As bad as the situation already is(and it's bad) the lack of action on Valve's side is particularly depressing.<p>People invest a significant amount of money into their steam accounts(by purchasing skins and games) and targetting folks with some serious bans would help curb this behaviour. For example, a four month ban on the first offence, a year on the second, and lifetime on the third seems pretty reasonable and would surely have a significant impact.
Funny that some people commenting on the video immediately claim it is fake. This kind of abuse was extremely common when CS was in perpetual beta and voice chat first started being a thing. There is clearly a subset of online gamers, especially in FPS games, who cross the line from joking/hazing into abuse against anyone with a female name or voice.<p>I sometimes wonder what makes these people knee-jerk deny such obvious behavior anyone can observe?
In one FPS game I picked a new name that was neutral or male, but people misread it as “foxy” and assumed I’m a woman. In half an hour I got several dumb comments from guys over voice chat. The abuse towards women in games is intense.
This sort of thing has made most multiplayer VR games completely unplayable for me. The only viable solution to hordes of screaming ultra-toxic kids quite literally surrounding you is to put up with it until your rank/ELO gets high enough to solve the problem via matchmaking.<p>Horizon Worlds is actually not quite as bad as the average third-party game. Ironically, I think this is the one unintended positive outcome of Facebook control - if you get a week ban on Horizon, you’re also banned from all Facebook properties. And not just the web properties, it seems that you also lose access to your entire Oculus library.<p>Is that a good thing? Probably not, but it seems to be the only thing out there in the VR space with enough teeth to make a tangible difference.
I wonder how much this abusive behaviour can explain the lack of women in certain fields?<p>For example a girl joining a male-dominated chess club could face some of these remarks, leading to fewer girls joining the chess club.<p>Then we see an end result of some activities completely dominated by men at the elite levels, creating ammo for misogynists to spew distorted “facts” about how men are better than women.
The treatment of female CS players is sickening. Every public lobby that I've been in where someone had an identifiably female voice eventually ended in harassment and sexist statements.
My wife gets treated like shit if she reveals she's a woman when we play rocket league. It was such a noticeable difference that a few years ago when she started back at school to get another degree and had to take some basic sociology course she used it as the subject for a paper - the teacher was not aware of the gaming world and was pretty shocked by how brazen men and boys were online.
This is exactly how I remember CS (boob insults and everything) and I'm male.<p>Without wanting to detract from the problem, claiming something is "worse" because it's "bad" is a bit disingenuous when the implication that the alternative is not equally bad is not addressed or compared.<p>It reminds me of when I arrived for work in what was reputed as "the dryest city in the whole of the UK", only to find rain non-stop for 3 months. When I pointed this out to my boss, he laughed and said "I said it was the dryest, I never said it was actually dry!".
Great initiative to show how bad things really are.<p>Gaming where voice is enabled without admins to supervise it, will degenerate into this nearly every time.<p>Sad state of affairs indeed.
Might want to change the subtitles from "that was sick" to "that was disgusting" just to prevent anyone misinterpreting that (unintentionally or otherwise) as "sick" is slang for "excellent" in some places.
I know biggest basically makes sense and means most popular here, but I can't get the image of all the cs players lining up to compare heights out of my head.
Sounded pretty "normal", as in males receive same amount of abuse. Some games end up deleting cross team chat completely for this very reason.
I'm afraid the staging undermined the message, alas. Lots of questions in the comments about why these are Norwegians, but the dialogue is all North Americans. Anyone know what happened there?