The video game industry has always been focused on men. The characters were based around male features and the in game items were formatted for male use. I can imagine that due to marketing and the use of female characters as sexual objects can attract the male players. That is not the only marketing strategy used though, the games are inherently violent and arranged so that are attractive to males aged 12 and up. When playing these games, the in game chat is used to communicate with other players in your game. These communication application’s purpose has changed extremely with the evolution of the gaming industry. While playing these First Person Shooter games, I have encountered many individuals who use their online gamer tag as a safety net to be able to openly say what ever they want. These applications of communication are not monitored by any organization so what is being said is all unfiltered. This leads to individuals saying inappropriate things and it leading to escalating circumstances were people say racist, sexist, homophobic things. These companies that allow in game chat realize the risk of having game chats that are not monitored so they employ a self reporting tactic.
Women in these games are subject to the worst of the abuse. Due to the aggressive nature of the games, woman are rarely the type to engage in the games. So, on the rare occasion that they are playing, men in these games go ballistic and start saying obscene things. Women also do a lot better making compensation when streaming these games. While, most of these cases, they may not have the most skill in comparison to the men who play these games but in the situations where they do match up in skill level. They use their skills to stream on the various streaming web sites so that they can make a profit. While, this is a primarily male dominated space, these women are able to make a considerable amount of money due to the rarity that it is seen for women to play these First Person Shooter (FPS) games. When I play these games, there are a significant amount of males that are intrigued by my presence so on more than one occasion I have been bombarded with a mass amount of messages primarily discussing that fact that I am a female playing a First Person Shooter game.
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