It’s sad you never hear feminine folks on voice chat.
2026 statistics, it’s 53/46 male/female gamers in the U.S.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/232383/gender-split-of-us-computer-and-video-gamers/
Women are gaming. They are probably just not in voice channels as much as men because who wants to deal with unmoderated sexist abuse while trying to enjoy a leisure hobby?
who wants to deal with unmoderated sexist abuse while trying to enjoy a leisure hobby?
Definitely one of the biggest failures of modern society.
sadly it’s not a modern societal issue. women have always been the bearer of abuse for no reason
who wants to deal with unmoderated sexist abuse while trying to enjoy a leisure hobby?
Definitely one of the biggest failures of modern society.
Do you call it out when you see or hear it? If you want women to show up, it’s on you and your peers to make it a more welcoming environment.
I have called out bigotry in voice comms and initiated vote kicks.
Last week my good Judy was playing Wardogs with us and she used the voice comms to coordinate. Within minutes she was harassed, called a dumb bitch, then team killed.
Then twenty minutes later a teammate threatened to find her address and rape her.
I probably would stay off the voice chat too if I was her.
It’s the flip side too, some guys turn into creeps around women, thinking they deserve a chance with them.
I’ve also had the same threats as a guy, people in these types of games are just the bottom of the barrel.
That makes me want to go to chat and rape them in Souls P2P.
Only problem is I’d have to updrade differently for P2P. I’m from Alabama, so I’d love for some rapist dick to find themselves unfortunate to be the poor bastard found alone with me. Sounds like I might have identified a good trolling hobby.
The one and only time i did a multiplayer game with voice chat with strangers, they were sexist assholes. Never again.
Now, any multiplayer games I play are with friends only, or are games that don’t need chat.
I play almost exclusively single player games.
you never hear feminine folks on voice chat.
Because a lot of the time when you have a female[-presenting] voice, you get either pigeon-holed into certain roles (“we need you to be the healer!”), patronized for skills that would be unremarkable in a male [-sounding] player, griefed by your sex when you make a mistake (“stupid fucking cunt!”), get white knighted sometimes ("oh, here, you take this! tiny shy giggle), sent explicit messages in group chat or PM, etc, etc. Even if you disguise your voice or stay off chat, you still need to have a certain level of tolerance for the misogyny, sexism and racism that crops up.
I play games a few hours a day. I just reserve my vocal communication to known individuals due to harassment being a near guarantee.
Women game a lot, they just dont show themselves because of harassment. I dont use voice chat with anyone i dont already know. I vet gaming social groups heavily before i join. I hate how men in gaming treat women.
There are also a lot of women who hate gaming because their spouses do it 24/7 instead of helping around the house, playing with kids, or being present in the relationship.
I’m a gamer; we exist, it’s not uncommon. Personally I’m just not interested in online games for the most part. And The few online games I’ve played are without voice comms.
Woman here.
Original Demon’s Souls was the best game ever.
Returnal maybe second.
Bet some incels claim I’m a bot.
I play an online game mindustry, and there are many women who play on public servers. This game is quite popular amongst queer folk, so many trans and gay people. That if i play on english speaking servers.
Joining a server from my country, everyone just assumes i am a men. I used a feminine pronoun for me while writing random message in chat, and people were like: “WTF, WOMEN?!?” “Are you really a girl?”, and other misogynistic stuff, which felt like those people thought that women are a fictional creatures, and not a normal people who play games.
About voice chat, i dont know, because i dont use discord.
It might depend on the game somewhat.
When I was active on guild wars 2 the last couple years, there were a few women in each guild I interacted with. But ya, not all of them were comfy on voice chat.
I wonder if the situation is better with MMORPG’s in general.
I meet tons of other women on simulators/sandbox/shooters, theyre just extremely discerning because you have to be
It shouldn’t be a “male’s” hobby. I refuse to allow fascists to deny us another thing, I saw them complaining about the The Last of US 2 for culture war reasons, they have no right to set the rules.
Since when is gaming a men’s hobby? For as long as i remember, while majority of gamers are men, women are still a significant part of gamers, at least in the games that i play and watch online. And especially in recent years, i see more women in games.
It may be a “male’s” hobby for gooner shooters, but in casual games it is pretty much equal.
I can’t speak for video games (because I loathe most of them and don’t even bother looking at them any more) but I can take a step to the side and talk about (pencil and paper) RPGs.
I started that hobby early. 1978, while it was still punk AAF and full up with the DIY ethos. Back then women were a significant fraction of the player base; I mean really, it was practically catnip as a game for theatre nerds and drama flakes, and a huge fraction of those (probably majority) were women. Hell, one of the most influential forums for game players and designers to hang out, Alarums & Excursions (still in operation last I heard!), was an APA run by a woman: Lee Gold.
But things changed from the '70s and into the late '80s until a lot of women were driven out of the public view (myself included). Pick-up games, hanging out in the games/comic shop, attending conventions … women just vanished because sexual harassment and gatekeeping and all the other obnoxious toxic masculine behaviour came to the forefront. There was a brief upsurge in the '90s with the release of White Wolf’s line (Vampire, et al), but it was still very small compared to the number of women at the beginning.
And who wants that shit in their recreation.
I still play RPGs. I still talk about them in some circles. Hell, one of my two Mastodon accounts is a gamer community. But I don’t go to conventions. I don’t hang out at gaming shops (well, OK, right now because I’m half a world away from any, but before I moved here). I don’t do pick-up games with strangers (the rule is “friends first, then the fun”; it applies to RPGs and sex both). By any metric used by people observing the hobby, I don’t exist.
But I do. And at my peak I had more RPGs (not supplements: core game rules) than most people can even name.
But hanging out with poorly-socialized men in someone else’s home? Not gonna happen.
They aren’t, dudes make it creepy though so the real ones stay off chat.
Would you mind terribly much reading the rules for this group, please?
Oh crap, missed that this was womenstuff. Voyager makes it easy to miss in darkmode.
No troubles. And thanks for understanding.
I’m 36. I think there used to be a stigma that games were only for social awkward male basement dwellers. It’s definitely changed with mobile gaming in the 2010s and more story focused rpgs. I knew a few other girls in college that were counting down the days till Skyrim launched in 2011.
basement dwellers.
Any gender can fall into that category.
