this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025
193 points (92.9% liked)
PC Gaming
12238 readers
449 users here now
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
- Be Respectful.
- No Spam or Porn.
- No Advertising.
- No Memes.
- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
- Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is pretty clear to anyone who has ever played a game of Counterstrike or whatever and a woman makes the mistake of using voice chat. You'll get the whole gamut from misogynistic nonsense to the most awkward and creepy attempts to hit on them possible, pretty much every time.
I only ever really saw the clsssic toxic gamer behavior flourish once most games switched from having private dedicated servers ran by the players that almost always had an admin present to handle toxicity to unmoderated developer hosted servers no players have any bit of control over. Counter-Strike: Source vs CS:GO/CS2 is quite a leap in the general attitude of players you would encounter.
Wild how removing people who managed the player's behavior makes the bad behavior intensify.
Confirmed. Counterstrike specifically was very inclusive and very open to most players of all ages, demographics, and skill ranges especially compared to other shooters of the 00's. Then matchmaking and eventually premier got introduced and any chance of moderating the community died and here we are today.
I suspect the environment is different depending on the game. I never witnessed any of that in overwatch back when I used to play for instance. Though I pretty much never play multiplayer games without at least one friend so the numbers are skewed a bit by having at least 2 non-weirdos on the team
Alternatively, you had two guaranteed weirdos.
I agree that most competitive games tend to go that way. My ex and I played a lot of League of Legends in a small friend group together (where this did not happen, thank god), and if playing with "externals" it was unbelievable what bullshit she had to deal with. and although most of the time the creeps bit off more than they could chew, it must have felt pretty bad, regardless of what me and our friends did or said.
Anyone with experience in non-competitive game settings to share?
Folks in MMOs tend to be more chill in my experience. In such a large sample of people you're going to find a few dickbags who think they're hilarious or the kind who will DM sexual harassment, but the majority of people just do not care and are happy to play the game. Toxicity tends to crop up around entitlement to loot and perceived performance rather than gender.
Maybe in more current MMOs, because back in my WoW days (2013 and earlier), misogyny was rampant
That's what I mean about the large sample size. It only takes the existence of a single asshole to ruin the experience for a target of harassment or casual phobic comment not even directed at them intentionally. Blizzard won't ban these people, so they're allowed to exist in the public chat channels, and they can say pretty much whatever the hell they want.
But what I mean is most people do not side with them. An asshole will drop a transphobic comment specifically because they know most people will take offense and argue with them. The general advice is to disable public communication and stick to organizing via guilds and Discord servers which are actually moderated. If the game were a democracy, those people would punished and/or removed.
It's just one joke, over and over again. I'm a guy, but one of the reasons I stopped going to lan parties was hearing this same few jokes again and again whenever a woman showed up. If it wasn't a woman, it would be something else from the limited number of topics and opinions they had. When it wasn't frustrating, it was simply boring.
What's the one joke?
Probably "A WOMAN is in the VC? AWOOOGA amirite guys?!?!"
Yeah, except this was irl at a lan part. Where they could see the woman's lack of response. Whether they came with their boyfriend or alone, they never showed up to a second time.
"girls don't play video games"
Oh, right, THAT one.
I don't doubt this but now I'm really curious about the numbers. Is it the same on PC? How do women's experience compare to other genders in similar surveys?
For how other genders fair, it's almost entirely dependent on your voice, so feminine sounding people almost certainly get the same treatment, and masculine sounding people just get treated like normal.
But if you just treat them like normal you can make some good friends. I had a group of women I played CS with for quite a while after playing with them as a random and just treating them like regular people for once.
It takes absolutely nothing to just not act like you're amazed at talking to a woman. They're just people trying to have fun in the game, just like you and every other teammate you've had. Don't treat them any differently.