How Women are Targeted by Players in the Gaming Industry
We’ve talked about harassment in the workplace, but there is a lot more that goes into it than just that. We need to talk about players and the way they harass women. As we can see from the graphic on the right, a study from the UK shows that women are being abused and harassed while playing games. According to Bryter “33% of female gamers say they’ve been a victim of abuse from male gamers. It is seen all the time so much so that there are sites such as NotinthekitchenAnymore and movies like “GTFO”.
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These stories are making their way into TV culture as well. Law and Order released an episode in 2015 where a woman was abducted by video game players. She was a developer who received death threats and denied to push back launching the game which ultimately led to her being kidnapped. So let’s talk about it, has this happened? No, this storyline is not real, I can not recall an event like this that happened, however, there's a reason this episode was aired, and it did call attention to things that could potentially happen if nothing is done. Players are scary and they do scary things.
I am going to start with a story from the movie GTFO. In the movie, a writer for a video game received threats and had people find the address of her children's school. An article by Robert Ito from the New York Times summarizes some of the movie. Ito talks to Shannon Sun-Higginson the director of the film says she started working on the film when she watched a live stream from Cross Assault. A female player, Miranda Pakozdi was being harassed by her teams' coach Aris Bakhtanians. He was smelling her, asking her about her boobs, telling her to take off her shirt and much more. He was harassing her so much so that she committed a ‘virtual suicide’. She walked directly to an opposing player and let them kill her so she would be able to leave the game. I don’t know about you but I would have done the same thing. The Cross Assault live stream was not the first time that public harassment occurred.
Let’s talk Gamer-Gate. Jeremy Freed wrote an article on Gamergate, and what happened during it. In 2014 Gamergate started as a hashtag that spread rapidly due to the accusations that a female developer had sex with a man to get a good review on a game, which did not happen. That female was Zoe Quinn. Basically, it all started when an ex-boyfriend of hers made a post claiming that she slept with a bunch of men in the industry to get ahead, before the allegations could be knocked down, it spread like wildfire and turned into something much bigger than it initially was. Gamergate turned into being less about Quinn and more about females in the industry as a whole. Supporters of Gamergate began to become known as Gamergaters, and they began attacking Anita Sarkeesian, creator of Feminist Frequency. As the article states both Sarkeesian and Quinn were forced to leave their homes due to threats. Many women involved in Gamergate had their addresses leaked online, death threats sent to them and much more. Freed goes on to discuss the ways this had real-life effects beyond just the release of information. Brianna Wu was another woman that was attacked during Gamergate, she eventually got diagnosed with PTSD due to what she went through. Women face harassment all the time, and players can be scary.
A study was done by authors Fox and Tang show statistics in correlation with harassment. The study used adult participants contracted through online forums, blogs, and social media sites (including Reddit and Twitter) for an online survey on experiences with trash talking and harassment in video games. The article said, “The female voice received three times as many negative comments as the male voice.”. This shows a direct relation between harassment and gender. The harassment that women face comes on two different levels. That is sexual and just plain misogyny. You will hear things like ‘damn bet you have nice tits’, to things like ‘get back in the kitchen’. The problem with the harassment that these women face is that it can push them from playing and it shouldn’t. Women learn to cope with the harassment by not talking online, changing their avatars, or using a non-gendered username, but why should women have to change. The game experience that women have is completely different than men because of this. Women can not play games in the same way men do. It is time gaming companies and industries do something about this, but how can they when they’re games hypersexualize females. If you want to read about that check out my next blog post.
I am going to start with a story from the movie GTFO. In the movie, a writer for a video game received threats and had people find the address of her children's school. An article by Robert Ito from the New York Times summarizes some of the movie. Ito talks to Shannon Sun-Higginson the director of the film says she started working on the film when she watched a live stream from Cross Assault. A female player, Miranda Pakozdi was being harassed by her teams' coach Aris Bakhtanians. He was smelling her, asking her about her boobs, telling her to take off her shirt and much more. He was harassing her so much so that she committed a ‘virtual suicide’. She walked directly to an opposing player and let them kill her so she would be able to leave the game. I don’t know about you but I would have done the same thing. The Cross Assault live stream was not the first time that public harassment occurred.
Let’s talk Gamer-Gate. Jeremy Freed wrote an article on Gamergate, and what happened during it. In 2014 Gamergate started as a hashtag that spread rapidly due to the accusations that a female developer had sex with a man to get a good review on a game, which did not happen. That female was Zoe Quinn. Basically, it all started when an ex-boyfriend of hers made a post claiming that she slept with a bunch of men in the industry to get ahead, before the allegations could be knocked down, it spread like wildfire and turned into something much bigger than it initially was. Gamergate turned into being less about Quinn and more about females in the industry as a whole. Supporters of Gamergate began to become known as Gamergaters, and they began attacking Anita Sarkeesian, creator of Feminist Frequency. As the article states both Sarkeesian and Quinn were forced to leave their homes due to threats. Many women involved in Gamergate had their addresses leaked online, death threats sent to them and much more. Freed goes on to discuss the ways this had real-life effects beyond just the release of information. Brianna Wu was another woman that was attacked during Gamergate, she eventually got diagnosed with PTSD due to what she went through. Women face harassment all the time, and players can be scary.
A study was done by authors Fox and Tang show statistics in correlation with harassment. The study used adult participants contracted through online forums, blogs, and social media sites (including Reddit and Twitter) for an online survey on experiences with trash talking and harassment in video games. The article said, “The female voice received three times as many negative comments as the male voice.”. This shows a direct relation between harassment and gender. The harassment that women face comes on two different levels. That is sexual and just plain misogyny. You will hear things like ‘damn bet you have nice tits’, to things like ‘get back in the kitchen’. The problem with the harassment that these women face is that it can push them from playing and it shouldn’t. Women learn to cope with the harassment by not talking online, changing their avatars, or using a non-gendered username, but why should women have to change. The game experience that women have is completely different than men because of this. Women can not play games in the same way men do. It is time gaming companies and industries do something about this, but how can they when they’re games hypersexualize females. If you want to read about that check out my next blog post.