High Speed Harassment: How “Progress” in Gaming Has Allowed Conditions for Abuse, and What We Can Do About It

In this blog piece, a gameHER traces how “progress” and developments in video games have created conditions for more toxic harassment of women in gaming. As we’ve moved into higher speed internet and new tactics of abuse, methods of attack from griefing to Swatting to the post-Gamergate era have become more destructive and dangerous. As we move forward as women in gaming, how can we best combat this norm of harassment and make it a thing of the past?

By Catherine Negron

You are alone in the desert. The only person around for miles besides the fish in the gently moving river. The hot sun beats down on you as you check the scrub grass for the herbs you need. You contemplate jumping into the water to cool yourself off when the sound of hoof beats meet your ears. Two riders approach and you think nothing of them, assuming they are also checking for the plant. After all the map said that they might grow in this area. You continue your search ready to move on when one of the riders moves in front of you, blocking your horse. They wave and suddenly you are pulled from your horse’s saddle and bound in rope. They toss you onto the back of one of their horses and ride into the river to drown you. You struggle against the binds trying to loosen them but it’s too late. Cold water greets you as everything fades to black.

You are alone in the desert, the hot sun beats down on you. Two riders approach…

Many developers provide PVP/PVE elements to their games. Red Dead Redemption Online, APEX, PUBG, Hunt: Showdown, Call of Duty, Halo, Doom, etc. are all primarily PVP/PVE or have Versus modes. And while those modes are incredibly fun and exhilarating to play, with rewards for coming in first or moving up the rank, encountering other players who want to continue to fight outside of the PVE/PVP modes is not so fun.

Harassment in online games is nothing new. It has become something that many have accepted as a part of the experience. If you play a game that has an online mode, chances are you have encountered at one point or another an unwarranted attack, whether that was from griefing, in-game voice chat or players sending messages to your account. As our gaming experiences have become more interactive and complex, the harassment players experience has in many ways become more toxic, dangerous, and targeted, particularly against women and people of color.

Harassment in Red Dead Redemption Online/GTA Online had become so rampant that Rockstar even spoken about it on their Newswire announcement in July 2020. When the new Naturalist role came out for RDR2 Online, PC players began to be targeted by a game hacker who would pull those player(s) out of their own games and into another lobby. The hacker would then spawn others on top of them and kill everyone by throwing dynamite. HazardousHDTV, a streamer, experienced this particular attack, and when he left the lobby and came back, he found that the hacker was spoofing his name, had disguised himself as Hazardous’s character and was going around killing other players. Hazardous was blamed for this behavior, despite it not coming from him, and he began to receive EXP for player kills and a bounty. Another streamer, SwolTV, had the same thing happen to him, but he quit playing on PC and moved to play on the PS4. After an hour of peace, he began to notice that the bitrate for his stream was dropping to 0. The hacker had gotten ahold of his IP address and because he couldn’t harass him on the PC version had begun to attack his internet resulting in several disconnects.

If a hacker went through all that trouble just to harass streamers and even went as far as to attack the internet connection of another when they couldn’t reach him on the PC, it brings the question, what happens when the harassment leaves the game world and continues into the real world?

Before we can answer that let’s take a look at VoIP or voice chat.

In 1997, Yahoo released an instant messenger service called Yahoo Chat! which allowed you to speak to other people through your computer. While most preferred to use the text-to-text chat rooms, voice chat was available on Yahoo’s HTML servers with some compatibility on the JavaScript ones. A couple years later in 2000, Sega in collaboration with GTE Internetworking division released Sega Net for their Dreamcast consoles. Dream chat was already a feature in their browser, and games like Seaman (1999) and Alien Front Online (2001) included voice chat with the microphone. Sony released a network adaptor for the PS2 with voice chat available over the headset in 2001. A year later Microsoft debuted Xbox Live which included voice compatibility as part of its service.

Why am I talking about voice chatting and instant messenger?

Because the move from text to voice opened a whole new gaming experience. You could now talk to friends over long distances, connect with people across the world. But voice chat brought its own problems. From racial slurs to misogynistic rants, if you did well on a game you could receive both. That, of course, is not to say that you wouldn’t have received any in text form previously.

Steam, Sony, Twitch, Xbox: they all have ways players can block and report people that take things too far. For instance, Xbox wrote this message in their community guidelines:

“We get it—gaming can be competitive and interactions with other players can get heated. A little trash talk is an expected part of competitive multiplayer action, and that’s not a bad thing. But hate has no place here, and what’s not okay is when that trash talk turns into harassment.”

The platforms provide guides on how to report or file for harassment and this usually leads to the reported person being banned or locked out of their account, either temporarily or permanently.

So let’s go back to my question from earlier: What does happen when harassment leaves the game and follows you into the real world?

In 2014, YouTuber Jordan Mathewson was playing Counter-Strike when he started hearing a commotion outside his office. Suddenly the door burst open and a SWAT team appeared ordering him to not move. Jordan was a victim of a “prank” called Swatting. Swatting is “the action or practice of making a prank call to emergency services in an attempt to bring about the dispatch of a large number of armed police officers to a particular address.” He’s not the only one over the years who has experienced this. From celebrities to the then 16-year-old Fortnite champion, Kyle Giersdorf, in 2019, swatting has been a particularly dangerous form of harassment in gaming. The FBI became aware of the practice in 2008, comparing it to that of “phone phreakers” from the 1970s but much more serious and deadly. While many times law enforcement officers realize upon arriving at a residence that what was described by the caller is non-existent, there have been cases where this attack results in the death of a swatting victim.

Many gamers have detailed their own experiences with the different forms of harassment. GameHer Mxiety/Marie Shanley talked about her experiences in her article “Block. Report. Move On. Why I No Longer React to Game Harassment.” Other streamers on YouTube or Twitch have also experienced repeated instances of targeted attacks.

A SWAT team entering a building. The practice of Swatting has become a harassment tactic of the current gaming era, and can be highly dangerous for victims.

But harassment does not just affect those in the realm of the gaming community, it impacts those working in the gaming industry as well. Whether one does performance capture, voice acting, or works within a studio as a writer, director, etc., a gaming industry professional can experience harassment from people in the gaming community upset with the direction they took a game, a character in a game, or just unhappiness in general. One example of this particular phenomenon is the harassment experienced by Neil Druckmann and Laura Bailey over The Last of Us Part 2. Both received death threats and other threats of violence for the direction the game took (Druckmann) and the decision by the development team to have players play as Abby and learn her story (Bailey).

Professionals can also face harassment within the gaming industry itself from their peers and colleagues.

In 2014 the “Gamergate” saga began. The saga started with accusations against Zoe Quinn. Quinn was accused by a “concerned” party, Eron Gjoni, of sleeping with a reporter at Kotaku, Nathan Grayson, in order to ensure a positive review of their game Depression Quest. Gjoni gave out intimate details of Quinn’s life in the blog piece in which he launched the accusation. You see, Eron wasn't a concerned party worried about integrity; he had been in a former relationship with Quinn and when it ended decided that he would punish them. And he brought an army to do so. Zoe Quinn wasn’t the only person affected by the Gamergate attacks, as others like Anna Sarkeesian, a media critic and the Executive Director of Feminist Frequency, were targeted as well. While the controversy of Gamergate has faded over the years, Zoe Quinn has used the spotlight of this experience to help others and speak up for gender-equality within the gaming industry.

In a research article, The view from the other side: The border between controversial speech and harassment on Kotaku in Action by Shagun Jhaver, Larry Chan and Amy Bruckman, published in February of 2018 on Kotaku In Action (KiA), a sub-Reddit forum for members of the Gamergate movement to talk and discuss information; they had found that people participating in Gamergate had different ideas of what they stood for:

“In mid–2015, the community split over the argument of what its focus should be. Some users believed that KiA should remain focused on its original goal of improving the standards of ethics in gaming media. Many others argued that PC culture and third-wave feminism were responsible for many problems that pervade not just the gaming industry, but also the society more broadly. They insisted that the community should expand its objectives to fight against PC culture.”

Just like the hacker I mentioned earlier — who was pulling players out of their game lobbies and killing them — ultimately the goal of the harassers in Gamergate was to run these women out of the industry all together. They just didn’t want them there. They blamed them for the direction video games were going and that games were focused more on topics they deemed politically charged. So they wanted to make sure that anyone (especially women) who had spoken out about video games (tropes, over-sexualization of women, violence, etc.) would not be able to do so. Ever. As Brianna Wu, co-founder of independent game studio Giant SpaceKat put it:

“It was an organized harassment campaign against women in the video game industry. And what they found out was, when they made the cost of speaking out high enough, many women in games would quit rather than continue speaking up. So what they did is they sent us rape threats. They sent us death threats, and they harassed us until many women simply left the game industry.”

Ms. Wu was one of the women targeted during Gamergate. She and Whitney Phillips, a professor of Communications at Syracuse University, were interviewed by NPR in August of 2019.

“[…] You know, one of the weird things about being a woman in the tech industry is you gain a kind of dark ability to judge the seriousness of a death threat. So I got one yesterday of a man telling me he was going to stab me to death. That just - you don't take that seriously.” Wu said.

These were harassment tactics that had been around before Gamergate happened: anonymous threats of violence that never went anywhere. They were distressing, yes, but they didn’t include enough information to lead to credibility that the person sending threats would follow through with them.

But something made this particular round of harassment different from a one-off threat of being stabbed: this time the attackers had all of her information. They knew almost everything about her and with that information they got… creative.

“The ones I got were very credible. They had my address. They had information about my family. They were very specific about what the violence they were going to do to me,” she said. She tried everything to make these threats stop. Wu removed her family’s and her information from databases, moved to a different home, set up a system where her packages were sent to a different location before being re-mailed to her, even bought things under an anonymous name. In the interview she recounts: “So it was very convoluted. And the thing that made my heart break one day is: I got home from a movie with my husband, and someone had sent me pictures of standing right behind me in the movie theater, just to say, “hey, I know where you live.”

Phillips has spent time researching and trying to make sense of what she refers to as “Present Hellscape” (PH). “So one of the main differences between pre-Gamergate and post-Gamergate behavior is that before Gamergate, these behaviors tended to be anonymous,” she states. But in the post-Gamergate world people found there was big business to be had. She calls them “chaos entrepreneurs.”

“Chaos entrepreneur, yes - people who are stirring the pot, maybe because they are themselves reactionaries, maybe because they adhere to white supremacist ideology and maybe because they're trying to make money or some combination of both. And Gamergate was when that life choice, business strategy, became an active road that someone could travel.”

But that’s not the only thing that it showed potential harassers.

“One of the things about Gamergate that is so distressing is that it showed us the dangers of lack of moderation on social media platforms. And in response to Gamergate, social platforms did nothing. And the fact that they were rewarded - journalists wrote about them, social media participants talked about them - there was every reason for these individuals to continue doing what they were doing and, in fact, to do it worse,” Phillips said.

The developments of targeted harassment in a post-Gamergate world have given those who want to keep women and people of color out of the gaming world more methods to try to do so. But within gaming workplaces themselves, harassment in a work environment can also keep marginalized groups from excelling in the gaming industry.

In the research for this piece, I reached out to a few people within the gaming community and industry. I was given permission to write about the experiences of a former game tester when she worked within the game industry. Her name has been changed and the game companies she had worked for will be left unnamed to protect her identity.

“Gemma” detailed to me that harassment has been a constant in her career. She told me that on her first day at work, many of her male co-workers would constantly walk into her work space or send messages to offer assistance/help while ignoring that there were others who had also started working that same day. She told me that there had been a co-worker who bought her gifts/tokens that she never asked for. He had mistaken her kindness for interest. She had rejected his advances, feeling uncomfortable with his attention. Gemma went on to say that there were two major instances of harassment (physical and sexual) from colleagues in which she had to get HR involved. The first incident involved another colleague who turned violent towards her when she had not been responding to his emails and messages in the way he liked. The second kind of harassment was a barrage of unwarranted sexual comments by her coworkers. Gemma said, “I even had a comment made to me by a male colleague that he bet I was an ‘avid swallower.’” She said at a different company she had worked for one of the older colleagues had kissed her on the cheek at three different times in the same day and when she had told him she didn’t like him doing so. In response to her recounting this experience, her male colleagues said “he meant no harm and he did it to me once.”

Kenzie Gordon, a Ph.D. candidate for University of Alberta studies gaming in relation to prevention of sexual and domestic violence, had this to say when many gamers in the game industry began to detail their own experiences with sexual harassment:

“The gaming industry is particularly conducive to a culture of misogyny and sexual harassment because straight white men have created the identity of the gamer as this exclusive property. When women, people of color or L.G.B.T.Q. people try to break into the industry the ‘toxic geek masculinity’ pushes back in ways that often lead to sexual abuse and bullying.”

While women make up close to half of gamers, it is still considered a male oriented environment. So the things that Gemma and countless others have gone through are sadly a normality. And if they bring up their own experiences, they are usually met with doubt, or those they report to simply do not think the harassment is something that needsto be taken seriously.

The latter phenomenon happened to me when I commented on a Twitter post that was talking about the major update RDR 2 Online had back in June. I had commented that I was glad that Rockstar is seemingly going to do something about griefing because at that point it was a constant. I would encounter posses of Red players that were just hell bent on attacking every player that stepped into town or on the roads. I received a reply from another Twitter user who said that stuff like that has never happened to them and that all the times they played it had been quiet. This user didn’t think that the issues of constant harassment that I and countless others experienced were serious because they themselves had experienced no problems.

At the Women in Games European Conference, many delegates conceded that the reports of abuse were a reflection of a problem as a whole in video game culture. They partnered with Bryter to expose the extent of toxicity and gendered abuse. In their Female Gamers 2019 report they found:

“Last year, we revealed that one in three female gamers has experienced abuse from their male counterparts, and unfortunately, this statistic has not improved one year on. Not surprisingly, the majority of this is happening online. Of the female gamers who had experienced abuse or discrimination, 31% had received verbal abuse from other male gamers while playing online multiplayer games, 33% had been sent inappropriate content or messages, and 14% had received threats of rape.”

In some ways it has gotten better. Over the years, many have come forward with allegations against those in the gaming industry/community. From misogyny to transphobia, racism, sexual harassment/assault and abuse, many folx have stepped forward to tell their stories in hopes that they can help others. By shedding more light on the dark parts of our community, we show the places we still need to work on. People are acknowledging that things need to change and that these types of behaviors are not ok. Paul Mason in his article, “Allying with Survivors of Gaming Industry Abuse & Harassment: What Can Men Do?” gave some ways men can help. The running message of the Women in Gaming panels was that education is important, but not just in the workplace. It has to happen early in a school setting. Emma Smith, head of talent at UK developer, Creative Assembly, which set up the Legacy Project to tackle representation, commented, “we talk to girls people and from BAME backgrounds, basically anyone who feels like they are not represented in games to encourage them to have that self-confidence in who they are and what they can bring to the table and make that unshakable no matter what.”

There is still so much more we can do, and it is a slow process, but I believe that we are heading in the right direction. Organizations like the*gameHERS, The Legacy Project, and countless others that are giving a support system and showing time and time again that representation matters. We as women matter. And we’re here to stay.

“Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.”

- Ryunosuke Satoro

Black lives matter and will always matter.

Trans lives matter.

LGBTQ+ rights .

Catherine can be found on Twitter, @Big_Barda.

For more blog pieces by Catherine, check out:

Looking in the Mirror with Arthur Morgan: A Study in Complexity

Wait, You Play Video Games?