For the first time ever I joined a voice call while playing a game (among us) and as soon as I said something everyone immediately started going "Is that a female??" "You're a female??" "There are females here??" I get that it was supposed to be a joke but fuck it felt so alienating to be bombarded with that in my first attempt at gaming socially
It's perceived as a male space and any female intrusion is met with hostility.
It really doesn't help that the type of people who are "gamers" are the same types who have or currently do watch youtube obsessively and go down alt-right indoctrination rabbit holes, that leaders in the gaming "community" like pewdiepie are literal nazis. Gaming has also always been very connected to online culture as gaming culture is really an extension of online culture and so of course the most online weirdos who hate women are also playing video games and shaping their cultures, 4channers, youtube commentators, etc. And the game companies for a long time directly reinforced this in marketing and other behaviors and now since gamergate, the anti-SJW craze and other things that have solidified it as a space for toxic white maleness they refuse to do the kind of aggressive moderation that would be necessary to change this because:
it's expensive and they're capitalists who want to maximize profits, hiring and paying human moderators is not something you can easily justify to investors and firing them is an easy way to shore up the quarterly profits continuing to go up if you've had a weak year.
it's a culture war issue now, if they start attacking it they'll be lambasted and attacked by various "personalities" and "influencers" as "SJWs/cancel culture/etc" from streamers to fringe reactionary personalities and "news" orgs to more mainstream reactionary orgs like Fox News, which they don't want to have to fight because these people will organize harassment campaigns in retaliation as they have been doing since GG and because that kind of controversy scares them in the pocketbooks,
many of the developers and suits at these companies are themselves backwards, sexist, reactionary males who see nothing wrong with this behavior, foster it in the workplace, and at any rate don't see making life better for female players as being worth the cost of alienating their sexist male players who demand the ability to be misogynistic and abusive.
it requires difficult moderation. You can't just ban naughty words (which is the solution companies always reach for when dealing with misogyny or racism because it can be done by machine) because misogyny is more than just calling a woman a "bitch" or a "cunt", it's telling her to go make a sandwich or saying women can't play as well or begging for your instagram or just mistreating you in ever more subtle ways. It's fundamentally a culture problem that cannot be fixed by blacklisting naughty words which means most companies just give up and won't even try.
It's actually interesting how much it can vary across genres. There is no genre untouched by it but some genres are markedly worse than others as well as some games within them being better or worse. For example FPS has a reputation as being most toxic and it is deserved. I can also say it varies across platforms, PC gamers are pretty bad but not as bad as Xbox gamers in my limited experience.
I just simply don't use voice most of the time myself because I don't want to deal with these toxic, awful people. Of course I'm also a filthy casual so it doesn't make a difference to me.
Sadly the best advice I can give is finding friendly groups. Back when I played more seriously no one made anything of the fact that women played within my guild. It was always casual groups that had that problem because a guild is more of a family and if you have good leadership they won't tolerate harassment. Finding other women to play with is also a good idea but not a total solution as there are a ton of women out there with internalized misogyny who are just as toxic or sometimes more-so than these guys in an attempt to win their approval.
Best of luck and don't let those assholes get to you.
It's funny because I've been bootlegging g*mes for longer than a lot of these g*mers have been alive. The women were always there we were just ignored.
I dunno man, have you seen the sort of shit that goes on in Steam groups and communities?
Yes. Have you ever been on Xbox voice chat?
That said I tend to mean it as overall. You can absolutely find PC gamer groups and even probably games with atmospheres a hundred times more toxic than Xbox live over-all, but there are enough that aren't so bad I think it balances out. I mean I've seen increasing amounts of reactionary behavior.
Honestly I haven't played on Xbox in recent year so it's definitely possible things have changed.
I'd say you find more extreme behavior in certain places online. I've seen literal unapologetic, open, spreading-the-ideology-in-chat fascists in online games with names that support people like Anders Brevik to Pinochet and beyond. That said it tends to be something that pops up for a bit in chat then goes away. But the fact it isn't moderated but someone who says "fuck you" back is handed a ban is basically emblematic of the civility fetishism in action, in that you can be an open fascist and ponder that maybe certain groups should be done away with and even name those groups, as long as you don't use naughty words to do so you won't be actioned but heaven forbid you make the game unsafe for the ears of the precious children by using foul language.
Gamers 100% need to be persecuted. Their culture is scum and only getting worse.