Let me first preface this by saying that this idea is radical. It's probably unworkable, utopian and completely batshit stupid, but it's also something to think about.
This idea comes off of the back of the recent harrassment experienced by Twitch streamer "FerociouslySteph", in which Steph stated that Voice Chat (VC) is a distinct disadvantage at the top levels of play in competetive gaming because society is full of shitheads who can't just let gamers play games without targeting protected characteristics (my words, not theirs). A woman playing a competetive game at the top tiers of play will forever be at a disadvantage in VC purely because all the cis-white gamerbros around her will use her sex or gender to belittle her as soon as they possibly can, as speaking up in VC immediately exposes her identity. Someone fighting the psychological assault of their own team will never perform as well as their co-ordinated opponents. And so most women just don't bother with VC. It isn't designed for them.
A lot of people claim that if that's the problem, then women could just mute VC. Yes, what a great argument. To prove that there isn't a problem after all. What a fantastic way to tell women to just shut up and stay quiet like the good little servants they were born to be! But more importantly if that's the "solution" then surely VC isn't important and therefore arguing in protection of it is just moot? If it's unimportant enough that some people should "just mute" and supposedly not matter then it's unimportant enough for it to be removed entirely.
It's a stupid rebuttal. I hope we're all clear on that?
And then someone in the comments to the article above posted about how we need to push usage of voice chat harder:
And that got me thinking about this crazy idea.
Yes. Push voice chat harder. Normalise women playing games. Crush society's preconceived notions of sex, gender and misogyny, but do it to the extreme. If we live in a society where women are socially belittled in every way possible in ways that cis-white males could never understand, why not tip that balance in your digital online ecosystem where you have the ability to do so? Why not do it in a way that would cause so much furor and uproar that it would completely destabilise the zeitgeist and make gamerbros the ones who are scared to speak in VC?
Design most of your game so that it's gender agnostic and appeals to everyone, but then give every woman the power to kick harrassers from any match.
It's such a fucking insane idea and I LOVE it. Suddenly men are the ones who need to consider if joining VC is worth it. Suddenly men are the ones who know how it feels to be the targeted demographic, purely because a woman might hear their (generally) lower timbre and realise "holy shit, there's a man in this game and I'm the one with power." Society's issues are omnipresent and this won't suddenly fix that overnight, and in a lot of ways this could be seen as an insult to the social cause due to the "triviality" of gaming but you've got to break some eggs to make an omelette. And could you imagine the headlines that this would generate? Maybe, just maybe the reaction to doing this is so uproarious that it begins a new movement further empowering women in video games, normalising the landscape in such a way that video games are no longer a "boy's thing" (which they certainly still are, especially in competetive play), especially if you make a pointed effort to actively disrupt the societal dynamic.
Now duh this would cause a world of potentially impossible problems with no workable solutions. You're overpowering women for the sake of destabilising the imbalance between the sexes, but why shouldn't that happen in a high profile case at least once?
First of all how would you prevent abuse of the system? How would you stop some women from kicking whoever they want regardless of whether or not they've even spoken up? Frankly you probably can't, but isn't that the point? That women, who have spent their whole lives in the working sector fighting for equality and in many situations losing out to their equally (or often lesser) skilled male opponents, are now able to use that power however they want? It has a beautiful symmetry to it in a way.
Perhaps even more obviously how do you determine who is genuinely female? (and of course by this I am also including trans women. That just isn't up for debate.) Do you resort to legal documentation? How do you ethically justify that requirement just for a feature in your video game? But then do you just take them on their word? And then who's to stop men from gaming the system and trying to gain the privileges of women in your closed ecosystem? Again, the answer is probably that you can't. There's also the risk of accidentally misgendering someone either at the privilege granting level or during gameplay. This is a theoretical system that unfortunately relies on a lot of other theoretical systems working flawlessly in unison.
And even providing you make this system work in a game, how do you stop it from devolving into a complete cesspool ruled by one group who possess a protected characteristic at the expense of those who do not? Simply, you can't. Unless you just don't speak. Tipping the balance.
I think it's an incredibly powerful idea, and I'd love for it to come to fruition in some way in reality. But given the cost of development of video games and the risk of alienating your male demographic I highly doubt that any big company would implement a system like this in any meaningful way. Which to me just feels like yet another way that imbalance would win out over prioritising the interests of women in a given medium.
And of course this post focuses on gender (or arguably more noticeably, given the nature of VC, sex), but who's to say that you couldn't empower minorities in this same way? The only reason that I didn't delve deeply into that idea is because VC is more likely to reveal sex first, and race second especially with regional matchmaking where you're much more likely to encounter someone who is probably of your own race. One is no more important than the other though, please make no mistake.
This idea could spearhead something huge if a company big enough took it seriously, genuinely seriously enough and valued women more than the potential outcome of implementing a system that might doom their game and have nobody play it. I'd argue that the buzz it would create might mitigate that but I get it. I also get that some of you reading this might think that the idea itself is fucking stupid. It would never work so it isn't even worth contemplating. Some of you might disagree with the ideology, and I can guarantee this thread will appear on the twitters and forums of incels who are complaining about how "REEEEEra is trying to censor the whole world!!" and that Vexii is some SJW fuck spreading cancer to the masses.
But to all of that I'll simply quote: "we can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
This idea comes off of the back of the recent harrassment experienced by Twitch streamer "FerociouslySteph", in which Steph stated that Voice Chat (VC) is a distinct disadvantage at the top levels of play in competetive gaming because society is full of shitheads who can't just let gamers play games without targeting protected characteristics (my words, not theirs). A woman playing a competetive game at the top tiers of play will forever be at a disadvantage in VC purely because all the cis-white gamerbros around her will use her sex or gender to belittle her as soon as they possibly can, as speaking up in VC immediately exposes her identity. Someone fighting the psychological assault of their own team will never perform as well as their co-ordinated opponents. And so most women just don't bother with VC. It isn't designed for them.
A lot of people claim that if that's the problem, then women could just mute VC. Yes, what a great argument. To prove that there isn't a problem after all. What a fantastic way to tell women to just shut up and stay quiet like the good little servants they were born to be! But more importantly if that's the "solution" then surely VC isn't important and therefore arguing in protection of it is just moot? If it's unimportant enough that some people should "just mute" and supposedly not matter then it's unimportant enough for it to be removed entirely.
It's a stupid rebuttal. I hope we're all clear on that?
And then someone in the comments to the article above posted about how we need to push usage of voice chat harder:
And that got me thinking about this crazy idea.
Yes. Push voice chat harder. Normalise women playing games. Crush society's preconceived notions of sex, gender and misogyny, but do it to the extreme. If we live in a society where women are socially belittled in every way possible in ways that cis-white males could never understand, why not tip that balance in your digital online ecosystem where you have the ability to do so? Why not do it in a way that would cause so much furor and uproar that it would completely destabilise the zeitgeist and make gamerbros the ones who are scared to speak in VC?
Design most of your game so that it's gender agnostic and appeals to everyone, but then give every woman the power to kick harrassers from any match.
It's such a fucking insane idea and I LOVE it. Suddenly men are the ones who need to consider if joining VC is worth it. Suddenly men are the ones who know how it feels to be the targeted demographic, purely because a woman might hear their (generally) lower timbre and realise "holy shit, there's a man in this game and I'm the one with power." Society's issues are omnipresent and this won't suddenly fix that overnight, and in a lot of ways this could be seen as an insult to the social cause due to the "triviality" of gaming but you've got to break some eggs to make an omelette. And could you imagine the headlines that this would generate? Maybe, just maybe the reaction to doing this is so uproarious that it begins a new movement further empowering women in video games, normalising the landscape in such a way that video games are no longer a "boy's thing" (which they certainly still are, especially in competetive play), especially if you make a pointed effort to actively disrupt the societal dynamic.
Now duh this would cause a world of potentially impossible problems with no workable solutions. You're overpowering women for the sake of destabilising the imbalance between the sexes, but why shouldn't that happen in a high profile case at least once?
First of all how would you prevent abuse of the system? How would you stop some women from kicking whoever they want regardless of whether or not they've even spoken up? Frankly you probably can't, but isn't that the point? That women, who have spent their whole lives in the working sector fighting for equality and in many situations losing out to their equally (or often lesser) skilled male opponents, are now able to use that power however they want? It has a beautiful symmetry to it in a way.
Perhaps even more obviously how do you determine who is genuinely female? (and of course by this I am also including trans women. That just isn't up for debate.) Do you resort to legal documentation? How do you ethically justify that requirement just for a feature in your video game? But then do you just take them on their word? And then who's to stop men from gaming the system and trying to gain the privileges of women in your closed ecosystem? Again, the answer is probably that you can't. There's also the risk of accidentally misgendering someone either at the privilege granting level or during gameplay. This is a theoretical system that unfortunately relies on a lot of other theoretical systems working flawlessly in unison.
And even providing you make this system work in a game, how do you stop it from devolving into a complete cesspool ruled by one group who possess a protected characteristic at the expense of those who do not? Simply, you can't. Unless you just don't speak. Tipping the balance.
I think it's an incredibly powerful idea, and I'd love for it to come to fruition in some way in reality. But given the cost of development of video games and the risk of alienating your male demographic I highly doubt that any big company would implement a system like this in any meaningful way. Which to me just feels like yet another way that imbalance would win out over prioritising the interests of women in a given medium.
And of course this post focuses on gender (or arguably more noticeably, given the nature of VC, sex), but who's to say that you couldn't empower minorities in this same way? The only reason that I didn't delve deeply into that idea is because VC is more likely to reveal sex first, and race second especially with regional matchmaking where you're much more likely to encounter someone who is probably of your own race. One is no more important than the other though, please make no mistake.
This idea could spearhead something huge if a company big enough took it seriously, genuinely seriously enough and valued women more than the potential outcome of implementing a system that might doom their game and have nobody play it. I'd argue that the buzz it would create might mitigate that but I get it. I also get that some of you reading this might think that the idea itself is fucking stupid. It would never work so it isn't even worth contemplating. Some of you might disagree with the ideology, and I can guarantee this thread will appear on the twitters and forums of incels who are complaining about how "REEEEEra is trying to censor the whole world!!" and that Vexii is some SJW fuck spreading cancer to the masses.
But to all of that I'll simply quote: "we can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
