5 Female Streamers Who Get Harassed While Playing Video Games and the Importance of Gender Equality

Readers are certainly aware of the recent incidents involving sexual harassment, racism and discrimination. This is something that often happens among gamers internationally, which makes the author himself a bit restless if it continues. The author himself has not confirmed whether discrimination, racism and sexual harassment in online games have often occurred or not in Indonesia. According to the author himself, this is approaching something unethical, even the perpetrators who do this can be considered as toxic player.

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This kind of treatment can be like throwing inappropriate words such as asking to send nude photos, having obscene words to female gamers, cat-called and others. Things like this make female gamers uncomfortable when playing games, even making it difficult for them to focus on the game and have to turn off both text chat and voice chat in the game. This is also known to often occur in team-based games such as DoTA2, CS:GO, Rainbow Six: Siege and others. Not many female gamers try to talk about this or speak-up on this issue.

This phenomenon, when traced to what happened in Indonesia, the author does not find many cases of verbal harassment through online games, there are only a few articles that try to discuss this problem. This also makes it difficult for the media to provide education to the public. If this also happens often in Indonesia and there are not many female gamers who don’t talk about this problem, it will certainly become a serious problem in the future. The author only finds this kind of harassment in the work environment or the surrounding environment. But it seems not many are aware that online games can also be a hotbed for abusers in cyberspace.

This does not mean that online games are not a bad thing for women, this actually requires supervision from several parties such as from the developers themselves. The report function in online games according to the author is still not good enough to eradicate this, imagine if a player who has been reported but has account backup, of course the player can continue to take action against female gamers. The report function used certainly needs to be developed with options such as “Sexual Assault”, “Harrassment” and others. Because in general the report function only displays the report button or only with the choices of “AFK”, “Low Skill Level”, “Using Cheats” and many others.

Some content creators from both Twitch and Youtube often experience things like this, they even recorded it. Below are 5 female gamers who have experienced this, of course these 5 female gamers are only a small part of the players who have experienced harassment or received inappropriate treatment.

1. Leena Van Deventer

Is a book writer, game director and also a player. His experience when playing video games at that time was when he played Team Fortress 2, he found a player doing harassment such as asking for nude photos, asking about his clothes and a player masturbating during the game. Leena admitted that she heard the player masturbating through an active voice chat. Of course, this experience is something that can not be tolerated. This made Leena also write a book as co-author entitled “Game Changers: From Minecraft to Misogyny, The Fight for The Future of Videogames” together with Dr. Dan Golding, which aims to be read by the public for discrimination and racism in a video game.

2. Chassidy Kaye aka Cupcake

One of the streamers, Cupcake, discovered that he was being abused while playing video games. At that time he was playing Overwatch and some of the male players were saying “Go mop my floor” and others vaguely, which was really rude to say to a female player. The author himself didn’t really hear some of the other sentences being said because the male players laughed loudly. Readers can click on the following link to find out more https://twitter.com/chassidykaye/status/1150430606700044289?s=20

3. Marti aka Onmarti

There is a recent case that happened to Onmarti. The first release of Valorant at that time was found to be unpleasant. When Onmarti is playing Valorant in bomb or Spike mode and is close to winning the round, a male player makes racist remarks like “Textbook Woman” and gets annoyed that it should be a woman who defuses the bomb. Soon, this prompted Riot to take action to increase the comfort and safety of players against incidents like this. Readers can click on the following link to find out the details https://twitter.com/Onmarti/status/1260862564470263808?s=20

4. Anne aka Annemunition

Anne is known by her nickname as Annemunition, and her name skyrocketed when she was introduced to one of the eSport Rainbow Six: Siege scenes, namely Six Invitational 2018. This woman with a beautiful face did not escape inappropriate treatment while playing the game. Some incidents were even considered ethical, such as a streamer on Twitch doing things like “kissing” Anne by changing the position of the stream camera closer to Anne’s face. Readers can click on this link to find out about the unethical video, just imagine it was done with a lot of viewers https://twitter.com/AnneMunition/status/109544228920856576?s=20

5. Samantha Schwemm aka Spawntaneous

Spawntaneous is well-known among Rainbow Six: Siege players with the content on youtube entitled “OMG a girl!”, a compilation of Spawntaneous dealing with players who abuse and also various toxic players who play with him.

Some of these incidents are certainly enough to be a lesson that things like this should be something shameful to do. Everyone, even women, have the same rights as men. Discrimination, racism and sexual harassment both verbally and non-verbally need to be taken seriously. Everyone deserves the same treatment, starting with respecting someone around us.