For the first time ever I joined a voice call while playing a game (among us) and as soon as I said something everyone immediately started going "Is that a female??" "You're a female??" "There are females here??" I get that it was supposed to be a joke but fuck it felt so alienating to be bombarded with that in my first attempt at gaming socially
There are many reasons why. 'Gamers' is a made up identity under capitalism centered around their hobby of playing video games.
Most of them are socially alienated young men who don't get out much and most of their social interactions are through playing video games. It's similar to the echo chambers that social media builds.
I dislike that there's no short way of saying "I play video games for a hobby, but no I'm not a sexist weirdo"
The term "gamer" has so much stigma around it when really I just want to chill with my pals and do a fun thing.
I don't define myself by playing video games any more than I do as someone who watches movies or goes for walks or anything else, but...
If pushed I'd simply say that I'm someone who plays video games. I hate the way game has become a verb and I genuinely think it helps reinforce the often toxic culture of the hobby.
The connotations of gaming are of game theory, of cheating or exploiting a system, of winning at all costs. Playing on the other denotes creativity, fun, immersion, imagination, and shared experience. But it's never been embraced because of people's paranoia about the idea that they're doing something supposedly childish, which has been a stigma for an long time.
___I have a collection of about 13-22 retro/late model game consoles(depending if you count handheld) and enjoy games but I'll never call myself a gamer. I like it mostly for the hardware and preservation aspect. I want to share them with folks but no one ever wants to play a random PS2 game with me. I have other hobbies that are way in front of games that take precedent though and I've only been playing games recently due to a hand injury that got in the way of music.
Edit: most of them I got for free by being in the right place, at the right time. maybe 10 of 22 were free, several were consoles from childhood I held onto. I think the only ones I've searched out to purchase in the last 10 years were the ps4 and switch.
Truth in that, there's a distinction between being a Gamer and someone that on occasion plays videogames (but also has other things going on in their lives so they have more than a mono pillar personality "i.e. Gamer 4 Life" shit). Also gaming can be a area of competition in which individuals can otherwise achieve dopamine highs from beating other opponents. Honestly I don't know much of the online scene, most of my gaming is done via single player play once experiences that I relate tot he same way one would watch a movie or read a book (not good books but ya know average fun junk media).
It's interesting to compare the video game and board game communities. The latter also has its fair share of toxic competitive weirdos to be sure (sprinkled in amongst the friendly weirdos), and also has kneejerk assumptions that women only like light party games and don't like heavier games like Game of Thrones or competitive CCGs like Magic or Netrunner and all that -- but even so, no one would believe that women are incapable of enjoying table top games altogether or would have their mind blown at the idea of a woman playing one.
Being into board games means that you have to be a social, decent person because otherwise no one will play with you. Most video games can be played solo, and the multiplayer games all have online matchmaking where you are semi-anonymous and get matched at random, any time of the day
Now that you mention it, my union had board game nights pre-Covid but definitely never LAN party nights...
Is my collection of overpriced cardboard boxes praxis? 🤔
Then there's tabletop RPGs, which are traditionally the exclusive domain of male nerds, but in my experience (and my sample size is decent but not huge) are actually much closer to an even split.
Hey Roy, we got a really small amount of empty space in the top right corner of the picture! Wadda we do about it?
No sweat Larry! Just cram in a housewife and a kid stuffing a bag of trash into the kitchen sink.
Tbh that's one of the reasons I strongly prefer singleplayer games. Also because if I suck then nobody's there to tell me I suck because I'm a woman and not because I'm just not that good at games unless I pour hundreds of hours into one
In my experience how weird the community is about women kinda depends on the game. Like r/dragonage is absolutely lovely (in my experience!) and I think that's because a lot of the people who still care passionately about it 6 years after the last game came out are women who are into the characters and lore. (Who's the real gamer and who's the casual now ahahhaha...) Like, it has weekly, active fanfic prompts. The Hades community also seems to be good, because the community strikes a nice balance between people who care a lot about the roguelite gameplay mechanics and people who care a lot about Greek myths (and/or are thirsty for all the hot Greek gods).
It's a shame the Among Us subcommunity you found was like that - tbh I wouldn't have expected that either. My Twitter timeline is full of people drawing romance comics between the little blob people lmao, which is something I associate with a woman-friendly community. Hopefully you find a less creepy one eventually...
Yeah like, I enjoy gaming but it's not my primary hobby. Lemme have fun! I guess I have the same anxiety re team sports tho - I don't wanna let anyone down, so then I don't play so much, so then I don't have time to get better haha. Ah well
It's perceived as a male space and any female intrusion is met with hostility.
It really doesn't help that the type of people who are "gamers" are the same types who have or currently do watch youtube obsessively and go down alt-right indoctrination rabbit holes, that leaders in the gaming "community" like pewdiepie are literal nazis. Gaming has also always been very connected to online culture as gaming culture is really an extension of online culture and so of course the most online weirdos who hate women are also playing video games and shaping their cultures, 4channers, youtube commentators, etc. And the game companies for a long time directly reinforced this in marketing and other behaviors and now since gamergate, the anti-SJW craze and other things that have solidified it as a space for toxic white maleness they refuse to do the kind of aggressive moderation that would be necessary to change this because:
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it's expensive and they're capitalists who want to maximize profits, hiring and paying human moderators is not something you can easily justify to investors and firing them is an easy way to shore up the quarterly profits continuing to go up if you've had a weak year.
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it's a culture war issue now, if they start attacking it they'll be lambasted and attacked by various "personalities" and "influencers" as "SJWs/cancel culture/etc" from streamers to fringe reactionary personalities and "news" orgs to more mainstream reactionary orgs like Fox News, which they don't want to have to fight because these people will organize harassment campaigns in retaliation as they have been doing since GG and because that kind of controversy scares them in the pocketbooks,
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many of the developers and suits at these companies are themselves backwards, sexist, reactionary males who see nothing wrong with this behavior, foster it in the workplace, and at any rate don't see making life better for female players as being worth the cost of alienating their sexist male players who demand the ability to be misogynistic and abusive.
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it requires difficult moderation. You can't just ban naughty words (which is the solution companies always reach for when dealing with misogyny or racism because it can be done by machine) because misogyny is more than just calling a woman a "bitch" or a "cunt", it's telling her to go make a sandwich or saying women can't play as well or begging for your instagram or just mistreating you in ever more subtle ways. It's fundamentally a culture problem that cannot be fixed by blacklisting naughty words which means most companies just give up and won't even try.
It's actually interesting how much it can vary across genres. There is no genre untouched by it but some genres are markedly worse than others as well as some games within them being better or worse. For example FPS has a reputation as being most toxic and it is deserved. I can also say it varies across platforms, PC gamers are pretty bad but not as bad as Xbox gamers in my limited experience.
I just simply don't use voice most of the time myself because I don't want to deal with these toxic, awful people. Of course I'm also a filthy casual so it doesn't make a difference to me.
Sadly the best advice I can give is finding friendly groups. Back when I played more seriously no one made anything of the fact that women played within my guild. It was always casual groups that had that problem because a guild is more of a family and if you have good leadership they won't tolerate harassment. Finding other women to play with is also a good idea but not a total solution as there are a ton of women out there with internalized misogyny who are just as toxic or sometimes more-so than these guys in an attempt to win their approval.
Best of luck and don't let those assholes get to you.
It's funny because I've been bootlegging g*mes for longer than a lot of these g*mers have been alive. The women were always there we were just ignored.
PC gamers are pretty bad but not as bad as Xbox gamers
I dunno man, have you seen the sort of shit that goes on in Steam groups and communities?
Yes. Have you ever been on Xbox voice chat?
That said I tend to mean it as overall. You can absolutely find PC gamer groups and even probably games with atmospheres a hundred times more toxic than Xbox live over-all, but there are enough that aren't so bad I think it balances out. I mean I've seen increasing amounts of reactionary behavior.
Honestly I haven't played on Xbox in recent year so it's definitely possible things have changed.
I'd say you find more extreme behavior in certain places online. I've seen literal unapologetic, open, spreading-the-ideology-in-chat fascists in online games with names that support people like Anders Brevik to Pinochet and beyond. That said it tends to be something that pops up for a bit in chat then goes away. But the fact it isn't moderated but someone who says "fuck you" back is handed a ban is basically emblematic of the civility fetishism in action, in that you can be an open fascist and ponder that maybe certain groups should be done away with and even name those groups, as long as you don't use naughty words to do so you won't be actioned but heaven forbid you make the game unsafe for the ears of the precious children by using foul language.
Gamers 100% need to be persecuted. Their culture is scum and only getting worse.
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Cum poisioning. Thier alienation and atomization causes them to turn away from society. However they secretly want society.
Girls, to such alienated folk represent the totemic power of society and they are both scared and mesmerized by them. At least thats how I experienced it in highschool.
internet anonymity + toxic masculinity... for what its worth I have noticed some games are better than others and I do think its slightly better than when I was younger... If you tried getting on the mic in counterstrike 1.6 as a girl you'd hear absolutely horrendous stuff. At least now there are semi-functional banning mechanisms. Doesn't surprise me that Among Us is bad - its very popular on twitch so lots of younger people are playing it. Overwatch however I thought was better about that than your average game but I think that's because all the youngins stopped playing and only old TF2 heads were left.
Damn I really thought among us would be chill because of the younger audience and because it's such a vanilla game :(
That's true. But I wasn't even playing with a random online group; a dude I've been talking to invited me to play with his irl friend group and he has seemed very normal and chill so I thought his friends would be too. guess not
In that case it’s probably just pack mentality. You “invaded” their safe space, so to speak, so in turn they activate the defense mechanisms. Don’t be discouraged though, not all groups are like that, and it really depends on the culture that group has formed, and also how insular it is.
I mean, I'd give it a couple more tries. There are creeps everywhere, but Among Us seems to at least have a level of mass casual appeal that it shouldn't be nearly as bad as something like Eve Online where the only kind of people playing literally never see daylight. From my experience, a lot of Among Us games are organized on Discord, and it might just be that you need to find a cooler group on there. My wife has a group of people she plays Animal Crossing with and they scheduled an Among Us cross-over event for tomorrow.
It does suck though. Really fucking weird that a woman can't play a goddamn casual game without being ogled by nerds over voice in the year of our Lord 2020.
Why do people use "female" like that in everyday conversation and why do they not realise they sound like scary death robots?
For me I think "Gamers" are the culmination of societal alienation and the merging of other fringe groups such as incels, Gamergate enthusiasts, far right peeps, and individuals on the "black pill" trip. Of note now is how easily many far right groups co-opted many different former internet culture websites (4chan and its many videogame and hobby boards come to mind).
I think it’s more that “gamer spaces” are perceived as dominated by white guys at this point more than anything. That enables reactionary weirdos and discourages women from allowing themselves to be visible.
Allowing a seed of misogyny or any reactionary world view will lead to normalized “gamer culture”
Women play video games. Be a normal fucking human being about it.
Not just women. It may unfortunately contribute to it being a self-fulfilling prophecy but I'm a cishet white guy and you couldn't pay me to turn chat on with a bunch of strangers in video game.
Thanks OP, I'm one of those gamers that behaves like that. Didn't realize it alienated you so much. Will do better.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GirlGamers/search?q=among+us+flair:venting&restrict_sr=on
@Nakoichi posted about Among Us a bunch of times, maybe he knows a decent group to join.
There are feminist online gaming groups too could be worth searching on Steam.I’d actually be super down to join this, especially if there are any WoW players
