Good Game
by Yu-Tung Cheng
(Content Warning: This article contains video and audio footage of violent video games–including sexist and racial slurs in voice communications–and flashing screens)
“GG (good game) boys,” I hear my teammates say when winning an online multiplayer first-person shooter match. As our soldier avatars began doing celebratory T-bag dances and chatting with each other, it is calm. Then, suddenly I am bombarded with a cacophony of racial slurs, sexist remarks, and classist insults in my headset. I've always hesitated to speak up in the voice chat, even when it’s peaceful, when I'm at the top of the leaderboard, or when teammates call out my username.
“He’s too poor to afford a headset,” they assumed, laughing. This happened during a 6 v 6 Search and Destroy match, where eliminated teammates spectate the last player standing. As the final player, I had everyone watching from my perspective, expecting me to “clutch” it. Every move and callout were critical—not just for success, but also because a poor play would bring instant judgment and shame from the team.
As a female gamer, talking in the voice chat is seen as an invitation for harassment. I am subjected to comments like: “Go make me a sandwich!” “It’s a WAMEN?” “Send nudes!” “Do you mind me asking your ethnicity?” William Cheng defines this construct as “an acoustemological closet for women: damned if you speak, homogenized if you don’t (Barz and Cheng 2019, 309).” Toxicity in online gaming, often driven by linguistic profiling in voice chats or usernames, targets players based on gender, race, and sexuality. I’ve experienced it firsthand and seen it silence non-white and non-male gamers, making these spaces increasingly exclusionary.
What makes a good game in this hardcore mode is the gratification of the masculinist delights similar to hardcore pornography (deWinter and Kocurek 2017, 58), where the culture pleasures itself with misogynistic and racist ideology. GamerGate, a 2014 harassment campaign targeted female, queer, and trans gamers, producers, and developers. The movement consistently reminded players that cyber harassment and violence bring real-life threats–colliding with reality and making it clear that the cyber utopia where individuals can transcend race, gender, and class–does not exist. A “good game” often comes at the expense of feminists—particularly trans and queer gamers and producers—who face doxing and rape threats. This toxic culture enables white supremacist ideologies, such as those found on platforms like 4chan, to infiltrate mainstream media and shape the current political landscape in the U.S.
Act 1
Are You a Gril(l)? is my composition written for Yarn/Wire, a quartet featuring two pianos and two percussionists based in New York known for their experimental approach to contemporary music. This piece, my first attempt at opening a dialogue with my gamer self, offers the audience a soundscape of being a girl gamer. It begins with the sound of breathing–inhaling and exhaling–before introducing a death metal drum beat (1:42), reflecting the overwhelming intensity of voice chat and the chaotic energy of in-game gunfights. As the music shifts into a phase driven by square-wave synth pulsations (2:30), it builds to a dense cloud of spectral noise and sound (4:13). This shifting soundscape evokes a disorienting state, capturing what it feels like to exist under the pervasive influence of toxic masculinity. In the aftermath (6:16), Sae Hashimoto from Yarn/Wire plays a mournful vibraphone passage, leaving a moment for reflection.
Intermission
Lisa Nakamura highlights several strategies based on recent research on racism and sexism in gaming aimed at disinfecting this toxicity (Nakamura 2017, 2). One key approach is to integrate practices in the gaming industry that actively promote inclusivity. However, these efforts often depend on undervalued and even punished labor, like community moderation (Nakamura 2015, 106). The backlash against such initiatives became evident during GamerGate in 2014. This campaign, which began with harassment of female developers and critics under the veneer of upholding “ethics in games journalism,” later expanded its hostility to include diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts, labeled as an anti-woke agenda. In 2023, Sweet Baby Inc.–a consulting firm working to support diversity in gaming–also faced severe harassment and death threats, revealing the persistent opposition to inclusivity within the gaming culture.
Standardizing the use of voice changers could help camouflage perceived gender in online gaming spaces. While voice modulation may appeal to minority gamers facing harassment in the sonic realm, its effectiveness in allowing gamers to integrate into the virtual social experience fully remains uncertain.
Michael Warner, in The Trouble with Normal, discusses the desexing of the gay identity by drawing upon the example of Hero, a gay magazine from 1998 that gave gays and lesbians a magazine without queer sexual images. (Warner 2000, 48–49). This “self-regulated” act functions similarly to the voice-changer. A stigmaphobic world is one where queer identities conform to stigmatization. Hiding a voice that sounds like “a girl” or “sounds gay” to be accepted in an oppressive gaming community exacerbates the hegemony that offers no exit, a necropolitical order for these oppressed to cease existing.
Act 2
My second interdisciplinary work, a multimodal ethnography, collectively gathers responses from a group of non-gamers regarding cyber harassment and bullying. Set up in a Max/Jitter workspace, this interactive project plays a simulated first-person shooter gameplay video, prompting testers to respond to insults and combat harassment. This multimodal ethnography captures testers’ reactions through both microphone-recorded audio responses and text input within the Max patch. The collected responses from non-gamers range from shock and disbelief to stunned silence and anger.
Toxic player blaming the female gamer “Look what you did!”
The tester replied, “Well, pay attention.”
The toxic player harassed, “Are you a Gril?”
The tester answered, “ I am a vegetarian.”
The toxic player threatened, “I'm gonna beat you like my drunk dad!”
The tester laughed and retorted, “No—I'm gonna beat you.”
Anger can serve as a weapon in the fight against racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression online. Audre Lorde states that one should use anger, turning it into “illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter (Lorde 2012, 10).” Through this ethnographic collective, I have built a toolkit of responses dismantling sexism and toxicity in voice chat. I no longer remain silent or scour the internet for free voice changer trials. Instead, I use humor, ridicule, and courage–channeled through anger–to speak up in game, coming out as an unrestrained flux of energy that challenges the oppressive systems in the sound space of first-person shooters.
(double-click to play)
Trigger Warning: This video contains content that may be distressing to some viewers, including the use of racial slurs.
Epilogue
Sometimes, I play "rat-style," camping in a spot–this time, a closet. Despite dying many times, I find joy in spraying and annoying the enemy team with a flamethrower (one of the least-used weapons in the game). One player, repeatedly dying from the collateral damage of the flames, typed in the voice chat, accusing me of staying in the closet too long and telling me to get the fuck out.
In Bonnie Ruberg's “Playing to Lose: The Queer Art of Failing at Video Games,” queer failure doesn’t just mean falling flat; it means taking pleasure in that fall (Malkowski and Russworm 2017, 203). A good game comes from a win, and a win is to fulfill the heteronormative expectation. To queer a gameplay experience is to take pleasure in the ecstasy of crashing and burning: my type of good game.
References:
Barz, Edited by Gregory, and William Cheng, eds. 2019. Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
deWinter, Jennifer, and A. Carly Kocurek. 2017. “‘AW FUCK, I GOT A BITCH ON MY TEAM!’: Women and the Exclusionary Cultures of the Computer Game Complex.” In Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games. Digital Game Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Lorde, Audre. 2012. “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.” August 12, 2012. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/speeches-african-american-history/1981-audre-lorde-uses-anger-women-responding-racism/.
Malkowski, Jennifer, and TreaAndrea M. Russworm, eds. 2017. Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games. Digital Game Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Nakamura, Lisa. 2015. “The Unwanted Labour of Social Media: Women of Colour Call out Culture As Venture Community Management.” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 86:106–12.
———. 2017. “Afterword: Racism, Sexism, and Gaming’s Cruel Optimism.” Undefined. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Afterword%3A-Racism%2C-sexism%2C-and-gaming%27s-cruel-Nakamura/8a14d0d897dbc9688e4b5fd6f5f728f37e1b3bc1.
Warner, Michael. 2000. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. 1. Harvard University Press paperback ed. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press.
