After a female Twitch streamer posted a clip in which she encountered rude ‘Halo’ players telling her to quit the game, Xbox co-creator Jonathan Blackley has called for more regulation to combat toxicity in online games.
On December 19 Twitch affiliate Grenade Girl was streaming her gameplay in the first-person shooter ‘Halo Infinite.’ In one of the matches, in which she was apparently underperforming, a couple of players in the voice chat made their frustration known and told her to “Just f*****g leave” and “Go play Fortnite or whatever the f***, show your tits on f*****g Twitch, whatever.” Ending with “You notice how Master Chief was never a woman?”
Grenade Girl later clipped the exchange and posted it on Twitter, commenting that “no woman should have to deal with this.”
While many users responded to the tweet by saying the streamer should grow thicker skin if she wanted to survive in the anonymous world of online games, others suggested she should simply learn how to mute the voice chat, which is a feature present in almost all online games.
Grenade Girl made a follow-up post saying she wasn’t ‘butt hurt,’ but that she was frustrated that she was targeted because of her gender.
However, shortly after her initial post other users started pointing out an apparent hypocrisy, as people started posting clips from her other streams where she similarly trash-talked fellow players based on their gender.
“You look like an idiot, dude,” she told a player during her stream. “I’m laughing at you, because your d**k is so f*****g small. And you’re probably still a virgin.”
Ignoring the two-sided nature of the trash talk and focusing on the misogynistic aspect of the insults, co-creator of the Xbox Jonathan ‘Seamus’ Blackley joined the conversation, writing on his personal Twitter account that “this wasn’t the future of xbox live we envisioned."
He went on to say that it was past time that something was done to ‘clean up the environments’ in online games. Blackley then went into a back-and-forth with ‘Polygon’ co-founder Russ Pitts about what measures could be taken to combat online toxicity.
They arrived at the conclusion that men should be encouraged to report misogyny and that women, people of color and minorities should be empowered and promoted to positions of authority in moderation across platforms to further enable self-policing in online games.