2y ago

How about starting a challenge #VoiceLikeAGirl to put on the other shoe in gaming?

Inspired by a discussion I had elsewhere and the article "Women in Games swaps male and female voices to highlight harassment in gaming", how about we start a voice modulation challenge where you have to play at least one online game with a voice modulator to sound like a girl?

I'm curious what the experiences would be like.

24 comments

Dunno that we need much more experimentation, we all know what the outcome will be - Loads of sexual harassment and misogyny.
Also, the stastically correct way to "sound like a girl" is to mute and never speak up. Last time i read something on this topic, the gender balance in a lot of games is better than we think, but women overwhelmingly stay muted to avoid harassment.
The solution isnt more education/experimentation. Everyone who cares already knows what the problem is. Games need better moderation tools and clear community standards.
- I was very glad to read the last sentence. I agree fully. Easiest would be a report button that saves the last 60 seconds of voice, analyzes it with ai and check if something illegal/harassing was said and autokicks the person who said it.
  Would not require more top down systems.
  
  I personally lean more towards humans for moderation, as words alone dont convey the full intent and meaning. And this cuts both ways, benign words can be used to harass.
  But of course, humans are expensive, and recordings of voice chat have privacy implications.
  
  Yeah that sounds totally reasonable and unintrusive, wtf. I don’t want my every word spoken in voice to be live analyzed by ai to see if I did a wrongthink.
  Why not simply mute or kick if someone is being an asshole? Has served me well in all my years using discord or teamspeak.
- It's not about experimentation, but awareness. Experiencing life as a woman IRL is not easy - you can't get a sex change on a whim or quickly hop into a female body. In an online game however, changing your voice is the probably the most convincing way to do so and it's quite easy.
  If even a small percentage of men experiencing the other side of the coin became active in improving the gaming space, it would be something.
  Waiting and hoping for better moderation tools and clear community standards is non-active course of "action". It's like saying "I'm not going to vote because the system is shit 🙅 " and expecting it to get better.
  CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
  
  I appreciate what your saying, and you're right that it is a passive course of action (unless one were to campaign/lobby for developers to implement moderation). But my point was that imo, everyone that cares about the problem is already aware of it, and more awareness doesn't solve the problem either.
  This has been a problem for decades, and pre-dates microphones and games. Any platform that allows users to send messages will be used to send abuse. The tried and true solution has always been moderation. Riot Games seemed to be making headway with their chat moderation tools, but i havent kept up with how that went.
  At a certain point, awareness becomes preaching to the choir. The assholes who are causing the problem won't change their behavior unless they are forced to.
Online games that let you talk to strangers aren't great when you're a guy either. Not because of targeted harassment, but because you often enough just end up with people screaming into the mic or repeating the N word over and over again for no reason. The last time I turned on voice chat with strangers was 7 years ago, with PUBG, and I quickly turned it back off. (It feels wrong that that game is somehow 7 years old.)
- I'm sorry but it is definitely nowhere as close as the kind of harassment women receive. They have to deal with insults based on their gender, sexual harassment, digital stalking outside of games, etc
  
  I didn't mean to imply that it's close, only that it's already awful enough that I'm not about to run some experiment for how much worse it can be. It's already an activity so bad that I haven't engaged with it in years.
Not a voice mod, but my voice passes as fem now, so I started talking in VC.
Started playing phasmophobia and it's a lot of fun, but sometimes you get one or two dudes that start making "funny" mysogynistic comments and it's pretty annoying cause it's the Same. Thing. Every. Time.
"Oooh it's in the kitchen, must be a woman ghost!" Looks at me to gauge my reaction.
Joins room I say hi "A FEMALE??? I'm not playing with a female" disconnects
And more. Spawntaneous is a youtuber that has a series of videos about being a "girl gamer" and it's very eye opening. You don't get that kind of people every match, but you do get them every couple hours you play, and even if you somehow find it funny the first time, it gets old really quick.
- If they do just disconnect thats kinda a win, but still rude none the less :/

24 comments