AUTO-ETHNOGRAPHY

I have been playing Call of Duty on a regular basis for the past two years and have experienced the different facets of sexism through the Call of Duty game in both the lobby and in the multiplayer game in a considerable way. When I first started playing, I had a login that could not identify me as male or female. I played regularly at first and never received any feedback and finally after reaching a certain level I decided to turn on my microphone to have a better experience and to be able to talk to my teammates and make the best out of the game, I am very competitive and wanted to achieve the best score every game.

 

From the moment I played with my microphone on, I started getting sexist comments about being a woman varying around my sexuality and how I couldn't play because 'I was inferior and useless and all because of my vagina and that I was more able to hold a penis than to hold a gun'. Through the lobby I repeatedly got horrific comments about stereotypes of women not knowing how to play war games because 'women don't go to war or the army anyways'. The different players attacked me on all the stereotypes of women. It was at this point after several comments that I made the radical choice to just turn off my microphone because I couldn't really concentrate in certain games because I was responding to their comments online and it always got into arguments and I would get comments in private threatening me. 

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Now I've learned that if a male player finds out there's a girl in the game and a mistake is made on his part or we lose the game they put all the blame on the woman. 

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I think that many women who play video games, according to the different testimonies online, feel injustice and problems with the rituals put in place by male players, including threats, gossip, sexism... 

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The video game is really a reflection of the sexist society we live in and the comments I received during the time I played call of duty made me realize that I was not playing as well because I didn't have my microphone on and I couldn't communicate with my teammates. My use of call of duty has actually decreased because I feel much less comfortable. Fortunately I don't have an username that can identify me as a woman.