Women in Games Argentina is a community dedicated to promoting more inclusion in gaming and the video game industry. For an experiment called “Switch Voices”, 3 Twitch streamers played Valorant and used a filter to pretend to be women.
What was that experiment? 3 Twitch streamers and experienced gamers were asked to play some matches in the shooter Valorant. After a few rounds, players should use a voice changer to change their voices to sound like women and voice chat with their fellow players.
The streamers suddenly found themselves hostile and insulted by their fellow players and apparently didn’t even know what was happening to them. However, according to Women in Games Argentina, the organization behind the experiment, this is everyday life for women.
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Streamers are insulted and sabotaged
How did the experiment go? As soon as the streamers pretended to be women in the voice chat, they were sexistically insulted and trolled by their fellow players. Among other things, the streamers had to listen to the fact that they were playing a men’s game and should rather go back to the kitchen.
Additionally, fellow players also refused to cooperate with the streamers if they mistook them for women. As a result, the performance of the streamers was affected, with all the kill-death ratios deteriorating noticeably:
How did the streamers rate the experiment? AlfreditoGames is visibly frustrated when he is excluded by his fellow players and exclaims: “It’s a team game, I just want to do my part.” Afterwards he commented on the experiment:
The experience really takes the fun out of the game. It’s something you don’t want to do anymore. I don’t want to imagine having to experience that every day.
AlfreditoGames
One of the other players, Lucius, said he felt “outrage and frustration.” Tasher also apparently felt slowed down: You just want to do your best, but you just can’t do anything, according to the streamer.
Videos about the experiment were already published on YouTube in early November 2022. Here you can watch it in the original Spanish soundtrack:
Women share their experiences
How did the experiment go down? A month after the video was released, the experiment has now received attention from Twitch streamer Kristabyte, who published a video about Switch Voices on TikTok.
Kristabyte’s video has already received over 1.7 million views in the 2 days since publication (as of 12/05/2022, 3:15 p.m.). From TikTok, the video spread further via Twitter, where it was shared by streamer LuluLuvley:
In the comments, women report on their own experiences with using voice chats in competitive online gaming. That’s exactly why they wouldn’t dare to chat or play games like this in the first place (via Twitter).
However, the experiment only shows what many gamers already know. A Twitter user wrote that it was heartbreaking that men had to have these experiences themselves instead of listening to women and believing them (via Twitter).
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For Kristabyte, the consequences of treating women go beyond reduced gaming fun: “This is exactly why women feel like they can’t pursue a career in gaming or esports,” the streamer said.
The biggest difficulty for women is not the gameplay, but the culture of the games.
German comedian Carolin Kebekus has also drawn attention to the treatment of women in video games and the gaming industry. In an edition of her show, she came out as a passionate gamer, but criticized the abuses in her hobby:
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