Under fire: Women who dare to play video games

[McHappyPants2012]

www.metro.co.uk/news/913538-under-fire-women-who-dare-to-play-video-games

i am a keen gamer, already preorder BOII :) ( black ops 2) and do play alot of games. I thought this was normal until reading this.

aibu to think that perhaps the remarks like slut, whore and bitch ( sorry MN for swearing) are perhaps used in a generic way and not really to the intervidual player.

i hardly go on the headset ( only speak to people i know) so never really had any of these names directed towards me.

I'm a gamer. My main online game is EVE Online, whih is very heavily male-dominated, with only abot 5% female players. I'm part of alliance leadership so I spend a lot of time on the headset. This stuff happens sometimes. It depends a lot on the culture of the alliance or corporation in question. It my alliance, it does not happen - because we (myself and the -male- rest of the leadership) call people on it when we hear it. 95% of the time, they apologise and don't do it again, the small minority who do are swiftly directed at the door and told not to come back. This goes for sexism, racism, homophobia and anything else that strikes as 'beyond the pale'. No tolerance. Not all groups are like this, I've heard some absolutely awful things from other female players.

That said, it's a mature game for adults. Insults and harsh language fly in the heat of battle. I have no problem with that, as long as it doesn't breech aforementioned racism/sexism/homophobia criteria. In the more mature alliances, it's no worse than MN on a Friday night :o

There is a pervasive problem in the gaming environment, though. I've worked hard to create a safe gaming space for myself and any other female gamer who wishes to join, with the help of a load of good people, mostly men, but I'm not denying the scale of the problem. I don't know what the answer is, but I do know its's not to stop gaming - I will not be driven out of a hobby I love by a bunch of linguistically unimaginative neanderthals.

I miss WOW! I was also a Healer, DH was a tank :-) We had so much fun playing together and met some very lovely people. When we got married IRL we even followed up with a ceremony in Stormwind Cathedral! Sad but true. Since the advent of our second child, I have sadly closed my Blizzard account. But I agree - lots of lovely people there if you look for them and I never experienced any sexism. I think FPS's are different though - a different game experience attracting different sorts of people. You have to kind of live WOW.

When we got married IRL we even followed up with a ceremony in Stormwind Cathedral! so lovely! I might have reopen my account when I marry DP :)

Talking of wow, any baby boy wow related names? If we were having a girl Freja was on the list (partly because of the wow connection.)

Tbf she plays COD on Xbox Live which is known for being played by the kind of twunts who will go out of their way to use offensive language. It is sexist. But it is also racist. Homophobic. Any other ist you can possibly think of in fact. It is at least equal opportunity bigotry.

As for the threats to rape, from what I know of it the word rape is thrown around constantly. They threaten to rape just about anyone, male or female. They also use the word rape to describe certain actions in the game.

Essentially they will pick the words they know are most likely to offend/shock. Unfortunately for female gamers the words that offend/shock the most are related to their sexuality.

What concerns me more than the immature twats on there is that when their behaviour is reported to the mods/companies in charge, the users are rarely banned.

If you contrast it with most MMORPG's, the trolls on there get banned or at least suspended.

Hmm, if you've made it through all that waffle, my point is that women aren't under fire in gaming. Just some games, and they are under the same amount of fire as the next person in those situations. I'm not excusing it, it is obviously wrong, but I can't agree that women are more badly treated.

Dare I say, she should play a proper computer game on a proper console?

"Essentially they will pick the words they know are most likely to offend/shock. "
That is concerning, in that by constantly using and mis-using the words, the shock lessens and the word becomes normalised. I don't think that's a healthy thing for society, particularly women, to have to live with. (I call out anyone who uses the term "frape" on facebook as I loathe it)

I am a gamer (although since DC2 arrived 6 months ago I play very sporadically) but I am not keen on online gaming. I don't care to put myself in a position where I am likely to feel vulnerable. I have recently downloaded a starter pack for WOW which I don't have the same concerns about as I would playing an FPS online.

TBH I enjoy co-op games but only when I'm playing in the same room as my co-player. When I was pregnant with DC1 DH and I spent hours playing Resident Evil 5 while I bounced on my birthday ball

BirthING ball. Damn iPad.

"That is concerning, in that by constantly using and mis-using the words, the shock lessens and the word becomes normalised. "

Absolutely. Problem is, how do you stop it? Telling them not to only encourages them further

Naoko Eve is an amazing gaming space. A fantastic example of community moderation. But then Eve attracts players of a higher intelligence that COD, HALO and Xbox based multiplayer. I mean COD is one format with what is effectively a load of very expensive map packs sold on disk as a new game DP and I were commenting tonight the best thing for COD would be to stop pretending there are new games and release them as what they are, map packs, and save on packaging and the environment, but if the fans don't realise, well. But I digress, and will end up on about Fifa13........

I play Halo, hear these insults sometimes on Xbox live. I refuse to be pushed out of my gaming space, I hand them their arse and then tell them to get in the kitchen and make me a sammich. Either that or they assume I'm a 12 year old boy as my voice is a higher pitch and they tell me I should be in bed by now. Fuck them, this is my game too.

Oh I've had that one Punk :o Got recruited into a corp with a reputation for highly skilled PvP, being vouched for by a RL friend. They were fine about it until they heard I was female, at which point they got worried they might offend me. Friend laughed at them, pointed out I'd almost certainly heard it before, and they gave me a chance. Had a great time and eventually left to go do something else. It was only then that I heard that about half the corp had decided I must actually be a teenage boy, because female voice + skill in PvP just didn't compute....

Naoko i also play eve :) i am bata testing dust 514 on PS3.

i am not offended by a name call me what ever, i know i am not a slut, heck even if i decided to sleep with 1003989847382473 males/females i am not a slut.

nobody is going to make me feel like i should not play games, it is that persons issue not mine

I used to be in an all female gaming clan (PMS) which,after the gaming, is all about promoting women in games, being civil etc etc, a few members are pros. I used to play in their Counter Strike Source division. I never used a mic, but my handle suggests Im female.
I'm playing Guild Wars 2 at the moment. Arenanet are working hard at maintaining a friendly environment, I havent encountered any trashtalk even. I've reported one troll, but everyone else has been really cool and helpful.

Xbox Live is littered with sweary teenagers and mysoginistic middle-aged men.
There's actually a website where women can send in stories and screenshots of sexist and/or creepy stuff they get sent over XBL purely because they happen to be female - here

PC gaming, on the whole, is much more accepting of female gamers than console gaming. But tbh I think it's a genre thing - traditionally "male" games such as FPSs or sports games (I know, stereotypes, but it's kind of true) tend to bring out the worst in all who play them. Never once when on mic to people who play RPGs or strategy games have I ever been cursed at, insulted or generally given any abuse at all. But my brother used to play shooters like CoD, and stopped playing online because he hated the sort of boorish attitude and abuse that goes on there.

I didn't read the "study" properly as it's clearly just someone trying to push an agenda, but clearly the writer knows nothing about gaming. And realistically, you shouldn't try to study something without at least trying to understand the culture first.

I play wow with my dp he is playing as I type lol in general I don't hear any language like that, Is it more these shoot em up army type games that brings the vile-ness in some males out to play?? Because I see wow as a totally different type of gameplay I guess, cod and the like don't interest me at all.

I think if we're generalising, then it's a maturity issue, not a gender one. As mentioned, I play EVE which only has a 5% female player base or something equally depressing. This stuff happens, but it's rare - it attracts a far more mature (in attitude, not necessarily age, either, I know a 10 year old who plays and he's great) audience than your average console FPS.

Of course, it's not perfect. Someone held a competition inviting blog entries on the subject 'Why don't more women play EVE, and how could we make the game more appealing to them?' The responses were depressing. Apparently if only the developer gave us the ability to paint our ships pink and have little pets, women would flock to EVE in droves, and oh it would also help if there were less numbers. Women don't like numbers. It was more than a year ago, and my corpmates still back away slowly from the crazy ranting lady when the subject comes up. :o I did consider entering the competition myself with an entry composed entirely of choice quotations from other entrants and captioned 'This is why, now stop it and more women will come' but I decided that might be a little pissy....

I remember reading some interesting research that said that when you look at violence in film/games you become numb to real life violence. Wow is violent to an extent but there is also lots of team work and "grinding" maybe it is games where you are killing people that make the players more likely to use nasty language with each other.

Naoko Absolutely! There are definitely different maturity levels for different games. And that seems to be the real divider rather than gender. Let's face it, gaming has more men than women across pretty much all games, so if it was a gender thing then we'd all be experiencing it in all multiplayer games, and we aren't.

That's depressing about the EVE suggestions though! You so should have sent that entry

It definitely seems to be something which mostly effects FPS and sports games as well.

Would be interesting to compare the percentage of female gamers in different games

It absolutely depends on the game, for example the chat on games like Streetfighter, Tekken, Marvel vs Capcom tends to be a lot more banter and less abuse. However if I've had the misfortune to be in the room while DH is playing COD I've heard some really choice language, less so on Halo though...

I think I'll stick to my single player games like Dragon Age so I can drool over Alistair and Fenris in peace (I'm such a cliche...)

I'm a gamer.

Never come across this problem.

Not surprised Halo is seen as less so MrsR, I think it's one of the few games that really thinks about it's female gamers. Kat is a wonderful character, Noble 6 can be played as a woman, the Spartans were created by a woman. Lot of very strong female characters in Halo.

Found these interesting stats

From the ESA's 2012 report

• Forty-seven percent of all players are women, and women over 18 years of age are one of the industry's fastest growing demographics.
• Today, adult women represent a greater portion of the game-playing population (30 percent) than boys age 17 or younger (18 percent).
• Of the most frequent game purchasers, 52% are male and 48% are female

UK specific 2011 stats

• 82% of women regularly play games

Yup punk Halo is one of the few games DH and I both enjoy playing. Normally we have very different gaming habits. I tend to prefer getting immersed in an RPG and he likes beating folk up on SF, SFxT, Mortal Combat. On those games the chat is generally very entertaining but I think that's got a lot to do with the fact the guys get together IRL on a fairly regular basis, but even when he plays with "randoms" he very rarely gets any griefers.

I play WoW with my dw and our friend. I am a girl, and have never came across any negitivaty playing, nor any insults. I play on the US servers, and if anything, I have had people surprised when doing a PUG for a random dungeon when all but two were girls!

The guild I am a member of, has an active female population, infact, out of the 10 of us doing dragon soul a week ago, only two were male. The only time I have come across negativity was a while back doing random battlegrounds, and some guy was spamming the chat with offensive things, and whispering us all with how crap we were!

I game as is possibly obvious from the username

Before giving birth I dabbled a bit in Mass Effect multiplayer. Lots of lovely ladies and no abuse; was very pleasant. The ME series has huge amounts of female players (probably cos FemShep may be the greatest character ever)

FemHawke>FemShep grin