Harassment as a female gamer

Harassment while playing online multiplayer games is something extremely prevalent, almost inevitable. You hear it happening in all sorts of games, in all sorts of different genres. It’s an extremely prevalent issue, and it has been an issue for some time now. So, let’s start with a bit of history, of how (I think) it was to play videogames as a female.

Video games have almost always been a primarily male dominated space, from its invention up till now. It was made by males, for males. But there has always been a group of girls, simply playing games like any other male. There was of course the problem of some females being barred from playing videogames, due to them being female. And then the snarky remarks other people would make about the fact that they do, but that happened to all video gamers in the 80-90s. The evolution came with the invention of some of the first online multiplayer games. So games like StarCraft, OSRS, Lineage, Ultima online, Quake etc etc. Communication in these games would be almost exclusively in the form of written messages over irc chat, or the text messaging service the game provided. I would expect there would still be harassment at that point in time, and a large amount in MMO’s, but with the possibility of easily just obfuscating your gender, it was an issue, but not a large one at that. I think it continued like this, but with more and more females coming into the hobby. I think it was all and brewing pot, with the gamergate controversy releasing it all in 2015.