In my first rough draft there was more of a structure to my AP but I soon realized I was adding too much of my HCP into my AP and this draft had to be restructure to decrease the historical element to it. 

How to Educate Men to treat Womxn like humans in Video Games

            Online video games can be toxic environment for individuals who are not identified as cis-males due to sexual harassment, sex-stereotypes and hate speech. Online video games are not just a place for individuals to play in but a social environment where gamers can interact with other players. One way to solution is to remove all men from video games and be for women only. Another solution could be to have an educational session before any video games that help everyone learn how to interact with other. Having places where people can report sexual harassment and hate speech within the games. Getting people to take video games classes that are interact since they are small so they learn how to interact correctly since they are you. Just delete video games out of our lives. I believe the most reasonable solutions is having a section within the video games where you can report sexual harassment and hate speech. Also bringing educational turn before any game. At the moment the set up is on the harassers side (Springer, 2018), like long term solutions is bring of them both together and when they get reported they have to go through an educational demo before they come back to the space. Microsoft already implemented a reporting harassment behavior in their Xbox one console (Shafford, 2016). Online video games can be a toxic social environment womxn where there needs to be a way to keep the womxn community safe by giving them a resource where they can report hate speech and sexual harassment and allow the people causing the toxic environment a place to learn why their actions cause problems through a module the must complete before they can rejoin the gaming community.

            Of course these environments aren’t always seen to be toxic to womxn when it comes to every opinion in this virtual world. People say that womxn have the same presence men have in the virtual world. Supporting that claim is a research, that identifies the percentage of womxn gamers to men gamers is basically equal now (Paaßen, per.1). Even if the number of people playing is equal from men to womxn players, it is still an unwelcoming social environment for womxn. As I emphasized before, video games are a social environment, many players play with multiple players. With these multiple players you can have conversations with microphones or send each other messages through group chats with the games. Many of these chats are ominous, or your name isn’t exposed into the world; players can only see others usernames, age and sometimes gender. Womxn don’t only witness sexual harassment and misogyny from the video games but they actually experience sexual harassment while playing games with other players. As seen in Figure 3, this is one of the numerous examples seen in a website called “You Play Video Games? So are you… Fat, Ugly or Slutty” this is a website where womxn put up different situations when they gaming where a man was either misogynistic or sexually harassing them. Figure 3 is specific a situation where…

Figure 3: A blog post from “You play video games? So are you… Fat, Ugly or   Slutty,” a screen shot of a message that contains sexual harassment

… a male gamer was sexually harassing a girl player at random. The gamer explains that she was playing Borderlands 2 with her boyfriend and friends when all of a sudden she received this message (Agriculture). This message is one among many attacks womxn receive while playing video games. Men in video games believe it is okay to send womxn these messages on the game message boards. According to research people who are exposed to video games become more tolerant and accepting to sexual harassment and rape culture (Dill, per.1). Which leads to having to very strong notion that shows how womxn are vulnerable to men who are attacking them, and they have never met or will ever meet these men in the real world. There is also evidence in these posts where men don’t believe that womxn are capable of being able to receive high ranks within video games. In Figure 4 you can see how a male gamer does not believe his group member can receive a high rank just because she is a womxn. He also claims she is cheating by assuming she is letting her boyfriend play for her.

Figure 4: A screen shot that shows misogynistic comments from the article “Where To Report Sexist Gamer Dudes”

This very common misogynistic attack can also put womxn in a defenseless position of not feeling good enough to be a gamer even if she has received better ranks than the male players who are constantly attacking them. There is never a sense of equity with womxn and men when it comes to video games because men don’t seem to see womxn as actual gamers.

            This toxic community can stimulate anxiety, sadness, self-doubt and stress for many womxn within this virtual community. An article in the Cut reports that indeed cyberharassment leads to withdrawal, depressive symptoms and damages mental womxn’s mental health (Singal, par.4). This environment should not be tolerated; this is why there was a creation of reporting options within games started being created. Many video game consoles and video games have adapted a reporting system for women to feel safe within the social environment aspect of video games. But, it honestly does nothing to solve the problem other than avoid root problem by not allowing men to play the video games. Just because you block an individual for a certain amount of time from the game will not allow the player to understand what they did wrong. The way that reporting systems works is also a large procedure and if only one person reports the individual it doesn’t prevent them from continuing the game. Rather it just deletes the negative comments written by the individual. Without any type of education of why being this horrible to women creates the situation of why men keep harassing women in video games without a second thought when they are allowed back to the space.

            Educating men about 1000 years of why womxn are treating inhumanely sounds impossible. How can there be a module that has enough of the history, can impact men to make the change and get men to actually act on it sounds difficult. Mostly when men might describe it as hostile and destroys their environment where they can act like themselves. Men feeling targeted over being reported about harassing womxn are part of the problem. There needs to be a way to make a module that won’t feel like a lecture that they dread or even an easy agree to the terms and conditions that they would be able to not even take a look at the 28 pages within it. The way that many educational module work is a very long and unbearable video with simplistic questions that can be answer with common sense. How can there be a way to make a module that can actually be entertaining and educational at the same time.

            Another problem that can arise is men can just simply open a new account when they get blocked from using a social game. This is so hard to record if the person is doing this due to faking information and how easy it is to make a new account. (will continue this in draft 2)

            I believe if there is a way we can make the module a social environment as well might be the key to the problem. It can be a video game from itself and in order to be able to go back to the actual game you have to go through tough situations where a computer bot can bother you the way you treat the person who reported you. I feel like this would create a sense of understanding to the men that you shouldn’t treat womxn that way and how the environment would be different if you didn’t feel in constant fear or stress of what others are saying about you. This will also prevent people from just reading or seeing a basic unsympathetic module that they will learn nothing from. (Will continue this thought in draft 2)

            Having these reporting sites being super on top of review on whether or not these men are harassing womxn or any individual is important. It doesn’t just support the individual being harassed but it also helps the community in general. Allowing men like that within video games allows it to be normalized culture in that community which is even worse than just have one individual being awful.

            The way that the gamer consoles can control the way people can make accounts it by making an individual have a gamer ID number the way that one has a state ID number that once they make an account with it they are unable to act as if they are someone else. This prevents spammers and it prevents people from making multiple accounts.

            Creating these policies and educating gamers can go a long way when it comes to the social environment of video games and can help people feel more safe within them.