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It's also my observation that women don’t get more abuse than anyone else when they play games. They don’t get more harassed than men on the internet in general either (if anything it is the opposite), and this finding has been replicated when looking across the board, even in samples which are most likely to attract online criticism like politicians and journalists too. And men don't just experience relatively harmless acts - serious online abuse is also more likely to be directed at men by the way. But people are much more sensitive to harsh comments and threats directed at women than they are when directed at men, who are generally expected to be able to take it and/or dish back; we have no such expectation that women do so.
"Online harassment" in general is one of these very many areas wherein women actually receive preferential treatment but the popular consensus somehow seems to believe it's the opposite based on what people find emotionally salient. Women really dislike being in male spaces wherein they will sometimes be treated like men (bullying and threats will be slightly adapted based on gender to optimise for mental damage regardless of who they are insulting, but the phenomenon isn't distinct), and many men take offence on behalf of female dignity when women are treated like men too. And as soon as any large number of women enter a space, the norms quickly adapt to cater to feminine sensibilities. I've seen these attempts at social enforcement in real-time, too - I was once in a close-knit private server populated almost entirely by men, and the only woman in there was a girlfriend of one of the men who would routinely storm out of calls in response to any off-colour joke (as an aside they later broke up and she started dating one of his friends in the server immediately after, which spelled the end of the whole thing).
EDIT: added an extra sentence. I will also leave this very angry, drunk-narrated two part video here. Part 1, and part 2. Bit vitriolic, but I agree with it.
According to the anecdotes, while men are often harassed in games for the perceived reasons of being bad, standing out, picking the wrong character, etc.; women have "sounding female on mic" on top of that.
The anecdotes aren’t necessarily something you should rely on, and it’s a mistake to draw your conclusions on that basis alone. Men are harassed more across the board, but the methods through which one would seek to piss off the sexes differ. Women aren’t usually targeted just for being women, but bringing up their femaleness is a sure-fire way to set women off (especially in gaming where they are fairly uncommon), and so it gets used sometimes as a vector of attack when the target is female. But you can’t conflate that with “women are targeted for being women”. Who woulda thunk it, being touchy about your identity group also means it can be used by people to attack you for any reason.
I've found that the belief that “women are targeted for being women” is usually not soluble to any kind of argument, evidence or really anything at all. It's a Truth that supersedes reasoning, acquired almost entirely from a mix of personal biases + social osmosis (which is a self-reinforcing collective phenomenon arising from many examples of individual bias). Look how the discourse around street violence has proceeded with the presumption of women-as-most-at-risk when nothing could be further from the truth. Women are always justified in their endless self-victimisation, even when they are not, and for some reason no one ever sees anything wrong when they insert themselves into majority male spaces and demand the entire culture change to fit them because it makes them feel unsafe. This is the kind of thing that makes me firmly in favour of enforced male spaces, ideally with strict "no girls allowed" policies or alternatively severe gatekeeping based on unambiguously masculine standards of behaviour - every space that attracts a significant amount of women always gets hectored and lectured and eventually adapts to cater to their level of comfort.
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I have an anecdote to relate sort of in response.
Our group of 25 raiders in a semi-serious Classic WoW guild had been together over a year (maybe 2?), through TBC into WotLK. In that time, we'd been raiding 4-8h a week, every week through progressively harder challenges, building up a lot of camaraderie. There were 3 women on the team. Let's call them:
end of a long session of raiding already an hour past the usual quitting time. Yogg-Saron, zero light (hard mode). It's near 11PM PST, pushing 2AM for the east coasters, on a work night.
Our group has nearly got it down, but the fight is difficult and takes a long time for each attempt - probably 10 minutes or something, + ~5m to get run back and get ready after each try. There's an easy mechanic at the start where there's a big floating AoE that everyone is supposed to avoid, and screwing it up means the attempt is almost guaranteed to fail. People are tired and making mistakes, especially Bubbles, but not exclusively her. The raid leader makes a call: next person to screw up that mechanic gets benched for the night. This is harsh, but understandable. No one vocally disagrees, at any rate.
Of course, Bubbles is the next one to screw up. True to his word, the raid lead kicks Bubbles from the group (she's still listening in discord), and apologizes but explains it's just for tonight. Get some sleep, etc. Buttercup twists the knife with some sharp comments "fucking FINALLY", "should have done that 45 minutes ago". Blossom sticks up for Bubbles. "yo, chill" "just a game", "let's calm down", etc. Buttercup more than happy to double down and fight : "bro she's literally keyboard turning, shut the fuck up".
Somewhere in the middle of Buttercup and Blossom going at each other, Bubbles leaves the channel, leaves the guild. leaves discord, and doesn't play again.
It would have been better if it'd happened differently, but I think Bubbles is better off. I know I found it really freeing when I realized the competitive and performance-focused environment of WoW wasn't for me and started playing other games.
Yes. Classic WoW has a lot of dynamics to it that keep people playing against their will, sort of. In some real sense, your guild has invested in you, and your character, by taking you along, giving you loot and such, so you feel like you owe them your participation, so that your friends can get their rewards too, and your group can keep progressing.
Probably better for Bubbles long term, but it was shitty the way it went down that night. She probably cried. Like getting dumped by your long term friend group and finding out half of them never liked you and were talking about you behind your back
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It's interesting that Blossom manages to be everyone's friend while being a highly skilled (I assume that's what "absolute gamer" means) player who gets held back by others, assumedly.
But at the same time it makes sense that the dead average player becomes abusive.
What is "keyboard turning"?
What did you cognize and conclude after being part of that group?
Yeah, Blossom was a unicorn. It's pretty rare to find someone with that combination of personality and skill. She lived somewhere exotic IIRC, like Hawaii or Alaska or something, so her internet wasn't amazing, and Classic WoW was one of the few games that was forgiving enough of network latency.
I cut Buttercup some slack because she had a tough job IRL (nurse, I think), and playing a healer in game is suffering, as you desperately try and keep people alive through their own mistakes, gradually failing at it. And yeah, maybe some insecurity
This incident was probably the inflection point in my enthusiasm for Classic. I stuck it out a while longer out of loyalty to the group, and we eventually cleared Lich King 25 heroic, widely considered the point at which you have beat the game, then quit. It was that, and other similar incidents, that made me realize the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. The game mechanics naturally led to that sort of conflict, and it just didn't have to be that way. I didn't have to play that kind of game. Would be better if I didn't. Is better now that I don't.
The juice not being worth the squeeze: That's the main idea I was left with after trying a couple of MMOs long ago. Addictive, takes a lot of time, and for what? What are you left with? You've passed a lot of time, somewhat in the manner of a rat pushing an irregular reinforcement lever for pellets, sometimes it felt fun or exciting, sometimes it was just a grind, and then what? If you got lasting friendships out of it, that's probably a good justification, but if not... ×_×
I guess it depends on what the opportunity cost is. Some people just need escapism for a few hours per day/week, at that time in their life. There's no guarantee that some other hobby would be more rewarding or meaningful for a tired body. But personally I try to cultivate long term reductions in stress and long term happiness. If the activity is only ephemerally satisfying and has a long term cost, I probably don't do it. It can be a lonelier path to tread though. Or a less crowded path, to put a positive spin on it, lol.
Either it's just an age and life phase thing, or the internet/gaming is less conducive to friendship building compared to when I was a teenager. Hm.
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You can turn your character with A and D, or you can do it with your mouse. Mouse is much, much faster and more precise. It's easier to dodge mechanics and have better awareness if you use your mouse.
A some people (usually beginners) also click on their abilities instead of using hotkeys. So their mouse is too busy to focus on turning.
It's a sign of not playing in an optimal way.
Lol. Sounds a bit painful.
This makes me think that groups should be more sorted by skill. I remember being in a team vs team game clan that was more "social" and carried a few horrendous players. It affected my enjoyment.
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I agree broadly. I do note that there was one incident where one of these weirdos was incredibly persistent with one of my friends — tried to find her on Skype and sext her, etc — which was genuinely extremely offputting. And I think the one case where women do get more unwanted attention than men is in this arena.
But also (women broadly) don’t want to be treated like the boys so what can you do
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