Female Gamers Conceal Their Identity Due To Fear Of Abuse

[dar0ck]

A new survey by Bryter has revealed that a huge percentage of female gamers in the UK have experienced discrimination or abuse in video games due to their gender. An alarming 10% of those gamers revealed that they’ve been threatened with rape.

This Bryter survey has been conducted in partnership with Research-i and ResearchBods and later reported by gamesindustry.biz, collecting data from 1,151 UK female gamers, aged 16 and up. The amount of women facing discrimination when playing online reaches a massive amount of 35% on PC and 23% on consoles. 23% of those female gamers choose to conceal their identity in fear of being abused, while another 11% won’t even play online to avoid it.

Regarding the type of abuse those female gamers experienced, half of them revealed that it was verbal. Another big percentage goes to inappropriate content/messages through video games, with 40%, while sexual harassment stands third with 32%. The most disturbing of all though is the fact that 1 in 10 female gamers have been threatened with rape through their online video game of choice.

Here are some more results originating from this survey:

• 62% had a negative view toward the game industry while only 30% had an interest in gaming careers
• 71% of respondents felt women were oversexualized in games, 60% thought there were not enough strong female characters, 55% felt women were underrepresented, and 51% found there was a lack of racial diversity among women in games.
• 15% felt that there were adequate processes in place to deal with this kind of abuse
• Half think that the number of female game characters improved with the flow of the times, but less than half said that the depiction was improved

The video game industry is far from perfect when it comes to player discrimination. As with any media processing through the years, female gamers might be faced as a minority right now, but they deserve the respect and cooperation as much as male gamers. Let’s hope that this kind of online abuse will cease to exist while video games are becoming more and more popular.

[CryptoSeller]

Only 35%? For male gamers all this is 100%, every single person who has ever played online games get this flung at them, so if only 35% of them get it, I'd say they're doing really, really well for themselves... But hey, when you have an agenda to push, I guess everything goes.