My Daughter Gets Harassed, My Son Gets Excluded: Gaming’s Gender Divide is Getting Worse.

[PacGuy]

Before the thread gets locked, I want to add how much I hate woke shit in games. I am also a big Asmongold fan

 

[Majormachina]

Before the thread gets locked, I want to add how much I hate woke shit in games. I am also a big Asmongold fan

the ai defender is also an anti-woke asmongold fan. how suprising

 

[PacGuy]

the ai defender is also an anti-woke asmongold fan. how suprising

 

[Metroid_Hybrid]

Take notice of which "side" is doing the name-calling...

 

[Majormachina]

Take notice of which "side" is doing the name-calling...

didn't know "name calling" was another way of saying truth

 

[ArchienineZXAdventArchienineZXAdvent's icon]

I recommend giving them single player games. Online gamming is a lottery and sometimes is good and sometimes awful depending on the server and game but with single player games at least you can live in peace.

 

[PacGuy]

didn't know "name calling" was another way of saying truth

OH YEAH? WELL UR NOT MY REAL DAD

Post automatically merged: May 18, 2026

 

[Clippy]

I was hoping it wouldn't come to this but I guess it was inevitable given the way this kind of discourse usually goes these days.

 

[KamakoKamako's icon]

TL;DR - I hope your kids keep playing video games and find ones they can both enjoy together and/or separately.

As a parent, I'm really curious why the gender divide in gaming feels so much worse now than before. My daughter gets harassed by some male gamers (voice/looks comments), which is awful and pushes girls away. But then her female group won't allow boys—including her own brother. She stepped away from that group. Why is this happening more?

I would say this is unfortunately nothing new. Children of a certain age will judge each other for the smallest differences, and they will often say callous things with little to no consideration for social etiquette.

Believe it or not, I actually think the gender divide in gaming has narrowed considerably over the past 30 years. When I was young, girls playing video games was almost unheard of. It was quite a niche hobby even amongst boys, with many preferring, or being limited to, outdoor play.

Girls enjoying video gaming is much more normalised now than it ever was. It used to be said that "Boys are more interested in things, Girls are more interested in people". Far from a universal truth even back then, but it helped explain the disconnect to me as a kid. I think as times have gone on, video games have expanded to target much wider demographics, and include more niche projects too. We're closer then ever to the idea of "video games for everyone".

And what the heck with woke feminist political doing on video games

For the longest time, you could argue that all games were so catered towards the interests of boys as to be extremely restrictive. It's not an exaggeration to say that if you were to pick up and play 1000 random games from more than 10~15 years ago, in the games where you were playing as a human character, that character would almost invariably be a white male. You may also be saving some kind of damsel in distress, or tasked with defeating an evil Queen. Not to say that any of that is bad, because it isn't. But they're not the only stories being told in games anymore, because they're not the only types of stories that people want to hear. What many alarmists call "woke" "feminist" etc, is oftentimes a story that is simply trying to cater to a wider or different demographic than before. I find it so odd that people solely accuse modern games of being political, when it seems obvious to me that every game with a story has political subtext if you choose to look for it. All works of art are expressions of human ideas and are thus inherently political. Am I crazy for reaching this conclusion?

(note: Creators can still do a poor job at expressing ideas, identities and themes in games, or shoehorn them in in ways that feel at odds with the rest of the game's content).