After a very weird semester this year, my junior year is finally coming to close and this will be my last blog post for DMS 448. Being a straight, white male, I was going into to this class just looking forward to the days where we would be playing World of Warcraft in class, to start thinking a whole lot about the identity of the video game community as whole and how I fit into that community. Being a male, it was easy for me to navigate through the multiplayer universes with online members but after taking this class I finally started to see how hard it must have been for girl gamers and anyone who wasn’t male to just simply trying to enjoy themselves playing online.

Growing up I was always kind of a little shit, but I knew my morals. I always liked to create fun out of a situation, even if It resulted in my brother chasing me down to get his revenge. However, it was different in gaming. I went through stages where would try really hard for games, and then there would be points where I didn’t really care at all. I grew up playing Call of Duty regularly, so it got boring pretty quick. To cope with how boring some games became, I started to find new ways to create my own fun within the video games I enjoyed. That fun can be characterized as trolling, even though I knew my actions weren’t detrimental to someone’s health. I was kind of skittish to say that I trolled back in the day, but my definition of trolling was very off from what we were learning about. I would trap people in corners, ninja defuse bombs, and reveal teammates positions (in casual games not ranked), but would never use my voice chat to make somebody actually bad about themselves, due to being scared half the time to put in my mic. What this class made me realize is the massive depth trolling has; trapping people in corners to telling somebody an awful statement, and the effects that has on somebody or a community.

After writing and researching on the disconnect within eSports for the female gender, I couldn’t imagine trying to load up a game of Call of Duty as a female with her mic in. During the times I would talk to my teammates, I would immediately be called out for being a kid, but as the game would go on it would slowly drift away, especially if I were playing well. Not so much for girl gamers. Back in the day it did not matter how good you were, there was such a persistent stereotype for girl gamers that would make it hard females to even want to participate in playing video games. Thankfully as time has passed, the toxicity towards female gamers has been diminishing ever so slowly over time. What I hope for the future is that video games become so big for both the male and female genders, that it becomes the new normal for girls to play games growing up. I would love to watch eSports events where a female team is facing off against a men’s team. The diverse culture that eSports could obtain, could create a whole new genre of sporting events that nobody has ever seen before.