Poll & discussion - On in-game harassment, gender targeting and potential solutions for it

  1. Male

  2. It's actually never happened to me, I mostly play single player games but I do love some good coop from time to time. I haven't played more competitive games since college.

  3. I play pretty much everything that's not a racing or sports game. I played DOTA, team fortress and WoW a ton in college, but I don't enjoy that sort of pressure now. I particularly like grand strategy, space sims, and games with good melee combat like mount and blade or dark souls.

  4. In my WoW guild, older women were pretty much treated the same as the men but the younger ones got some mildly creepy behavior particularly if they had a pleasant sounding voice. They'd get random free stuff, requests for pics, and sometimes guys would be awkward in voice chat. We also had some guys that loved to make racist jokes and play white power music in ventrillo. I still have no idea if they were serious or just drunk guys trying to be edgy. They all came in as friends, and one guy was even black. They called him "black David." David did eventually get frustrated with them at one point, but they were all still friendly after the fact. Sadly I have few friends that are really into online gaming these day, but the one I do know has to keep her steam account private or she gets stalkers.

  5. So far I've never been targeted.

  6. In coop games, yes.

  7. Texas, USA

  8. The best examples I can think of are games that severely limit the ways you can interact with other players, stuff like Dark Souls and Hearthstone. Dark souls is especially great, there's so much ritual and community around that game. It's considered rude not to bow to your co-op partner, teenagers detailing their sexual encounters with your mom don't even factor in. I've actually gotten a lot of love mail playing that game, everyone loves sunbros. They also give people who want to troll in game ways to troll that have rules and boundaries. At the same time, they give people who don't want to be trolled ways to opt-out.

  9. The easiest way is to go the above route and give players very limited ways of interacting with one another. When that's not possible due to the type of game, it's going to take a ton of moderation or for society to completely change. Also, now that I think about it, dedicated servers instead of online matchmaking whenever possible. This allows players to create and moderate their own communities.

/r/AgainstGamerGate Thread