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World of Gaming for Women

Reinert Toft

It’s Monday night and Carino Haro had her dual monitor setup ready to play Minecraft. The essence of the game is to build and to get creative when building. Viewers who watch Haro’s Minecraft light up her chat with supportive comments and inside jokes from past streaming episodes.

When it comes to harassment in the chat, it’s very minimal on her gaming channel when it comes to Minecraft. On this particular “Minecraft Monday,” Haro only received a couple of comments that had to be deleted.

Unfortunately, harassment is common issue that Haro and many other females gamers deal with on a regular basis.  

Anonymity Behind a Screen

Besides playing the game itself, Haro keeps track of her audio, comment section and server to keep things up and running. To the untrained eye, it looks like Haro does it all by herself. But that isn’t the case.

“I have a staff that takes care of me,” Haro said. That staff has made it a lot easier to deal harassment while she streams games from her channels.

However not all female gamers that type of support.

“For women who are out playing in different leagues online…you don’t really have those types of protections,” Haro said. “As soon as they hear a female voice on the other end of that game, there’s a lot of stuff that happens.”

In certain situations, female gamers don’t even have time to speak before getting harassed online because they’re immediately identified as female by their username.

“Jedikiller1,” AKA Samantha Calderon, doesn’t have that problem, but her friend Laura does.

“She gets harassed a lot more than I do,” Calderon said. “She’s told me multiple times that she wants to change her username because it has ‘Alice’ in it.”

Harassing comments vary. Haro in the past has been threatened with physical violence but more often she has dealt with harassing comments that were sexual in nature.

“Everything from ‘You’re cute,’ ‘You’re hot,’ ‘You’re sexy,’…really disgusting, perverted remarks of what they would like to do to us,” Haro said.

Calderon also pointed out harassment during gameplay. “The crude comments come out [too] when the team is doing poorly and they just want to blame someone that’s not themselves.”

“People will blame you and start going into more personal attacks than just being like ‘You suck at this,’” Calderon said. They’ll start saying ‘You’re a woman, you don’t know what you’re doing.’”

By not being able to put a human face to a harassing comment, those who create a toxic environment for women have been able to get away with these types of comments.

“People feel protected when they’re behind the screen because they’re anonymous technically,” Haro said.

There is a formal process to deal with online harassment. When Haro and her staff come across harassment during the stream, they delete the comment, report the comment to the streaming website, and if the comment is serious enough, ban the account from the channel.

The loophole to this process is that same person creating a new account.

“They can come back at you. It’s happened to me before,” Haro said. If it gets to be too much, companies will deal with streaming games put an IP ban on the harasser’s computer. Essentially a permanent ban from the channel.

But Haro and many other female gamers have taken another approach to dealing with anonymous harassers.

“Instead of pretending that it didn’t happen, I started calling them out,” Haro said. “I would call them out on Twitter and post the comment that was made and just call them out by name and say ‘listen, this is disgusting and unacceptable.’”

With more people calling people out online, the issue has grown and more people are talking about it.

“You can’t hide behind a screen anymore,” Haro said. “If you’re gonna be at a certain level competing in esports, if you’re going to say your piece [and] you’re going to say it publicly? You’re going to get called on it.”

Women in Competitive Esports

According to Haro, while the percentage of female gamers fluctuates between 40 to 48 percent.

But that percentage drastically falls when it comes to competitive esports.

“Women only make up about 5 percent of the esports scene,” Haro said.

In May of 2018, the Overwatch League had its first female competitor, 18-year-old South Korean Seyeon Kim, AKA Geguri.

The process has been slow, but more women are showing up in professional esport leagues.

“The top esports gamer, professional player, her name is Sasha Hostyn. She is killing it in the Starcraft II scene,” Haro said.

There is still a struggle at the top however. Most of the women who have made it into the competitive esports world are still being pushed away from the limelight.

Instead of fighting for that top spot, Haro said most women know what they’re up against and it’s just easier to accept their role.

“Women are cast into those support roles or those healing roles and they’re not lead fighters,” Haro said. “That’s been really challenging for women to step it up and say ‘No I am actually killing it at this game and I deserve just as much respect.”

Though it may come off as a unique challenge for the esports community, it’s important to remember that sexism is still a global problem and that gaming isn’t exempt from it.

Additionally, there is still a stigmatism to view esports players as a professional athletes. But that stigmatism is slowing going away.

“People in our generation [millennials] are starting to become parents…we all grew up with video games in our lives,” Calderon said.

Gender equality and professional esport athletes have the will eventually lead to more esport athletes that are female.

Getting more Women into Esports

Having professional esport athletes that are women is only one factor that can help get more women into gaming.

Haro hopes that gaming companies are aware of the gender gap. Moreover, creating a more positive gaming community for women will also be good business decision.

“If your going to bring in more women; women entrepreneurs, business-minded women and competitive women, that can only make things better for their business,” Haro said.  

At a more local level, places like ASU Esports, SAK Gaming and The Gaming Zone provide welcoming environment for people to come and hang out no matter the gender.

Calderon, who is the head of streaming for ASU Esports, described a welcoming community within the club. “With those people, they’ve been super welcoming, super friendly especially in person,” Calderon said.

Nate Chrisman, who is a weekly visitor of The Gaming Zone sees women frequently. “I think that the community, the way it is right now it’s very open it’s very inviting. Anybody is able to come down and play and everyone loves to help everybody get better,” Chrisman said. “The environment here is very open. It doesn’t matter what game you play or who you talk to, you’re probably going to find somebody or three, four, five people that you get along with very easily.”