anonymunchy said:
Online gaming has abuse across the board though. It might be more sexual in nature towards women, but I think it'll often become aggressive quicker towards men. It says 51% of men have witnessed a woman being harassed online. How many of these people have witnessed a man being harassed online? According to a study in 2021, over 83% of gamers 18-45 and 63% of gamers 13-17 have experience some form of harassment online. ''27 per cent were concerned the threats could translate into real-life attacks'' This isn't a result of the virtual abuse, but irrational fear as there is absolutely no statistical evidence that 1/4 of women abused online are also abused in real life by that same person. It's a problem they feel this way, but this is a cultural/media problem. There is definitely a toxicity problem in a lot of online communities, it is not going to be solved by only focusing on one target group, attention will just move to the next group. |
Yes all lives matter...
Of course cleaning up online harassment will work for everyone. But it's a fact females have it much worse and rather pretend to be male than play as a female online. I've had plenty harassment online (not playing online anymore as a result, screw that) but never had rape threats directed at me.
Sony, Microsoft, Meta, etc need to take this stuff seriously. You can only report text messages on PSN for example, and even then at most the offender gets a week online ban on their profile. Result, he just pops back up on another profile to keep on harassing. You can block people, but you still get matched with them anyway. Hence I quit GT7, not worth the aggravation of having to deal with the same assholes over and over. Even with 2 of his accounts already blocked one the antagonists simply used a 3rd one to keep on ramming and deliberately targeting people on the track. He just made sure he used abbreviations now in text chat which are fine according to the report filter. I've seen good people leave online racing behind for years due to these kind of assholes, now it simply takes too much time to find a decent race.
I can only imagine how bad it is in games with open mic. At least GT7 is just text chat you can ignore. Some idiots send you PMs to insult you further, report them and they get an ineffective warning. Some people see it as something to be proud of to have a long moderation history... My oldest plays Rust with his friends and says there are often people throwing racial slurs around. Maybe AI can help find the patterns and track down the troublemakers, as human moderators are completely useless.
And maybe making games more inclusive will slowly start educating gamers that everyone matters. Not just the white male hero saving the world. And no, just having another skin color option isn't enough. There are real differences between ethnicities and how males and females solve problems and its about time that translates more into games.
