Few years ago I changed my nick on PSN because I coudn’t stand my old one anymore. I choose a name that sounded feminine to say the least. Unicorns and shit, don’t ask. So naturally people thought I was a gurl or at least super gay. I felt the change of behavior immediately.
In Destiny 2 alone I got revived way more often. People went out of their way to run across the open world map just to get to me. Damsel needed rescue I guess. I got a lot of invitations to Raids “Hey, we are LFG and we can explain everything to you if you want to”. I got these messages while standing arround the main hub. Doing nothing. While wearing the Raid exclusive Exotic on my character for everyone to see (fucking Eyes Of Tomorrow is almost as big as my char). I got called “bitch” and “slut” many times…come to think of it, that wasn’t new. Party invitations out of nowhere, chat invitations out of nowhere.
In Warframe some guy gave me an item for half the price for no apparent reason, after that he send me a chat invitation, I declined and he send me a PN wishing I would get raped. Another one I thought was afk in a mission, but no. He was just typing a message to me: “Hey, how are you doing? You new to Warframe?” Again, me jumping around in a highly optimized Nekros/Atterax build…
Sooooo online gaming is full of psychos. I didn’t question that but it was then when I fully understood how bad it was. There are a lot of women playing games, some even play Call of Whatever is cool atm. They just stay quiet and play eighter with friends or with other women. There are nerds out there who are beyond insufferable.
I often play female characters and occasionally have the same experienced.
Recently i started a new game, someone helped me with something that I thought would take like two minutes, but it went on and on and he was friendly and helped me further. When we were finished after at least an hour, he said something which made it obvious he thought that I was a woman. I corrected him and he said “oh, lol” and immedeatly left the group. So fucking weird.
It’s also funny to me because i never even look at usernames, neither in games or reddit, lemmy, etc. don’t know why, but I just skip over it. So I don’t even come to think who the person might be. Only when I’m in a group and have adress someone specifically I read what the names are.
The only time I look at usernames is when someone says “thanks for the advice cumspanker3000” or something like that
When I was about 13 or 14, I revealed to my WoW friend (who I’d been playing with for months) that I was a girl and within a day he went from being my cool friend to someone who was offering me raid gear in exchange for talking dirty to him through Ventrilo.
Nearly 20 years later and I refuse to let anyone in on my gender. It’s dehumanizing that we can’t even play a game without being harassed.
I typically use masculine names when playing multiplayer games to avoid most of the misogyny. I also pretend I’m mute so I don’t have to use a mic.
im doing my part!
Me too! But I still avoid voice chat… :P
Ugh same. The number of gross comments I’ve gotten on vc over the years is enough to fill a book.
I’m mainly on PC now though, playing single player games or games with my fiancée and/or friends
I just avoid pvp or most multiplayer.
Seriously. Even PvE multiplayer games suck these days.
The comments: No way, women don’t play games. I never see them.
Yeah no, they might not be on your games. But having seen the sheer lust for Link, I’m not surprised switch is popular.
And the crazy thing is, the industry really doesn’t do a good job at this. The numbers could really be higher, especially mobile, but the sheer number of male fantasy waifu games out there is ludicrous. (Although, unsurprisingly, the dollars earned from whales are overwhelming male, especially internationally where the wage gap is higher, so that’s what drives that).
Not to mention that a lot of women have bad experiences with online gamer guys being sexist assholes, so they might not want to call attention to themselves.
Ngl, I met some hot chicks on Apex and Overwatch. A few became LDRs.
What’s an LDR?
Loser Detection Radar
It’s pretty clear that games being male oriented has been somewhat of a self-fullfilling prophecy for decades. Publisher’s and manufacturers have pretty much exclusively targeted young males and so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that they historically made up the bulk of the market as a direct result.
It’s honestly embarrassing how long it’s taken for that mindset to shift when there’s an obvious financial disincentive to perpetuating it.
so many comments in disbelief lol, almost like gaming is more accessible now hmmmmm
About time
My wife loves her Nintendo switch and so does my daughter. I also played Diablo 4 with my wife which is amazing. I’m all for more women playing games. I don’t have to hide by myself in a room playing video games anymore. It’s just a normal part of my family. There are many benefits to women playing games beyond what I just mentioned obviously.
Glad to see the gate keeping came with us.
I’ve played wow (MMOs tend to be popular with women, my guild has several women), overwatch, and am playing diablo now. Call of duty just looks kinda boring to me. I also play alot of single player games.
I almost exclusively play single player games or multiplayer games with friends I know in real life. I’ve had some bad experiences with online gaming and they are often way too stressful for my liking.
deleted by creator
The irony of the company that picked boys over girls having the majority of their users being girls
Women also make up 50% of PC video game players and 54 percent of mobile game players.
I find a lot of these figures really hard to believe, to be honest.
Looking at the link, there is little I can find about their methodology.
It’s a survey of 10k households, US only (since that’s what NPD/Circana is).
I don’t believe these figures are even remotely close to reality.
https://twitter.com/matpiscatella/status/1667172957066600448?s=46&t=Cbb3biYQblpmbWC3J0KfQg
i wonder what the demo of those households is?
as far as i can tell video games are not popular with wealthier people. most gamer girls i ever met were working class people.
50% of video game players makes sense to me, depending on what you count as a video game player. If, say, it was anyone who’s played any video game in the last year, I believe be about right. Sims, among us, the dinosaur game in chrome, wordle, etc. it adds up
Men probably dedicate more time to gaming and make it a bigger part of our lives, hence why it would seem more common.
Well if they’re including mobile gaming, I can see it.
But 50% of PC gaming? I know a lot of women hide the fact that they’re women to avoid sexists, but I just don’t see that figure being accurate, especially if there’s no reporting on how they came to that number
I know a lot of women who have played sim/management games like The Sims, Zoo Tycoon, Stardew Valley, etc.
A lot of this comes down to the actual survey questions that were used. If the wording of the survey questions was “Have you ever played…” as opposed to “Do you regularly play…” for example, then the numbers could be quite skewed.
they are including majong and card games. my 75 year old mother plays those on her ipad/pc all day.
she also thinks video games are evil and rot your brain because they are all sex and violence
Brother, pretty much every single woman I know under the age of 40 plays, at the very minimum, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, and Terraria. Most of them also play other big games, like Dark Souls, Elden Ring, etc.
The genre that the mostly don’t play though are modern “arena” style shooters like Call of Duty, Halo, CSGO, Rainbow Six, etc. They’re far more likely to play something like Fortnite or Hunt or something where you can have a small squad to roll with. Typically because it means they don’t have to deal with anywhere near the same number of toxic random assholes.
Hi, woman under 40 here. I’m AFKing at a mob farm I built in Minecraft right now as I browse Kbin. I create mods for Stardew Valley. I have a lot of management games and RPGs. I also avoid multiplayer unless I know I’ll only interact with a small closed circle of my real-life friends because I hear about how awful and bigoted people will act online. These people are also why I am not going to try those arena style shooters on the off chance I fall in love with the genre. People being awful is a near-certainty in those games, while me turning out to love the gameplay is just a chance. I’ve got other things I can play that won’t expose me to this and that I already know I enjoy.
TL;DR: local woman says you’re right
Nah they likely included mobile brainless games which everyone male or female downloads to pass the time
I can say from my experience most women I know are gamers. I’d say the biggest difference is they tend to play more single player experiences. My older sister has always been a big jRPG nerd, and my younger sis was always into Bethesda games, especially Fallout. Meanwhile a lot of my friends are into life sim games like Stardew Valley, the Sims, and Animal Crossing, and we tend to play the latest big nintendo game together.
I am probably the only person in my group of friends that does anything remotely multiplayer, unless it’s local or coop.
cool. i can say from experience most women I have ever met do not play video games.
OK, why is this news? Is it important that women play games for some reason?
Information is good. There’s a stereotype that gaming is a male dominated hobby. This article challenges that.
There’s a lot to unpack here, and I’m not sure that I can do it justice.
This is one example of what happens when women are not involved in a space. It allows for casual misogyny, because men do not tend to call out other men for bad behavior, which further isolates women in the space and keeps new women from joining. Both as consumers as well as producers.
Having a more even spread across genders means that we should eventually see more content created for and by women, which in turn will make the whole thing more accessible, and may ultimately tamp down on some of the incel garbage that many online gamer spaces have allowed to fester.
because the stereotype of a gamer is a basement dwelling male nerd who has no social life and zero social skills being disgusting and smelly.
not a nice young lady sitting in her sunny second floor bedroom on her bed playing her switch looking wholesome and happy.
