Gonzo ® profile

We live in a world where people believe the Onion's reports. Context can be easily lost, especially in tweets. Dick move, COD-twitter-line-of-command. (Especially as I wouldn't be surprised that someone/people cynically hoped that it would get taken seriously, and go viral with all the publicity that entails. Did someone get a roasting when that didn't happen?)

Gaming isn't a monolith. So no, gaming harassment is not targeted, en masse as a single coherent entity, at women. Nor is most harassment in games necessarily targeted at women. I'm not sure what you mean by "most harassment" because that's a rather more difficult thing to assess than what I'm talking about--which is already a messy thing to try to assess in the first place!

Harassment in games is not equitable. Harassment in games is not a demographically flat phenomenon.

This shouldn't surprise you, because harassment OUTSIDE of games isn't a demographically flat phenomenon either.

Harassment targets all sorts of people and comes form all sorts of people. But this kind of rhetoric is a pointless catch-22. Individuals are more complicated than the aggregates, averages, and stereotypes they can be summaized into but they are also smaller and more numerous and impossible to incorporate into a conversation. I can't speak about every single gamer ever and their habits and behaviors and experiences ... but I shouldn't have to.

Give me some credit here. When I say harassment in online games is inequitable, I'm not saying GAMERS HATE WOMEN or anything that pointless. What I'm suggesting, instead, is that saying "everyone gets harassed" is equally pointless whether or not you agree with me that no one should get harassed in the first place.

Not everyone gets harassed to the same extent and degree or in ways that line up identically with industry practice out-of-game experiences. Harassment in online gaming is not equitable. It is not demographically flat. We don't have to look down on or denigrate gamers as a whole or even specifically male gamers to note that gaming harassment is not uniformly distributed.

use to be even worse back in early FPS games, amount of times I got kicked from games of UT99 and Renegade for "hacking" was comical, considering a few times in UT99 it was because I was using the environment to kill people using aim bots.

it's part of why I got sick of competitive multyplayer, as it just turned into whining kids who would cry hack as soon as they came up against someone better than them.

but I've played online and took a pasting from female gamers, would never think it's because they hacked, it's just because they were better than me, it comes back to the same problem as above kids will cry when someone beats them and when a girl who has cooties beats them it just makes it worse.