4w ago

What a shocker!

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The problem starts with these companies feeling obligated to police what you can say over chat. Just to be clear it's advertisers and payment services that necessitate that. The whole thing about trying to force a "non-toxic community" is a gaslight.
- I played a lot of Halo on Xbox live as a teenage girl in the late 2000's. I sincerely wish they were more stringent about cracking down on assholes. A lot of the rules were in place to attempt to discourage some of the atrocious behavior I was subjected to.
  
  A lot of the rules were in place to attempt to discourage some of the atrocious behavior I was subjected to.
  No doubt, but I don't think microsoft spends money on that because they altruistically care about your online safety, I think they do it because they are pressured by monetary reasons.
  I played a lot of Halo on Xbox live as a teenage girl in the late 2000's. I sincerely wish they were more stringent about cracking down on assholes.
  I appreciate your perspective, thank you for sharing your experience.
  One thing I don't understand is why the built in tools for self managing are insufficient, such as mute and block. If willing, I would be open to hearing your experience with that.
  I was never on XBL really, but I've been a PC users on counterstrike and league of legends since their inceptions. I can't say if one service is worse than another but I did watch the efforts to stamp down toxicity over time. I don't know how successful these efforts were, it seemed futile at best.
  Would you share if you feel the current efforts from services like this are effective in making you feel like it's a safer place for you to game?
  
  One thing I don’t understand is why the built in tools for self managing are insufficient, such as mute and block. If willing, I would be open to hearing your experience with that.
  These tools have improved immensely over the years. It was particularly bad in those days because there was no option for private or party voice chat and a lot of games came with 3-day trial cards for Xbox Live which allowed people to make tons of sock puppet accounts to evade blocking.
  I don't really play FPS's any more and I haven't turned on an Xbox in about 7 years. I just play on PC now, almost exclusively with a gaming community on discord comprised of online and IRL friends. My experience is very curated now and the games I play either have minimal social interaction or are well known for their welcoming communities (eg Warframe). It felt a little bit like admitting defeat, but shutting off the public mic and just sticking to private VCs and servers has been a good way of dealing with it. I certainly don't get rape and death threats with a side of doxxing these days.
  
  lol who downvotes someone’s factual personal account?
  
  Welcome to being a woman on the internet.
  
  Idk, the rules of the Internet say women don't exist so from here on, you shall be treated as a man instead. Suffer the terrible existence of menfolk, featuring highlights such as: people believing you, male defaultism and so on.
  
  Thanks for taking the time to share your experience with me! I'm sorry those things happened to you and that it had an effect on the way you play in the end.
  
  I think it's important for people to recognize the toxic effects of general misogyny and phenomena like Gamer Gate have on gaming communities. To this day, I see plenty of cis-male and trans-femme gamers wonder about why there are so few cis-women in gaming spaces without recognition of what gaming communities are like towards young women and girls who express interest. Nothing quashes your desire to join a community quite like incessant harassment, abuse, rape/death threats, and doxxing.
  (To be clear, I am not insinuating that trans-femme folks have an easy time of things, but I can say they outnumber cis-women in gaming communities like Arma by a factor to 2 to 1 or greater. There are 3 trans-women in my Arma group and I'm the only cis-woman there.)
- 2 things can be true at the same time.

127 comments