‘Why do you hate us?’ - the gaming industry’s abuse problem

Though Udogaranya is determined not to let the hate stop her from playing what she wants, both she and fellow streamer Sunpi say that they treat certain communities or games with caution. For Udogaranya, a bad experience playing Grand Theft Auto (GTA, itself a game that lets you hire and kill prostitutes) resulted in her avoiding the game “for a while”. Sunpi talks about wanting to start playing League of Legends, but feels apprehensive about doing so.

“Everyone was telling me not to buy it, because apparently it’s a really toxic community,” she says. “But I really want to play the game. I shouldn’t have to not play it because of toxicity.”

She also steers clear of GTA, and a bad experience with stalking – a man from America found out what city she lived in and flew to the UK to try and meet up with her – means she avoids initiating conversations with her followers.

Has the abuse got worse over the years that they’ve been streaming? Perhaps. As a more diverse audience enters the gaming space – almost 46 per cent of gamers these days are female, while audiences in China, South-East Asia and Africa are growing apace – the traditional white, male inhabitants of the industry are no longer the only people whose voice matter. And some of them are not happy about it.

“I think the more they see us thriving [the angrier they get],” Udogaranya says. “I was the first black woman in the UK to be a Twitch partner, which was highly celebrated, but also the first Twitch ambassador who was black and a woman from the UK.

“[When it was announced on Twitter], immediately, you had people in the comments, ‘Oh, she’s nothing special, she doesn’t play games’… they were so rattled, and I think Twitter is 100 per cent the main place where if you’re not streaming, you will see abuse. They’ll just be in the comments. And I think a lot of us have just learned to not look at the comments, because we already know what to expect.”

Shura faces a similar problem. A music artist and longtime gaming fan who turned to Twitch during the pandemic, Shura sees her Twitch channel as a safe space for women and members of the LGBTQIA+ community to share their love of gaming. “I... had never played games online, multiplayer, never played Call of Duty, [I never do] anything that would involve exposing myself to random people online who would just say awful things. And I think a lot of women and a lot of queer people actually feel the same. It's like, there's a whole world of gaming out there that they just sort of avoid.” As such, she says, she feels a responsibility towards her community, to protect them from similar vitriol.

Is anything being done about it? There are some tools available to streamers to combat online abuse. Udogaranya has a button that will wipe her Twitch chat and block anybody but subscribers to her channel from commenting. Shura is even more prepared: she also has online moderators who monitor the chat for hateful messages, as well as settings that mute newcomers to the livestream for ten minutes – in order to, as she says, “make it as boring as possible for you to be raided.”

But as Sunpi says, there’s still more that can and should be done. “I feel like ID should be uploaded. I’ve said that before: upload ID. If they leave hate and nastiness, they’re blocked, they can never come back on the platform again, because the ID is there and [the site knows] it’s them.”

Plus, as Shura suggests, Twitch could do more with their ambassadors (partnered content creators) to raise awareness of the issue. “I feel like they use [them] more to advertise or to promote... maybe it would be more useful if they actually listened to the ambassadors about what the pain points are. Because the hate raids was a really big issue for a really long time. And it took forever [to do anything about them] and even now, it's still difficult.”

As horrific as online abuse is, this isn’t the only battleground: nasty sexism and other forms of aggressive discrimination are an industry-wide problem that’s just as prevalent in studios and industry events as it is on Twitch channels.

“There are certain unique conditions to gaming that I think create this sexism,” Imogen Donovan says. “Games let you be the most powerful person in the room. So you can be the strongest, you can be the cleverest, you can be the most attractive, you can be the most decorated in combat.

“And for the longest time, the only people who got to be the most powerful person in the room were white heterosexual men.”

A games journalist, Donovan has been writing about the industry for years, and has experienced its toxic culture first-hand. During an industry event, while chatting to a software engineer, the conversation shifted to Donovan’s career. “He was like, ‘What do you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘Honestly, I’m happy to do anything, as long as I get the chance to write about games.’”

“And he said, ‘So, you’re a whore.’” Taken aback, Donovan tried to laugh the comment off, before leaving as quickly as she was able. But his comments are nothing unusual. “I tell men in the industry that story. And they’re shocked. They’re like, I can’t believe that and I’m like, ‘Why? Why can’t you believe that?’”

Though few statistics exist about the number of women who suffer abuse in the industry, or indeed how common these incidents are, the numbers speak for themselves: one search on Twitter will find hundreds of stories of being sexually assaulted, groped at events – or even, at this year’s Game Developers Conference, having their drinks spiked (in fact, multiple allegations of spiking were made, prompting the Games and Harassment Hotline to release a statement condemning the situation).

62 per cent of employees in the gaming industry are male. This is a considerable improvement on previous years but that doesn’t mean the historic problems are anywhere close to being fixed, particularly not in a formal way. In IGDA’s 2021 Developer Satisfaction Survey, only 60 per cent of interviewees said that their workplace had a policy for sexual harassment. Of those, only half of that group said that these policies were adequately enforced.

There are some ways of mitigating damage. Donovan talks of “whisper networks” – secret groups made up predominantly of women, who will warn others covertly about people it’s not safe to be around.

“But if you’re a new person coming into the industry, you might not know somebody who was in that whisper network. You might develop a friendship with this particular person. And then you aren’t aware that perhaps this person isn’t the sort of person you want to be hanging around with.”

Women entering into the industry for the first time face a host of difficulties. Not only are they statistically likely to be underrepresented, but the majority of people who are in positions of influence are men, making speaking out about harrassment, or worse, difficult.

“I think industry-wise, women are less willing to talk about it, because of the repercussions, potentially, of speaking out against a guy who has abused them or done something weird… it might block opportunities for her in other places,” Udogaranya says.

“Potentially your career could be done... it’s a very, very hard place to be.”

Janneke van Swetselaar, Head of Partnerships at Ultra Games, agrees. “There's actually a lot of money to be made [in gaming]... and you see that in some of the high profile cases, where studios protect certain people, because this person is very valuable, they're very good at their job, they make a lot of money for the company.”

Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to be putting women off and helping each other thrive. Donovan cites several charities and groups aiming to improve female representation: Code Coven advertises itself as a classroom for “gender-marginalised game developers”, while websites such as FemHype serve as safe spaces for women and non-binary gamers to discuss their love of gaming.

“When I was starting, a lot of the behaviour that they did, it was just so inappropriate, but you didn’t even think about it,” Van Swetselaar says.

“And I think that is one of the things that is changing now is that people actually think about certain behaviours and certain choices, because they feel they cannot necessarily get away with it anymore.”

All of the people I spoke to about this are clear: things might be improving, but slowly. Sexism is deeply rooted within the gaming industry, and while a majority of men might be innocent, the culture is pervasive, and there’s still a lot of weeding to be done.

“It’s hard because I’ve got so many guys that support me,” Sunpi says. “And then you’ve got the other half that ruin it. Just, like… why do you hate us? It’s so weird.”