Male Gamers Suffer Gender Violence When They Switch to a Female Voice

In the world of online gaming, thousands of women face a major obstacle: they cannot compete with an open microphone. If the other players hear a female voice, it makes the game impossible for them to play. 

Women in gaming become victims of insults and belittling of all kinds - even being excluded them from the game by opponents and teammates alike. This has a big impact on  players who want to have fun, and especially on those who want to become professionals. Under these abusive conditions, their performance suffers and their chances of moving up the rankings become much more complicated. 

To raise awareness of this problem, BBDO Argentina and Women In Games Argentina, conducted an experiment in which three professional male gamers played with a female voice modulator to experience first-hand how women feel when they try to play online.  The result was as expected: the players saw their average number of wins significantly lowered and declared that it was "impossible" to play under these conditions.

"We want to make visible a situation that’s denounced daily by female gamers all over the world, and that's neither supported by video game companies nor, in most cases, by the gamer community itself," said Christian Rosli and Joaquín Campins, chief creative officers at BBDO Argentina.

Women in Games Argentina (WIG Ar) is a networking community of professionals and enthusiasts in the video game industry, bringing together women and dissenters from all over Argentina. Its main mission is to make the gaming world more inclusive through actions such as visibility, education and the creation of job opportunities for minorities who are traditionally disadvantaged in the world of technology.

"Working to create a diverse and inclusive environment means ensuring the representation of different perspectives, the promotion of necessary roles within the development chain and the consolidation of experiences in both the marketing and the preservation, conservation and analysis of video games as a cultural product," concluded Silvina Lemos of Women in Games.