The Gatekeepers of Gaming
Growing up, I never associated gaming with being a male-dominated activity. My brothers and I shared gaming systems and my female cousins had consoles of their own.
But it wasn’t until I got older that I realized how often men are surprised that I consider myself a gamer and streamer. It’s almost controversial.
The gaming community has been gatekeeping for years. If you aren’t a white man, you basically don’t have a place in this space.
Women, especially BIPOC women, are constantly harassed, berated, belittled, ignored, and pushed out.
Earlier this month, news broke that there was a website called Bunny Hop TV that would take live streams off of Twitch, broadcast them to their site, and notify viewers of when certain streamers were live. But it wasn’t just any site.
The site proclaimed themselves “The best place to find girls playing video games, just chatting, ASMR, and more.” The wild part about it all was that if you were on the site, you wouldn’t know.
They didn’t ask for permission or notify you that you were being broadcasted on their site, to thousands of viewers.
Not only did this violate Twitch’s TOS, but they also did this without any of the streamers’ consent.
Thankfully, I wasn’t on the site but the fact that it was this easy to take female streamers’ content only adds to the harassment we have to deal with both on and offline.
Even further, Black female streamers are bearing the brunt of online harassment with little to no support.
Recently during GlitchCon, a line-up of virtual events hosted by Twitch, a newly partnered Twitch streamer, Zombaekillz, was harassed all across the internet because people felt as though she didn’t deserve the partnership.
Salty white gamers went on a rampage and harassed her relentlessly, even going as far as sending her death threats.
During this time, other Black female streamers who were given free consoles were dismissed and belittled because people thought that they only received free consoles because they’re Black and it looks good for diversity.
Not once did anyone consider how long they’ve dedicated themselves to the industry or how much content they’ve put out that gamers of all backgrounds enjoy.
To make matters worse, during a recent Twitch Town Hall, it was announced that words “simp,” “virgin,” and “incel” were now bannable offenses whereas sexist insults geared towards women and racial slurs are still acceptable.
BIPOC streamers and reviewers like Zombaekillz have been adamant about making the tech and gaming industry not just diverse but inclusive and safe for marginalized groups.
In a piece on Kotaku, she states,
“Our industry has a racism problem. And no one’s talking about what this really looks like. Xbox just came out with their comment about how they think one of the worst things in the games industry right now is console wars. Is it? Is console wars our worst thing, or is racism and gatekeeping Blackness out of games the worst thing in the games industry? I don’t just want to say Black people, because I see my disabled friends get bullied and harassed, so much too. I see a lack of Native American people in the games industry. I see a lack of a lot of otherness in our industry and we have to do better.”
My streaming platform is small at the moment but in a conversation I had with another Muslim gamer, she was nervous to start streaming because she was worried about trolls.
The racist, islamophobic, sexist trolls.
There are accounts on Twitch whose sole purpose is to troll and I expressed that I felt that same. I enjoy streaming but I truly fear that if and when I “make it big,” I’ll have to be on guard for trolls who attack me because I’m Black, I’m Muslim, and/or because I’m a woman, and that will overshadow the joy I feel when going live and playing video games.
The industry has been controlled and occupied by cisgender, straight, white men who want to make the space perfect for other men like them. There’s no room for “others.”
But for now, until the gatekeepers find new interests, I guess I’ll just have to get more moderators for my Twitch chat and brace myself for what may lie ahead.
