Low-skilled Video Gamers More Likely to Harass Women

Men love to play video games and women often frown upon such trivial activities, while they would rather do something else. It sounds like a familiar scenario.

While it is true that there are a lot of women who disapprove of men’s constant video games playing, they should know that it has recently been proved that it might not be such a bad habit, after all.

A recent study published in the prestigious journal PLOS One looked at the intentions men had on the Internet, especially when they displayed hostility.

A team of researchers from the University of New South Wales in Australia and Miami University analyzed the way women were treated by men during 163 sessions of a famous first-person shooter called Halo 3.

The results revealed that women were 10 times more likely than men to be exposed to abuse in online chatrooms and three times more at risk of being subjected to harassment in online games.

What was interesting to note was the fact that the worst players distributed the most abusive comments. According to the researchers, this is due to the  fact that these men felt the urge to compensate their low gaming skills with such comments to get rid of the inferiority complex they had.

This basically makes misogyny just the tip of the iceberg and the scientist do not believe this is the cause of harassment when various people play online against each other.

It can be said that the worse the  men played, the more likely they were to write the most abusive comments to offend the female players.

Their aggression is a method that they employ because they feel it can help them maintain their dominant status over women. This is what makes them become hostile and have no regard for their feelings. Deep down, they are hoping to demean the woman’s performance in the game.

In contrast, men who played well were more likely to be more polite and positive to women.

It is a known fact that women are very vulnerable to harassment online. There have been studies that showed that young women (between 18 and 29) face very serious forms of harassment online. These include death threats and other types of intimidation techniques such as doxxing.

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