Gaming is for Everyone but My Patience is Not.

I am exhausted.

I absolutely love my job and love what I do and I’m pretty damn good at it. But every time I publish something, a preview or a review or even just an opinion piece on something I have a lot of passion for, I notice the mix of replies commenting on the same things: my race, gender, or appearance.

Of course it’s not every reply that’s negative, but the negative ones do stick more often than I think I’d like to admit. I’ve recently been in a pretty bad mental state, going through a depressive episode and PTSD flare ups, so the comments have gotten to me more than I expected and realized till today. It’s discouraging and annoying seeing the same things being said about me when all I want to do is just share my love for gaming and express my opinions about the games I’ve been entrusted with providing coverage on.

Finding my space in the FPS genre has been incredible and it really made me find that passion for gaming when I was back in high school with my friends hanging out in their basement playing custom Call of Duty games and just having fun. It’s been such a great experience being given trust from my coworkers to provide news and opinions on FPS games.

I’ve slowly gained my confidence in being able to cover games in general and be a voice that can be trusted with the community and provide good feedback. All I want to do is connect with the community and provide an ongoing discussion and dialogue about games. I don’t feel I’ve ever wanted anything more than that from working in games.

Ever since I started out as a Twitch streamer in 2014, I realized I loved having discussions about games, recommending them, and also just talking about what makes specific games special to me and others. Being able to connect with so many people about a media form is kind of amazing, especially since I grew up in a time where the internet was so new and gaming was definitely nowhere near what it is now.

But since I started streaming in 2014, I also saw a side to the gaming community that I didn’t realize was still a problem. I had a very small community on Twitch that was built around positivity and openness. I wanted it to feel like a little family in a corner of the internet and it grew to become a welcoming group of people. But that took a lot of weeding and curating to do.

I recognize that my first and continued actions of banning people who were being sexist, racist, hateful were the key reasons my community stayed a loving positive group. The rest of the internet can’t really be moderated like that. When I first started at IGN I remember being so eager to check my first on camera appearance comments to see how people would react and remembered being so… disappointed.

The first comment I saw was a racist comment and I remember being taken aback. Another comment was about my appearance and I recall not wearing something that different from what my male coworker was wearing but they didn’t get that same sort of negativity.

In my years of being on Twitch I’d honestly become pretty separated from the hateful comments I’d come across occasionally. It was pretty easy to have moderators ban them before I even saw the comments or even just avoid them altogether due to the community we had created. So seeing this was completely different in this new part of the gaming world. Without fail, each video I was present in with my voice and face, I would see negative comments on either my appearance, race, or gender.

When I started at IGN I was pretty skinny, I was actually slightly underweight but I was very thin. Still on camera that wasn’t good enough for the viewers who would comment negative things about me. Saying things like being flat or whatever. Then, after the pandemic hit, I got into powerlifting and put on some muscle and extra mass (and ass nicely enough) and I’m at a healthy normal weight now with extra curves that I’ve always wanted.

But now I’m “fat” and I need to “lay off the food” according to those same viewers. There is no winning, honestly. I used to fight back against all the comments I’d see. I wanted them to know this was not okay and that I saw them. That the person on screen who they thought was completely separated from their comments, could see their hurtful remarks.

That got exhausting quick. It’s always funny to see people tell me “don’t give them the time of day” when I highlight some particularly negative things I see and choose to blast them. The times I choose to showcase those comments, most times I am actually pulling one out of dozens of comments out to highlight how nasty people can be.

I ignore more than what is seen which is, to repeat, exhausting. When I first started out working in gaming, I wanted to really engage with the viewers and other gamers and talk to them in the comments or wherever else they may see my articles and videos. But as time as gone on, I have found myself checking the comments less and less. And it makes me so sad.

I want to connect with you all. I want to talk to y’all about games and I want to discuss things but getting to the people who do want to have an actual conversation or real feedback is a battle to get to. And I’m finding that I don’t want to wade through the shit to get there. 

I don’t think I’ll ever be “good enough” for the negative, racist, sexist assholes who exist in the space. I’ll never be qualified enough for them, I’ll never be hot enough and I’ll never be thin enough. 

I think they forget though, I don’t live for them. I don’t write for them, I don’t dress for them, and I certainly didn’t start working in games for them. They can leave comments all they want but it does not change who I am, it does not change the fact that I am the head of FPS at IGN, it does not change that I can crush a man’s head between my legs like a watermelon if I wanted to.

It does not change me or my momentum.

But it is exhausting and I am not the only woman, particularly POC woman, in games who deals with this abuse daily. It bothers me when people say “I don’t know why you get so much hate” when the answer is just because I am a POC woman in games covering the games that men thought were so male-dominated. Though it almost is a point of pride to say I make men angry just by existing. It’s an interesting but useless superpower. 

When you’re at the forefront of the games industry, especially with news coverage, and you’re on the camera nearly daily, there will always be a slew of nastiness. You know why I’m getting this much hate, or that someone who looks like me is getting the hate. It’s because we exist and are in the space. 

But we belong here and are not going to be leaving. In fact, things are changing. Slowly but surely. I’m not entirely sure if I will get to an end point here but I wanted to just express my frustration and talk out my passion and reaffirm to myself that this is what I want to do. I love this. I love what I do. I deserve to be here and have earned my spot. I’m here to stay and I’ll keep fighting against the shitheads who throw trash at women in the industry when I have the mental capacity to.

Love you and keep gaming.