Knock, knock!
Come on in. Welcome. Paladin Amber!
Nice to meet you! So nice to meet you. This is your space!
This is, this is the Game Station. Everyone else just gets to see this. You
get the behind the scenes! This is John, I can fit into this. This is from Halo.
How did you fit into that?
A lot of safety pins!
Amber, how long do you spend streaming every day?
Anywhere between four to six hours. It just honestly depends on what I'm playing. After
about four hours of playing like a first-person shooter, you've kind of got to step back away from
the keyboard a little bit because I end up coming out of there and I’m a bit melted in the brain.
I guess you have a whole lot of people to talk to online though? Like 100,000 plus followers.
I know there's a lot of them. And I honestly don't know why they keep coming back!
Tell me about how you first started gaming?
I mean, I started playing in high school. But a lot of the time we would get, me and a group of
my girlfriends, we would get kicked from matches if we were like talking, or if people knew we were
girls. So we would game under aliases. We were like named after all the different transformers.
Bumblebee! We suspect that...
That was some of my highlights in online gaming, because it really helped me build like community
and it helped me understand that no, there is a divide where there's not a lot of female gamers.
And there's a lot of male gamers who just don't want anything to do with female gamers.
What sort of harassment have you experienced?
I think because I was always outspoken, I made myself almost a target for people to be like “OK,
well, let's dox you then or, let’s you know, what if I sent death threats to you,
you know? Things like that where it was how can they get into my mind?
Amber’s not the only one. Women 18 and over make up 46% of Australia's gamers. But a new survey of
female identifying gamers 16 and over found 83% have experienced or witnessed offensive behaviour
or language online. More than 70% rated those experiences as severe and making them feel unsafe,
and nine out of 10 changed their behaviour to feel safe before even starting to play.
I mean, obviously not using voice chat,
which is a huge issue because I think that a lot of games, including multiplayer games,
rely so heavily on team communication. And then for a while there, I just stopped gaming.
Of course, male gamers experience bullying online too, but female-identifying gamers often cop it
specifically because of their gender. Like check out this challenge Amber helped out
with which gave male players higher voices to see if they got treated differently to usual.
Hello, hello, hello? Testing, testing? Hello, hello, hello? There we go!
Oh! There she is.
You guys got comms? Anyone got comms?
It's that uncomfortable, like, silence.
I've never had people not respond to me before. I’ve just had two people leave.
I'm searching again.
Like, God, it wasn't even five seconds in.
Oh man, it's rough, isn't it?
Women in every industry and, you know, even non-binary and trans suffer at the
hands of discrimination every single day. So then when we're coming online,
it's like you're bombarded with it again, and again, and again. Whereas maybe men and
male-identifying individuals don't have that so much in their everyday lives.
Discrimination in the gaming industry isn't exactly a new thing.
I'm Dr. Stephanie Harkin and I'm a PhD Researcher into games and gender. The very first video
games they came out around the 1960s and they were made in computer science labs,
but were funded by the US Military. So, already women were excluded because they faced greater
cultural barriers that in accessing University and military positions back then. But the games
themselves in the early days, they were enjoyed by everybody. So advertisements in
the 70s and early 80s, they featured entire families playing games regardless of gender
Odyssey. The electronic game of the future, and the family’s best friend.
What we think of as the stereotypical young male gamer now, that only really
came about in the in the mid 80s and the 90s. So, there was a big financial video game crash,
which meant that there were less studios making less games, and here they needed a more defined
target market to direct those games. And that target market fell to being young men,
likely because it was still largely men behind the scenes making games.
Young Bobby Engels has a problem. He needs to
earn the respect of his peers. So he got Sega Genesis, the ultimate action system.
On screens, women were often depicted a certain way in games too;
think Princess Peach always needing to be rescued, Lara Croft in Tomb Raider,
a strong female character, but still had to be a hot girl in shorts and a tight top. Or pretty
much every woman in Grand Theft Auto, existing mainly to be sexualised, harassed or killed.
And especially around that time, when they were targeted at men,
we were seeing hyper-sexualisation of women, hyper-masculinity is represented as well,
which can be damaging for young boys’ perceptions too, there was, you know,
not very good racial representations, lots of stereotyping and fetishisation.
So it wasn't particularly a great space for representation and now it's a lot better.
There is so much more representation now, which is incredible. I mean, you got female characters
headlining like Call of Duty games now, people waiting for the drops for those characters,
which is incredible. And it's not just, it’s all-inclusive, all culturally inclusive,
and all gender inclusive, which I love. So I'm proud of my industry at the same time, you know?
It’s got something to do with that girl. It has everything to do with that girl.
While the gaming world has obviously changed a lot over the years, experts say the discrimination and
harassment that's still happening online can have a big impact on young gamers.
Being subjected to bullying, or harassment, or discrimination online, can absolutely have a
negative impact on people. For some young people, we know that the impacts will be
longer lasting, and it might contribute to things like anxiety and depression.
So Linda, what are some tips for someone who might
be experiencing harassment or discrimination online?
Reaching out to someone whether it's a parent or a friend, and sharing how you're feeling can allow
you to feel more supported and less alone. There are some practical things that you can
do as well. So sometimes it is about identifying what are the online spaces that I feel more safe?
And also, what are the settings that I'm more comfortable with? But also there are reporting
mechanisms on the platform and, if the platform doesn't respond, you can go to the eSafety,
their website where you can actually get that bullying and harassment reported.
There's more men sticking up for people and trying to make it a safer space. So it’s not, all hope
is not lost. What we do need is just more people realising that the only way to make that change is
to stand up for it themselves, but also to stand up for their friends and to call
out their friends when they're doing despicable things online.
What do you love about playing games?
Anyone can do it and its connection. It's like it doesn't matter who you are,
where you are or what you're doing in the world – anyone can game if they've
got access to gaming, which I think is beautiful.