soycrates: I started using voice chat in Competitive Overwatch so I could coordinate with teammates.
soycrates: I started using voice chat in Competitive Overwatch so I could coordinate with teammates. While playing Zarya, I encountered a Reaper who kept getting himself killed. He demanded someone on the team change to a healer when we already had one healer and too many offense champions. I finally switched onto a healer even though we needed the tank. At one point he spammed “Need Healing” when he was only at 75% health, so I piped up and said “dude, you don’t need healing”. The rest of the game was just him complaining that I wasn’t playing well, and that “our healers suck”. The 14 year old kid he was being nice to said “idk, they’re healing me”. After the grown ass man griped more I said “stop complaining or else you’re not gonna get any heals”. “Are you a girl or a boy? You shouldn’t be playing this game. Could you at least try?” he just would not. shut. up. And when he wasn’t just trying to insult me, he was acting totally nice to the kid, asking oh, when did you start playing and what characters are you liking so far? The kid didn’t insult me once. That fetid piece of garbage was just setting such a bad example for him and I wish someone else had called him out. Second round comes by, I switch to attack, I am on fire the entire round, AND I get play of the game. While watching my POTG reel, he’s still going on about how useless I was. While watching all the kills I got. We won the round. There was no reason for him to be in a shitty mood save for the fact he didn’t like that I was a woman. I could have turned the voice channel off but I was waiting until he saw the play of the game I KNEW I got to hear him go “Oh, she actually did good” or at least feel some sense of… I don’t know, embarrassment? Embarrassed that he had been complaining about my performance the entire time when lo and behold I had the highest stats. But he didn’t. He didn’t realize shit. He sat through it, laughing at me, stuck in his deluded little world where women are automatically lesser than he is. Picking apart my multiple kills and telling me why they weren’t that good. It was dumb of me to think that just because I played extremely well he would change his opinion on an entire gender. Sexist Fucking Assholes might be nice to you, but that doesn’t mean they’re a nice person and it doesn’t mean they’re in the right. People (particularly men) need to realize that women just existing in gaming spaces and being skilled doesn’t mean shit to misogynists. It didn’t matter that I went on to win 10 competitive games that night. It wouldn’t matter if I was master ranked. Men don’t shit on girl gamers because they’re bad, they shit on them because they’re women. This was almost a year ago now. There are a lot of things I could bother to say about it, but the most important would be: I know he quit the game and I didn’t, because I choose to try and make it a positive experience for myself and others. He chose to try and make it a negative experience for others, and chances are he made it a majority negative experience for himself. Being a bigot in video game chats may give you a temporary chuckle, but you’re bitter and angry overall. It’s going to be a bitter, angry experience no matter how many people you think you’ve dominated with hate speech.Being this kind of man is inefficient, counter-intuitive to your own well-being. Men like him are just in their own way when they could be having genuine fun instead.I believe people need to feel okay with expressing their emotions even if someone is trying to make you express that emotion because they want some sort of control or victory over you. It is valid to be upset if someone’s trying to upset you. Repressing your emotions doesn’t mean they haven’t “won” or that you “won” and when you think in those terms, you start playing THEIR game. I stopped worrying about whether idiots think they’ve “won” by eliciting a response from me, and I feel infinitely better about my reactions and responses to other people because of it. In a sense, competitive gaming helped me feel less like interactions with negative people is a competition to be won. -- source link