The gaming world can be a toxic space, especially for women. It's easy to cringe hearing a girl get on the mic and an entire lobby instantly turning against her, and it's worse to realize that happens all the time. So, what gives? Are gamers sexist? Do they hate women? Not to worry, because in this article we'll explain why gamers are so toxic to women online.
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The Problem With Toxicity Online
To be fair and to be clear, not every gaming space or community is toxic or even approaches being toxic. If you hop on Animal Crossing or Minecraft or something, chances are you won't have too much of a toxic experience whether you're a girl, a kid, or anybody else.
However, lots of gaming spaces are, indeed, toxic. This problem mainly surrounds competitive online games. Whether it's an FPS or a fighting game, a MOBA or an RTS, these spaces are often quite toxic, and the toxicity tends to come out most when people are competing head-to-head.
In these environments, being a woman is bad news. If you happen to hop on the mic, you can generally expect everyone else with a mic in the lobby to instantly target and focus on you just because you're a woman. You'll hear cringe sexist 'jokes' like 'get back to the kitchen' and you'll be constantly harassed or propositioned or hit on, too.
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This happens all the time. It happens so much, in fact, that there are many gamer women out there who might like to play Call of Duty or anything else that don't and won't because of the reception they know they'll get if they ever try to actually compete and communicate with their teammates.
So, the question becomes, are gamers sexist? Do they hate women? Why exactly are these communities online so toxic?
Why Gamers Can Be Toxic to Women
First, it's important to understand the gaming spaces out there that are toxic. If you look at these kinds of games, whether it's Valorant or League or Legends, you'll quickly realize they select for a certain type of person, especially when it comes to ranked or high-end competitive play.
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The people in these spaces are overwhelmingly young men, and these men are usually relatively isolated and don't have an active social circle, which is why you'll find them spending so much time grinding a competitive ladder, for example. What's more is that these people ending up in this environment is exactly what creates toxicity.
When you don't have much going on in your life outside of maining your game of choice, you naturally care a lot about your performance in-game and the outcome of your games. After all, if you're spending all this time playing, well, you should have something to show for it, right? You might as well try and be, at least, relatively good at the game you're playing.
Of course, though, these competitive experiences online are rarely solo endeavors, and on a team, the fact of the matter is that your teammates are inevitably going to have much more control over whether you win or lose a particular game than just you as a single player have.
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So, it's easy to start to resent your teammates. It's easy to quickly get angry at them for messing around or missing something obvious. And when you pair all of the above with the fact that online gaming is essentially the Wild West when it comes to how you can behave, you've got the perfect recipe for toxicity: you care a lot about something, other people generally control whether you can get it, and there are no consequences for flaming these people.
None of this is to say that toxicity and harassment are okay because of the dynamics at play here, but it is a good explanation for why these communities are often so rife with what appears to be racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, or anything else. It is to say that it's much more likely people in these communities don't actually hate women, for example, and are rather just being mean-spirited edgelords who troll with impunity because they can.
So, How Do We Fix These Spaces?
Over time, as women continue to represent more and more of the gaming population, there will be a natural tendency towards these problems going away, but that's on a scale of decades and doesn't help much in the here and now for women that are having a bad go of it.
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However, there are ways to change this, and the best way to do it involves changing the culture. The number one thing that ought to change is the instinctive reflex to blame your teammates for a loss, even if they do, in fact, cause that loss. This may sound counterintuitive, but it's really not.
It's almost impossible for you to play a game perfectly and lose solely because your teammates weren't up to the task. This is to say that there are always things you can improve on as a player, and if you chalk up every game you lose to your teammates, you're giving up on being able to learn and improve from a large portion of your games.
If gamers, especially those trying to improve, take a little more responsibility, it's inevitable that there'll be less toxicity. But this isn't the only avenue of change. The other side to women being mistreated online comes down to lonely, desperate men trying to find girlfriends that have the same primary hobby as they do, one in which there are generally fewer women than men.
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Ultimately, that's an okay desire. It's okay to hear a girl's voice in a lobby and think to yourself, 'Oh man, it sure would be cool to have a gamer girlfriend.' That's fine. The problem is if your next step is to beg for that particular's girls contact info or harass her resentfully.
If those same lonely men instead were respectful and chill, they could add that girl they met in a game as a friend. If they can keep that up, they can probably keep playing with her. And if they can demonstrate to her that they aren't weird and/or creepy, they can probably exchange social media contacts with her, too.
And if all that happens, those same lonely men may well be able to, respectfully, find out if the person in question is single and might be interested in them. It's that easy, and if you're a nice enough guy and get a little lucky, it may even work out. The key here is pretty simple: not being weird, unpleasant, and pushy. The toxicity just doesn't help anyone be less isolated.
If these aspects of gaming culture can change, gaming can become better as a whole and actually be an open and free space for anybody.
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