Jaicee said:
You know, part of me suspected that might just be the case. I mean I've read about stuff like that happening in gaming (women in gaming feeling unsafe being out as women), but honestly haven't been connected enough to the online gaming community to really know first-hand. I still pretty exclusively play offline, and mostly single-player titles at that. Hearing lots of stuff about sexual harassment is, in fact, one part of the reason why I don't get more involved in like online gaming, in addition to just personal aesthetic preferences. It's a combination of those things for me. Also part of the reason why, in stark contrast to offline where I'm not even out, I make it clear what my sexual orientation is in heavily male online spaces like this. Not only is it nice to be able to be out reasonably safely somewhere, but it also reduces sexual harassment to let people know what my boundaries are clearly. It's useful that way too in settings like this, I find. I also have the benefit of assumption going for me, as I find that VGC users instinctively assume I'm male until I formally tell them otherwise. Anyway, yeah, I do see stats sometimes that suggest women today compose a significant minority of the gaming population (for example here's the official Entertainment Software Association data on American gamers over the last 15 years, which suggests about 40% are female), but those stats are based on a more generous definition of the term "gamer" than most people, including most women who game, would embrace, and to which end honestly the Quantic Foundry survey data, which suggests that about 20% of gamers are female, seems more believable to me. That seems more like the world I actually live in. |
Back in my mmo days when i did lead groups of people and planned events for them we had like 30 percent females with us and it was interesting to overlook the interaction between male and female gamers and ofcourse most of the complaints were shown to me to be able to solve the problems.
There were certainly some dudes being obsessed by female players and those that went overboard got punished for it or just thrown out of the group,also some of them formed an irl relationship and that was ofcourse a more positive effect:p
There were dudes that obsessed but not in an aggressive way but being overly nice and some of them were taken advantage of by being caught in a manipulative web.(sending pictures to the guy,promising to meet him,and he blindly did everything for her and bought her stuff while she actually disliked him)So i asked her to stop abusing the guy and she did not so i banned her and sadly that guy followed her not listening to me.(she told me about it because we talked a lot and had the crazy thought i would support her with that)
Outside of all of that most females and males got along like normal people do,males mostly being more competive and the females more chill and more focussed on being social with some exceptions and it was handy to have both sexes represented in the higher up rankings that had a seperate chat to discus about needed changes to the ''group''.
