In my second draft the structure was starting to make more sense just that it started to become to personalized including the title. The title felt to be more of a jab towards men being bad people than finding a title that emphasized how to help womxn. Also with a lack of flow is what made reach for help from Professor Shane and the Writing Center

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 are 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 which is a long improvement than allowing the abusers make the virtual world their own (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 1, 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 1 is specific a situation where…

Figure 1: 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. Taking a look at Figure 2 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 2: 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. Games including Minecraft, Fortnite and more have adapted support centers or options to report an abuse player (Cybersmile, par. 1-3). But, it does nothing to solve the problem other than avoid root problem by not allowing abusive men to play the video games. Just because a game or console blocks an individual for a certain amount of time from the game will not allow the player to understand what they did wrong. Also this makes it the abusers work to go through the process of blocking an individual and having to explain why they are blocking a certain individual. The way that reporting systems works is also a large procedure and sometimes it can be difficult to find the link to report an abuser which creates an inconvenience for the victim (Cybersmile, pr.1). Sometimes it just deletes the negative comments written by the individual. Without any type of education of why being horrible to womxn creates the situation of why men keep harassing womxn in video games without a second thought when they are allowed back to the space.

         Educating men about the whole history of why womxn are treated 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 in video games are known to be racist, sexist and homophobic and create a hostile environment (Maher, par. 4). Men feeling targeted over being reported about harassing womxn are part of the problem; they should understand that they are targeted because of their actions. 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 modules precede is extensive and unbearable videos 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.

         Currently in the video game environment doesn’t seem to have these video games that create a lessons once they are reported. But there is a development of educating students about sexual harassment in school environments. Three northern Chicago charters schools in October 2016 launched a video game called Bystanders in their classrooms that teaches students about sexual misconduct (Stone, par. 1-3). The video game is aiming to educate students on how not to be bystanders and understand what sexual harassment is and the next steps to take when you are sexually harassed. Bystander really just aimed to shift the social norms about sexual harassment and to disrupt and prevent sexual harassment (Stone, par. 6). Looking at Figure 3, a screenshot of the actual game, you can see how the minimalistic setting can go a long way to create sympathy and an understanding of what the problem is right away through facial expressions and context.

Figure 3: A Screenshot of the game Bystanders taken from the article Can VR teach us how to deal with sexual harassment?

In Figure 3, The text behind the womxn’s back describes what the situation is which in this case is explaining that the man the individual had been flirting got the wrong message of her intentions due to what she was wearing, a dress. In this image you can also see the individual that the gamer is playing which in this case is the girl on the right who is playing a friend or a bystander deciding on what to say to the victim. The game actually allows the player to choose what to say to the victim and allows the gamer to lead the storyline by giving options that can lead the story differently. The game does not penalize the player by choosing the wrong choice instead brings you back to earlier lessons in the game (Holpuch, par.18). This is an efficient way to teach someone to understand the cycle of what they are doing incorrectly because they can see the cycle within the game storyline of what they did wrong that keeps them from moving on to the solution. According to research, 97.6% of the students who played the game in a pilot found this game to have valuable information and 60% of them found the game to be relevant (Rowley, 103-106)

Virtual Reality is another way that video games can train people on sexual harassment. A game called Vantage Point is a sexual harassment program that was made to train people on sexual harassment (,). This game bring you to the position of a scenario that you visual interact in rather than

Figure 3: A Screenshot of the game Bystanders taken from the article Can VR teach us how to deal with sexual harassment?

In Figure 3, The text behind the womxn’s back describes what the situation is which in this case is explaining that the man the individual had been flirting got the wrong message of her intentions due to what she was wearing, a dress. In this image you can also see the individual that the gamer is playing which in this case is the girl on the right who is playing a friend or a bystander deciding on what to say to the victim. The game actually allows the player to choose what to say to the victim and allows the gamer to lead the storyline by giving options that can lead the story differently. The game does not penalize the player by choosing the wrong choice instead brings you back to earlier lessons in the game (Holpuch, par.18). This is an efficient way to teach someone to understand the cycle of what they are doing incorrectly because they can see the cycle within the game storyline of what they did wrong that keeps them from moving on to the solution. According to research, 97.6% of the students who played the game in a pilot found this game to have valuable information and 60% of them found the game to be relevant (Rowley, 103-106)

Virtual Reality is another way that video games can train people on sexual harassment. A game called Vantage Point is a sexual harassment program that was made to train people on sexual harassment (,). This game bring you to the position of a scenario that you visual interact in rather than...

Having these developments that people have made to fight sexual harassment within the physical world closes the gap in a development that needs to be done to for sexual harassment problems in the physical world. Developing a video game within virtual reality or even regular video games that demonstrates the toxicity and sexual harassment within videogames/virtual world. Demonstrating

         These modules are efficient because they make the module a social environment. 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 helps you understand through a storyline that makes men the victim of the storyline rather than the abuser. This allows men to put themselves in the victims’ shoes and understand why they were removed from the video game in the first place. 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.