed to utterly destroy them. Sometimes they’d scream and curse, accuse her of cheating, accuse her of having a guy play for her (lol her man sucks at this), and so on. She’d just mock them, call them horrible names, and then specifically target and spawn camp the little shits until they rage quit.
It was fucking awesome, and it was alway a laugh riot for the other (more mature, less sexist) folks in the match. I love her so much.
I agree that most competitive games tend to go that way. My ex and I played a lot of League of Legends in a small friend group together (where this did not happen, thank god), and if playing with “externals” it was unbelievable what bullshit she had to deal with. and although most of the time the creeps bit off more than they could chew, it must have felt pretty bad, regardless of what me and our friends did or said.
Anyone with experience in non-competitive game settings to share?
Folks in MMOs tend to be more chill in my experience. In such a large sample of people you’re going to find a few dickbags who think they’re hilarious or the kind who will DM sexual harassment, but the majority of people just do not care and are happy to play the game. Toxicity tends to crop up around entitlement to loot and perceived performance rather than gender.
Maybe in more current MMOs, because back in my WoW days (2013 and earlier), misogyny was rampant
That’s what I mean about the large sample size. It only takes the existence of a single asshole to ruin the experience for a target of harassment or casual phobic comment not even directed at them intentionally. Blizzard won’t ban these people, so they’re allowed to exist in the public chat channels, and they can say pretty much whatever the hell they want.
But what I mean is most people do not side with them. An asshole will drop a transphobic comment specifically because they know most people will take offense and argue with them. The general advice is to disable public communication and stick to organizing via guilds and Discord servers which are actually moderated. If the game were a democracy, those people would punished and/or removed.
I don’t doubt this but now I’m really curious about the numbers. Is it the same on PC? How do women’s experience compare to other genders in similar surveys?
For how other genders fair, it’s almost entirely dependent on your voice, so feminine sounding people almost certainly get the same treatment, and masculine sounding people just get treated like normal.