The moment that inspired this question:
A long time ago I was playing an MMO called Voyage of the Century Online. A major part of the game was sailing around on a galleon ship and having naval battles in the 1600s.
The game basically allowed you to sail around all of the oceans of the 1600s world and explore. The game was populated with a lot of NPC ships that you could raid and pick up its cargo for loot.
One time, I was sailing around the western coast of Africa and I came across some slavers. This was shocking to me at the time, and I was like “oh, I’m gonna fuck these racist slavers up!”
I proceed to engage the slave ship in battle and win. As I approach the wreckage, I’m bummed out because there wasn’t any loot. Like every ship up until this point had at least some spare cannon balls or treasure, but this one had nothing.
… then it hit me. A slave ship’s cargo would be… people. I sunk this ship and the reason there wasn’t any loot was because I killed the cargo. I felt so bad.
I just sat there for a little while and felt guilty, but I always appreciated that the developers included that detail so I could be humbled in my own self-righteousness. Not all issues can be solved with force.
Kind of feels disparate from it being a video game, but it’s difficult to really make this experience another way:
I wanted to play a healer in an MMO. It was a shitty MMO, so healers could only be female characters wearing skimpy armor.
Well, it took about half a minute until I had people walk up to me, to then just stop 3 meters away. From the way they were moving, I have to assume, they were working their cameras to look underneath my skirt, and probably doing so with only one hand.
Some of them were sending me “hello :)” messages, which I guess is basic decency, if you’re going to use my body, but it felt weird, too, since we had nothing to talk about.
All in all, it felt uncomfortable. And I did not even have to fear for them to start touching or even raping me. Plus, I was able to log out, delete my account and basically just leave all of that behind.
Well, except for one thing I did not leave behind: I do not want to be the other side in that experience either.
When sexist objectification accidentally teaches a point against sexist objectification
It happened to me when I played Star Wars: The Old Republic. I’d played it since the beta and finished the story with all classes but I decided to play as a female sith warrior and I constantly got messages from dudes complimenting my thick ass or wanting me to humiliate them and be their dominatrix mistress. It really put into perspective the shit women go through. Especially since my character didn’t even have a skimpy outfit.
I’m a woman who has played SWTOR since its inception 12 years ago and I’ve never had anything like that happen. I’ve played through the whole story on 16+ toons, one for each class/sex combo. I’m not surprised by what you say, just lucky I’ve never experienced it.
Happened to me multiple times on that character. Never with any of my male characters.
I have the opposite experience.
I remember one character in Perfect World MMO… I played an archer, one of the weakest classes. I happened to play a girl. Then one male chatted me up, we did some quests, just had fun.
After a while, he asked me if I wanted to chill a bit, and I agreed. In the game, males can take females into their arms, also everyone can fly. So he took me in his arms and started flying seemingly randomly around the sky.
After a bit we approached some clouds, and lo and behold, we entered an area inside.
It was a hidden well-lit cave with trees, flowers, a waterfall, beautiful colors and a quiet atmosphere. It was small and very cozy, the sun was shining on the lake in the small meadow surrounded by places to lay down. Just the nicest place you can imagine. We just rolled around there and talked about everything.
It still tugs on my heart strings when I recall that moment. Truly one of the most profound experiences I’ve ever had in gaming.