I never considered myself a “gamer” until recently. I still cringe at that statement, perhaps because the game’s reputation is incredibly and irredeemably lame: adolescent, feverish, and redolent of the staleness of a teenage bedroom. On the contrary, I’m 25 years old and have friends and relationships. I go outside and can maintain eye contact with strangers. My apartment is small, but it’s definitely not a basement. But despite all this, I was hooked. It can happen to anyone.
My obsession is Red Dead Redemption 2, a cowboy game. His world is a microcosm of America in the late 1800s, and players play the roles of gun-slinging outlaws. Hunt animals and bounties, rob trains, and rustle horses in the malaria swamps of Louisiana. The lush heart of Oklahoma. It’s a utopia of sorts, one of the stable prize assets of independent publisher Rockstar Games, makers of the Grand Theft Auto series. More than anything, it’s innocent fun. As it turns out, my bloody bank job victim isn’t real. At least, I didn’t think that was the case until I went online.
I played the main offline “story” version of the game for a year and got so hooked that a friend tried to intervene to get me to stop complaining about it. . But by that time I was far away. I could no longer resist paying an extra £6.99 a month for an online iteration with expanded plotlines and features. I was expecting more of the same, but this version has other gamers playing with you.
In the main game you play as a man. The online version of her allows you to choose a female avatar and create her in your own image (in my case, her blonde, overly made up, and probably very vain). I called her Martine Horse, and her horse will be Hoof Hefner. All you “gamer girls” out there, please take note. It takes a little bit of irony to maintain some level of calm as you dive into the dark world. But the smile disappeared from my face the moment I started playing. In this new world, all the worst things that men fear women would want to do without consequences can happen to you at any time and to you.
As you run your errands, a man will almost certainly be lurking behind you, given the gamer tags of the male characters (fightclub247, meetgrinder2001, bitch_flayer). They stab you, shoot you, tie you up with ropes, and carry you off with your still wriggling body on the back of a horse. They throw you into an abandoned house where they take turns jumping on you. This is the closest simulation of rape that the system will allow. Someone called Messi69 will “emote” you by spitting on your body. You will be told in voice chat and message inbox that they can find you, rape and kill you, and that you are a prostitute.
In a world where players can pretty much do whatever they want, why do men continue to choose rape? Until the 2010s, online gaming was still a niche thing. After that, it exploded in popularity. Call of Duty launched online in 2012, GTA in his 2013, and Red Dead in 2018. We’re now living in a “golden age of online multiplayer” where players are more connected than ever, one critic said last year. . You’ll be able to have unscripted conversations with other gamers, play as yourself or an idealized version of yourself rather than Pac-Man or Mario, and move beyond the strictly enforced constraints of the plot. became. In other words, you can do almost exactly what you want. This is the insertion of fantasy into real social networks, where the darkest human impulses are played out over and over again, against the usual victims and the usual suspects, with disgusting predictability. It’s creating space.
“In a world where players can do whatever they want, why do men continue to choose rape?”
Our thriving incel culture likely has its roots in the brutal online civil war of 2014 known as “Gamergate.” In this frenzy of misogyny, men and boys forums organized massive harassment campaigns against female players and developers, ranging from revealing personal information to rape and death threats. It was a response to the suffocation of gaming culture by some of the worst diversity advocates among feminists, and a response to the explosive growth in the proportion of female gamers, which at the time was up to 48%. “For a campaign that sought to take politics out of gaming, Gamergate injected gaming deeply into the very fabric of our politics,” one critic wrote.
I’m lucky that in my real life, women hold court at dinner parties and are at least as resourceful as men, making equality seem like a given. But the next generation of early misogynists have cut their teeth into the game of attacking and threatening even those who purport to be women. You can block or report it, but it will happen again the next time you log on. And I’m an adult. I don’t want to imagine how a 13-year-old girl feels as she closes her laptop in a darkened bedroom, being degraded online by knife-wielding strangers. Perhaps the very boys who were double victimized. That morning she did math with her.
Many believe that the explicit content of video games contributes to this. In GTA, players can drive up to prostitutes and receive their services. Encounters improve the player’s health, but cost money. Fortunately, you can kill the prostitute later and get it back. But if research is to be believed, these virtual acts have nothing to do with our real-life urges. Games are as likely to breed sex offenders as they are to breed gangs. Therefore, it seems unlikely that it would encourage in-game abuse between real players. Games are a mirror of increasingly brutal male sexuality, not the cause.
The “gamer girl” trials are much more important than we think. Because this is what boys and men do that they think society doesn’t pay attention to. The next generation, already overwhelmed by Andrew Tate’s extreme misogyny, incel culture, and complete porn saturation of society, is living out these ideologies in cyberspace. 76% of boys aged 12 to 15 in the UK play games online. It’s a training ground, a virtual arena for role-playing abusive hobbies.
Therefore, we need to understand games as a prism through which we can see something bigger and more frightening. That is, certain parts of male sexual culture have mutated into a frenzied arena where there are no women, only prostitutes. There’s no sex, only rape. In this world, female characters become ciphers for real women: women who will dump you, laugh at you, or ghost you on Hinge. And while we don’t know anything about the players on the other side of the screen, we don’t even know if they are actually women, we are not allowed to hate them or act on that hatred. I am. The game world is a petri dish in which relationships between men and women unfold, and feminism’s worst fears are expressed pixel by pixel.
Recently, I started seeing the real world. In January, British police launched an investigation into the virtual “gang rape” of a girl under the age of 16 in Mark Zuckerberg’s VR utopia, the Metaverse. Online sexual attacks have since become enough of a problem for Interpol to issue a report calling on police to “define what constitutes crime and harm” in the Metaverse.
These are all serious concerns and a higher level of investigation should be welcomed. But I don’t think there’s any need to censor, ban, or worry about the game itself beyond normal and reasonable restrictions against harassment and bullying. After all, that unreality, that freedom, is why we play, and why I continue to play. So everyone, dust off your controllers and cancel your plans. It’s a delicious guilty pleasure to shut out real life and immerse yourself completely. But remember, the appeal of virtual worlds is that they are never completely so. Even if the game world is strange and unfettered, the shadows of our own dark reality always creep in.
