Editor’s note: This story contains vivid descriptions of online and verbal gender-based abuses. If you believe that you are a survivor of similar instances, resources are available here.

In the comfort of her gaming chair, Maura Yap, a fourth-year anthropology student, maneuvers her avatar through virtual battlegrounds and thrilling quests. But behind her fierce gameplay lies a secret shield she's forced to wield: a voice changer.

Whenever Yap activates Valorant’s communication channels and her feminine voice is revealed, she becomes an easy target for a barrage of sexualized comments from male players.

“(A male teammate) kept moaning in my headpiece, and calling me ‘mommy,’” Yap recalled. Since then, Yap grew increasingly uncomfortable with the thought of even enabling voice chat.

In first-person shooter (FPS) games like Valorant, team strategies are often coordinated through verbal communication. To engage safely with her teammates, Yap went through the lengths of buying a membership for a software that could make her voice sound masculine.

At the age of 6, Yap’s father introduced her to the world of online gaming. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she embarked on a shoutcasting career and assumed the head position in UP Diliman (UPD) Oblation Esports.

Upon becoming president of the UP Gaming Guild (UPGG) in 2023, Yap observed a concerning trend—every female-presenting member of the organization had encountered in-game harassment.

“Logging into a game can sometimes mean bracing yourself to be, at best, verbally berated and, at worst, sexually harassed,” Yap said. With a voice changer in her arsenal, she could engage in gameplay with lesser chances of being targeted because of her gender.

Virtual Vitriol

Jilly Malabed, a second-year fine arts student who recently competed in the 2023 Diliman Games, shared a similar plight. Like Yap, she also hides her identity in gaming profiles and refrains from using voice chats entirely.

“Whenever they spot my female symbol in Mobile Legends, it’s either they get hostile or objectify me. I go incognito para patas yung tingin nila sa ‘kin,” Malabed said.

Yap and Malabed’s experiences reflect a larger pattern revealed in a 2022 study by Rival Technologies, which found that 88 percent of female gamers worldwide have encountered gender-based harassment in the form of unwarranted comments and post-game private messages.

In the case of Malabed, her ordeal began at the age of 11, when an older male gamer brazenly demanded explicit photos from her during an open-world campaign.

The memory of that encounter continued to haunt her, resulting in a gradual decline of her gaming interest and performance.

“I didn’t play for a long period kasi natakot talaga ako. When I resumed playing, I became more guarded and snarky towards male players,” Malabed said.

After a two-year hiatus, Malabed returned in 2021 to the gaming scene through Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) titles like Arena of Valor and Mobile Legends. In these games, she noticed that choosing certain roles in the game led to sexist insults.

For example, whenever she secures the most kills as a marksman, her teammates assume she is being “carried” by a male support. On the other hand, If she happens to lose while playing an “easy-to-use mage,” she often hears an exasperated “ah, babae pala eh.”

“It often makes us feel that we are not allowed to be called a good gamer just because we excel in a role that is stereotypical to us,” Malabed said.

Eventually, she found a safe haven within Maroon (MRN) Aurora Esports, UP’s pioneering all-female esports team which debuted in 2022.

United by their shared passion for gaming, MRN Aurora defied stereotypes that undermined women as “pabuhat,” when they showcased their prowess against 23 Southeast Asian teams in an international esports competition for the wildly popular mobile game, Wild Rift.

However, forming the all-women gaming ensemble was riddled with setbacks due to the decline of female gamers trying out for the team.

“We barely managed to gather the minimum requirement for a full team with backups,” Malabed said.

UP Maroon Esports, the parent organization of MRN Aurora only has 12 female members, seven of whom are actively participating out of 41. This challenge also plagued their partner organization, UPGG, where five of six esports teams were male-dominated.

“Maraming malalakas [maglaro] na babae pero discouraged sila. Nahirapan kami maghanap ng competitive players kasi the stigma is still there. Bihira lang ‘yung mga nirerespeto ng mga lalaki gaming-wise,” Mai Lagasca, a former esports player for MRN Aurora, shared.

During the pre-game phase of the League of Legends tournament hosted by Tokenized Esports Asset Management (TEAM) DAO in November 2022, Lagasca and her teammates faced hostility which forced their captain, Anna Cruz, to withdraw them from the match.

“Sabi nila, ‘ano ba ‘yang MRN? Moron ba ‘yan?’ Hanggang sa Telegram, tina-trash talk nila kami,” Cruz said. “Nung nakita nila profile namin, ‘ay mga babae pala ‘tong naglaro. Kaya pala ganun ‘yong play style, mahina.’”

When MRN Aurora raised the incident with the organizers, Lagasca said their complaints were dismissed, and the team received sexist remarks.

“Normal lang daw ‘yon. Ang sensitive raw namin. Iyakin kasi babae,” Lagasca said. “Pero hindi naman dapat ganun sa tournament. Dapat professional.”

In a series of screenshots Cruz shared with the Collegian, TEAM DAO appeared to justify why trash talking is inherent in any sport.

“Players trash talk one another as an attempt to make the other players lose their focus in the game,” a Telegram user with the “admin” tag wrote. “There’s no way you can take it out of the game.”

The incident, according to Cruz, wasn’t a harmless case of trash talking, but a blatant attack on their gender.

Game Changers

In 2018, Riot Games, the gaming empire behind hugely popular titles League of Legends and Valorant, faced allegations of gender discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace. For Malabed, these revelations exposed the industry's complicity in perpetuating a hostile environment toward female gamers.

“[The gaming giants] really need to reevaluate their values and what their stances are. Kung ganyan sila internally, what more pa kaya to their players?” Malabed said.

These concerns align with the findings of the 2015 Gender Balance Workforce Survey, which revealed that 33 percent of female game developers in the UK have experienced gender-based harassment, while 45 percent agreed that gender negatively affected their careers.

In the Philippines, the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 and Anti-Bullying Act of 2013 serve as legal measures against online offenses, including harassment within gaming platforms. However, the anonymity of perpetrators in online games hampers prosecution, leaving gamers dependent on in-game affordances like blocking.

Lexis de Castro, a fourth-year communication research student, uses the “mute” and “report” buttons when encountering perpetrators in Valorant. Nevertheless, she finds that reporting harassment incidents often yields no tangible results.

“On my end, pag nagre-report ako, laging walang update kung ano na nangyari. More like ‘thank you for reporting’ and sila na bahala,” de Castro said.

Penalties for various forms of harassment in FPS and MOBA games range from temporary to permanent chat restriction and account suspension. These sanctions are usually based on a player’s cumulative history of violations rather than individual instances.

Under the system, the credit score for harassment is assigned nearly the same value as other reported behaviors such as passive play, spreading cheats, going offline, or poor in-game performance. De Castro observed that penalties for passive play are more “evident” compared to harassment.

To improve in-game reporting systems, De Castro suggests that developers implement a mechanism that ensures users receive swift and transparent updates on the status of their reports.

On the other hand, Cruz contends that reporting mechanisms are not enough to address the toxic culture within online games.

“First-aid lang ‘yon (reporting mechanisms) kung tutuusin. Kailangan talaga siya mapag-usapan on a bigger scale, na bakit pa kailangan mangyari,” Cruz said. “We also need to enlighten yung mga players.”

Similarly, the voice changer may have provided a temporary relief for Yap, but she and countless other female gamers seek to reclaim their voices and partake in gaming without the dire need of such measures.

For Yap, community building is the essence of gaming. While the esports teams of UPGG are predominantly male, she takes pride in the organization’s female-led executive committee.

In 2021, Yap received a scholarship from AcadArena Women of Esports for her contribution in fostering safe spaces for female and LGBTQIA+ gamers.

Within her organization, Yap implements a zero-tolerance policy against sexist and discriminatory behaviors. Along with members of Gabriella Youth UP Diliman, she also spearheaded discussions on violence against women with UPD Oblation Esports.

“You cannot divorce one identity from another so it's important to build spaces everyone can participate in, contribute to, and enjoy without facing prejudice or exclusion,” Yap said. “This is what the fight for inclusivity in gaming is all about—the freedom to exist.” ●

An earlier version of this contributed article was completed for Journalism 121 (The Newsroom) class.