I play online games all the time voice chatting with women and I have never, ever, ever seen this.

o.o

I remember when I tried PS Home, all the guys where around girls like monkeys. Pathetic sight, really... But I think it extends to all areas of the Internet, it's what anonymity will do.

Indeed, but when it pertains to such an environment where you can voluntarily choose your avatar's gender, you don't know if they're a girl or a G.I.R.L.

Wow, that's some shockingly disturbing and creepy stuff in the OP. I tend not to use a mic online because I just get annoyed by other peoples voices while I'm trying to play. Can't believe some male gamers try that crap.

I'd say most of the time, the people I play online with are pretty cool. The other percentage of the time, we have:

-The guy who lets his baby babble on the headset
-The stoner who wants everybody to be impressed by how stoned he is
-The girl that makes such a big deal about being a girl (always talks about sex)
-The guy who thinks everybody and everything is gay
-The guy who thinks he's so cool because he's racist

Aside from this, I tend to have a good time on XBL. I'd say 70% of the time is a good figure.

I'm not even a girl and I can't bear the amount of BS that's spout over any kind of online community that uses voice chat to communicate with each other.

This is also one of the main reasons why gamers are still seen by immature kids by a large sector of society nowadays and sadly I don't see this changing anytime soon. If anything, it's getting worse.

Guilty :( Well by accident. I was playing GT5 with the baby being noisy in the room and didn't notice that the ps eye was still plugged in.

You can add

- The guy who thinks his music taste is so awesome he has to blast it over the mic as loud as he can.
- The 2 guys using public chat as a private call, hello we can hear you and are not interested in your life problems, use a phone.
- The dictator, play by my exact rules or I'll boot you, and he'll tell you the rules every minute. He'll boot you anyway if you beat him.

Anyone who has played videogames online for any period of time knows that a large portion of gamers are confident assholes online; and will be very abusive to other players when given the opportunity. Race, religion, sexual orientation, biological sex, socio-economic status and (just about) anything that will differentiate someone will be used to harass that person when given the opportunity. Some of this is from people who actually hold these views feeling open to express them, but most of it is just people who enjoy being trolls trying to ruin someone else's day in any way they can.

As for the girl who got asked her bra size ... I have noticed that certain disorders are highly prevalent in avid gamers and there are a lot of gamers who are very sociall awkward and completely misread other people. It isn't quite the same thing, I've known engineers who have unintentionally (repeatedly) sexually harassed female co-workers because they didn't understand that their advances were being rejected; or they were not able to understand how their actions were impacting the women. The following article describes a situation which was (somewhat) famous and illustrates this problem:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18916-bat-fellatio-causes-a-scandal-in-academia.html

Which is why Nintendo seems to be doing the right thing with the Wii U's online. Hopefully they will strike hard on these mic-abusers.