Why are so many women against the video games hobby?
It’s sad you never hear feminine folks on voice chat.
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View original on piefed.caIt’s sad you never hear feminine folks on voice chat.
47 replies
I have been gaming probably longer than you have been alive. My first PC was a 386.
I only join women only or LGBTQ guilds and go in voice chat with them because like Vanth said, its not a very enjoyable hobby if I am bombarded with sexist comments and assholes who are more concerned about what is in my pants thousands of miles away than the game right in front of them.
I'm a gamer; we exist, it's not uncommon. Personally I'm just not interested in online games for the most part. And The few online games I've played are without voice comms.
Last week my good Judy was playing Wardogs with us and she used the voice comms to coordinate. Within minutes she was harassed, called a dumb bitch, then team killed.
Then twenty minutes later a teammate threatened to find her address and rape her.
I probably would stay off the voice chat too if I was her.
It's the flip side too, some guys turn into creeps around women, thinking they deserve a chance with them.
I've also had the same threats as a guy, people in these types of games are just the bottom of the barrel.
That makes me want to go to chat and rape them in Souls P2P.
Only problem is I'd have to updrade differently for P2P. I'm from Alabama, so I'd love for some rapist dick to find themselves unfortunate to be the poor bastard found alone with me. Sounds like I might have identified a good trolling hobby.
We're not.
48% of gamers are women, probably more if they were honest. The stereotype is a lie.
Women tend to stay off chat and under the radar on team games because low skilled males are arseholes
Anecdotally, I know some women who are judgmental of the hobby.
Some women are judgmental of the hobby. Some men are judgmental of the hobby.
There's marketing studies of video games and show a very strong feminine presence. But as @Taleya says, they stay under the radar because a feminine voice is a magnet for the worst of the worst in male behaviour.
and I know some men who are. Almost like people are their own individuals and not some gestalt.
Woman here.
Original Demon's Souls was the best game ever.
Returnal maybe second.
Bet some incels claim I'm a bot.
The one and only time i did a multiplayer game with voice chat with strangers, they were sexist assholes. Never again.
Now, any multiplayer games I play are with friends only, or are games that don't need chat.
I play almost exclusively single player games.
2026 statistics, it's 53/46 male/female gamers in the U.S.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/232383/gender-split-of-us-computer-and-video-gamers/
Women are gaming. They are probably just not in voice channels as much as men because who wants to deal with unmoderated sexist abuse while trying to enjoy a leisure hobby?
Definitely one of the biggest failures of modern society.
sadly it's not a modern societal issue. women have always been the bearer of abuse for no reason
Do you call it out when you see or hear it? If you want women to show up, it's on you and your peers to make it a more welcoming environment.
Uhuh, do you? It'd be kind of fucked up and shitty to suggest women are solely responsible for challenging misogyny and then not participate yourself.
What makes you think I'm not a woman? Another reason people don't "see" women on the internet is the automatic assumption that someone is a man.
What about my comment suggests that you're a man?
The part where you say it's "shitty to suggest women are solely responsible for challenging misogyny and then not participate yourself" implies that I and 'the women' are completely separate entities.
How..? You said a specific group of people is responsible for challenging misogyny, and I said that you better be doing something to help if you're going to do that (especially if you're saying the victims are the ones responsible). You read that as "you're a man," because you think shit is about teams or something. Yeah, someone who says something like this is likely a man, but women are misogynists too bud.
I have called out bigotry in voice comms and initiated vote kicks.
This is pretty much exactly why I use text chat only in multiplayer games. Even then, you'll often have them freakout if you mention anything marginally anti-misogynist.
Because a lot of the time when you have a female[-presenting] voice, you get either pigeon-holed into certain roles ("we need you to be the healer!"), patronized for skills that would be unremarkable in a male [-sounding] player, griefed by your sex when you make a mistake ("stupid fucking cunt!"), get white knighted sometimes ("oh, here, you take this! tiny shy giggle), sent explicit messages in group chat or PM, etc, etc. Even if you disguise your voice or stay off chat, you still need to have a certain level of tolerance for the misogyny, sexism and racism that crops up.
I play games a few hours a day. I just reserve my vocal communication to known individuals due to harassment being a near guarantee.
I disagree with the premise that women aren't gaming as a hobby. You would never know how many women play single player games, and in multiplayer games not being in voice isn't much of an indicator.
I think this is very much a game dependent thing. When I commanded open world events in Guild Wars 2 I didn't have any trouble, but when I played Overwatch, I would get judgement and snide comments and extra scrutiny. Most of the time I didn't have any trouble from teammates but that <10% was bad enough that I don't blame any woman from staying quiet.
I think each game attracts certain people and encourages certain behaviors, and those people will create their own subculture around the game. See Helldivers for example. Guild Wars 2 has done an admirable job creating an online space with less toxicity than most. Overwatch not so much. I think it's extremely common for people to form gaming clans and carve out their own enclave away from the random population, so they can play even games with highly toxic hostile cultures in relative peace. I think if you found yourself in a larger gaming clan that explicitly made toxicity unacceptable, you would find yourself surrounded by women on voice with you.
I meet tons of other women on simulators/sandbox/shooters, theyre just extremely discerning because you have to be
They aren't, dudes make it creepy though so the real ones stay off chat.
Would you mind terribly much reading the rules for this group, please?
Oh crap, missed that this was womenstuff. Voyager makes it easy to miss in darkmode.
No troubles. And thanks for understanding.
I play an online game mindustry, and there are many women who play on public servers. This game is quite popular amongst queer folk, so many trans and gay people. That if i play on english speaking servers.
Joining a server from my country, everyone just assumes i am a men. I used a feminine pronoun for me while writing random message in chat, and people were like: "WTF, WOMEN?!?" "Are you really a girl?", and other misogynistic stuff, which felt like those people thought that women are a fictional creatures, and not a normal people who play games.
About voice chat, i dont know, because i dont use discord.
I’m 36. I think there used to be a stigma that games were only for social awkward male basement dwellers. It’s definitely changed with mobile gaming in the 2010s and more story focused rpgs. I knew a few other girls in college that were counting down the days till Skyrim launched in 2011.
Any gender can fall into that category.
It might depend on the game somewhat.
When I was active on guild wars 2 the last couple years, there were a few women in each guild I interacted with. But ya, not all of them were comfy on voice chat.
I wonder if the situation is better with MMORPG's in general.
It shouldn’t be a “male’s” hobby. I refuse to allow fascists to deny us another thing, I saw them complaining about the The Last of US 2 for culture war reasons, they have no right to set the rules.
Since when is gaming a men's hobby? For as long as i remember, while majority of gamers are men, women are still a significant part of gamers, at least in the games that i play and watch online. And especially in recent years, i see more women in games.
It may be a "male's" hobby for gooner shooters, but in casual games it is pretty much equal.
I can't speak for video games (because I loathe most of them and don't even bother looking at them any more) but I can take a step to the side and talk about (pencil and paper) RPGs.
I started that hobby early. 1978, while it was still punk AAF and full up with the DIY ethos. Back then women were a significant fraction of the player base; I mean really, it was practically catnip as a game for theatre nerds and drama flakes, and a huge fraction of those (probably majority) were women. Hell, one of the most influential forums for game players and designers to hang out, Alarums & Excursions (still in operation last I heard!), was an APA run by a woman: Lee Gold.
But things changed from the '70s and into the late '80s until a lot of women were driven out of the public view (myself included). Pick-up games, hanging out in the games/comic shop, attending conventions … women just vanished because sexual harassment and gatekeeping and all the other obnoxious toxic masculine behaviour came to the forefront. There was a brief upsurge in the '90s with the release of White Wolf's line (Vampire, et al), but it was still very small compared to the number of women at the beginning.
And who wants that shit in their recreation.
I still play RPGs. I still talk about them in some circles. Hell, one of my two Mastodon accounts is a gamer community. But I don't go to conventions. I don't hang out at gaming shops (well, OK, right now because I'm half a world away from any, but before I moved here). I don't do pick-up games with strangers (the rule is "friends first, then the fun"; it applies to RPGs and sex both). By any metric used by people observing the hobby, I don't exist.
But I do. And at my peak I had more RPGs (not supplements: core game rules) than most people can even name.
But hanging out with poorly-socialized men in someone else's home? Not gonna happen.
Strange, I wonder what videogame mass marketing trends looked before 2010, when a less challenged cultural awareness of sexism in media had already been established. Do you think you'll find PS2 or Xbox 360 ads gendered equally? When do you think you could draw the line where we could look at public discourses surrounding video games and prove that it was not perceived of primarily as a men's hobby?
I think it would be more accurate to say "men's" hobby, unless you meant to include the point that misogynistic people would of course subscribe to naturalized gender.
You mean like they used in their first sentence? Without the "scare quotes"?
They said "male's," and I said it would be better to say "men's," unless they intended to reference that misogynists typically also think of those two things as synonymous, and wouldn't even think to be conscious of trans women or trans men existing.
They said "men" and "women" two times each. Without putting quotes around them. Then in the last sentence they used "male". With quotes around it.
I wonder why the quotes were around that final usage? Surely it's not at all a characterization of the way the toxic people refer to "males" and "females" in gaming circles...
Nah. They must have meant "male" all along and "men" was just a typo.
"It shouldn’t be a “male’s” hobby. I refuse to allow fascists to deny us another thing, I saw them complaining about the The Last of US 2 for culture war reasons, they have no right to set the rules." ~ the comment
What the actual fuck do you think you're talking about rn?
Oh! Sorry. The attribution lines got confusing (too-similar colours) and I thought you were responding to gegil.
Ahhh I see, I did leave a response to gegil, but yeah that's a different thread.
I play games nearly exclusively on my phone. Old PlayStation games, assorted PC releases, all kinds of fun stuff, right off my phone, cause I’m on the road a lot. Lately it’s been Silent Hill and Parasite Eve, both ps1 games.
Boy from Venus! I'm really enjoying it :D