Tasha Romero has felt the same thing almost every day for over 10 years. A tingling, consuming desire to escape the world around her and forget about the responsibilities her daily life demands.
This safe haven involves a headset, a screen and a keen focus on her hands as she bounces between some of her favorite sanctuaries: League of Legends. Teamfight Tactics. Marvel Rivals. One day, the ASU alum was set up to play a round of Overwatch; all she had to do was turn on her mic and speak. But as soon as her high-pitched, bubbly voice cut the air, a much deeper, abrasive one tried to squash Romero's enthusiasm with a single response:
"Start barking for me."
The comment, however, was nothing new. In fact, it never even pierced the thick skin she’s been building since her childhood days of Halo when she’d get mistaken for a "squeaker" instead of a 14-year-old girl — something she used to her advantage. "(The term) is used for really young boys online, and so I would tell them I'm a girl, or I'd tell them I'm a squeaker," she said.
"I'd (say) 'Oh yeah, I'm a squeaker. I'm just an 8-year-old boy playing this game. Don't harass me, please." As she got older, hiding behind the guise of a child was no longer an option. Wanting to be treated as an equal and freely enjoy playing, Romero often found it easier to stay silent.
"Overwatch was a big one where I couldn’t speak, because if I spoke, they'd (male players) get mad at me," she said. "I would experience that a lot, especially these role-specific games where (male players) will basically throw a game because I spoke ... That's just people being weird."
While this happened a few years ago and Romero no longer plays Overwatch, this interaction is only one of many strange exchanges scattered across her decades-long relationship with video games. "No one would ever really speak up for me at the time," she said. "Even when I played Halo, those spaces (for women) didn't exist; women in gaming were there, but they weren't really there."
For female players like Romero, unwanted comments are a regular part of playing. According to the Women in Games & Bryter survey, 59% of female gamers reported experiencing some form of online harassment, toxicity or gender-based discrimination in 2023.
While these issues have always been tethered to web-based communities, women who game face unique challenges as their behaviors and autonomy are restrained online.
The root of the problem
Christine Tomlinson, an assistant professor of Games and Esports in the School of Games, Arts, Media and Engineering, said that because the gaming community has been predominantly led by "straight, white, cis-gendered men," anyone who did not fit into this demographic was immediately cast out. Today, she said the opposite is happening.
"Historically, a lot of those marginalized groups — and that includes people marginalized in categories of race and ethnicity as well — have not felt comfortable claiming that identity for themselves. They don't feel comfortable calling themselves gamers," Tomlinson said.
"Now (it's) a situation where people are reclaiming this identity and reclaiming this title for themselves, which is really cool." Tomlinson refers to this as "fractured gaming culture," which she defines further in her book "Fractured Gaming Cultures: Marginalized Gamers and New Identities."
While these alternative communities are flourishing, she acknowledged that first-person shooter games like Call of Duty, Halo and Valorant are more likely to draw malice toward female gamers. "All of the toxicity (becomes) too much to deal with, and people will just quit a specific game to try to get away from it," she said. "It's not even necessarily that women aren't interested in these types of games, it's that they don't feel welcome."
According to a study from The Entertainment Software Associate published in 2024, 46% of the global video game population is female. Despite their prominence, Tomlinson said an "open hostility" against female gamers persists due to male homosociality — same-sex, non-romantic social bonds between men. This division, she said, can be traced back to the video game crash of the early '80s, when an over-saturation of poor-quality games led to a large-scale recession in the United States video game industry.
When Nintendo wanted to revive gaming with a family console a few years later, they decided to market it as a toy instead. "At that point, toy aisles were gendered, so they had to pick, 'Are we going to market this as a girl's toy or a boy's toy?'" she said.
"They went with boys, and that impacted decades of marketing and decades of 'Who (are) we making this for?' which comes along with a lot of cultural stereotypes about gender." While this separation was originally contained to major department stores, by the early days of online internet communities in the late '90s, a new space for gender isolation was already emerging.
In 2015, a group of anonymous gamers launched a harassment campaign against women in the video game industry, later known as Gamergate. Coordinated across the social media platforms 4chan and Reddit, the movement gained traction after a 24-year-old programmer falsely accused game developer Zoë Quinn of sleeping with a journalist in exchange for a positive game review. As a result, Quinn — along with feminist gaming critic Anita Sarkeesian and developer Brianna Wu — were subjected to intense online vitriol.
Some have marked Gamergate as a cultural shift in the video game community, one women are still reeling from.
Jonelle Gregorio, a senior studying biological sciences and forensic science, said that women are still not super present in competitive Esports spaces, let alone mainstream entertainment. As of 2026, women account for 35% of Twitch streamers, and in 2023, only 10% of the top 1,000 streamers were women.
"I was asked to go on a live stream with a video game YouTuber, and I noticed that I got a little bit of harassment because, one, I'm a female, and two, I only played as female characters, which is the normal stereotype," she said. Gregorio is not alone in this experience.
Twitch streamer xocheergurlox — who has amassed a platform of over 32,000 followers — often posts clips of men insulting her over voice chat during gameplay. Some have told her to "go back to the kitchen," while others express homophobic and racist insults. But the way female players are treated can go beyond voice chat.
Curious about the differences in gameplay across male and female skins, Gregorio decided to conduct an experiment using one of her favorite horror games, Dead by Daylight. Using the female character Yui Kimura and the male character Leon S. Kennedy, she played 15 rounds as each skin to see who would be killed faster. Yui was consistently eliminated at a quicker pace.
"With Leon, I was left to stay alive. I couldn't really pinpoint a conclusion, besides saying people just wanted to kill the girl (character) faster because the guy is likely to get a better score or something like that," she said.
The new age of streaming
In 2019, Romero was active on Twitch — an interactive livestreaming service for content, most notably gaming, sports and other forms of entertainment. Eager to finesse her skills as a gamer, she entered a Teamfight Tactics competition at a local LAN center in Phoenix, winning first place as the only female contestant.
Sometime later, her livestream went viral. Scarra, an American Twitch streamer and former professional League of Legends gamer, posted on X that he was looking for small creators to "raid," which involves large creators dropping their viewers off at another channel.
"He came into my channel and raided me, and that really set the tempo for my career when it came to content creating at the time," she said. "(Scarra) had 300 plus viewers, and I was sitting there with like 10 ... And so then I got 300 viewers overnight, and then I got 500 followers overnight because of that."
Romero attributes these events to her securing her position in the reality competition show "Making the Squad," that same year. Hosted by European organization G2 Esports, the YouTube-based show took Romero on an all-expenses paid trip to Berlin two weeks before graduation. She took home $10,000.
"The very last (competition) was an interview, and then a talent display ... that's where I say it was more my personality and how well I answered the questions," she said. "I think they (the judges) just liked my personality, and so they ended up choosing me."
With the COVID-19 pandemic on the rise, Romero balanced her winnings between content creation and making ends meet after her job was furloughed. Her Twitch channel, MadhatterxX3, climbed over 1,000 followers; but even as the 27-year-old streamer built a solid, positive fanbase, she still experienced negativity.
After a friend said something in the chat that certain viewers did not like during a particular stream, Romero said she experienced significant levels of toxicity.
"They kept trying to friend me on different accounts on Discord and they found all of that out through my stream. Just because I was gaming and they found me streaming, they were able to find out a lot," she said. "(It was) a privacy concern."
According to Tomlinson, when it comes to services like Twitch, streamers are only able to take action against online abuse after it's happened, saying that it's up to the streamer to protect themselves through moderators, banned words and cultivating a specific community.
"It's (streaming) still getting better, but we're still kind of in this moment of flux where there are these really strong, enduring perceptions that women shouldn't be streaming or shouldn’t be playing specific video games," she said. Although experiencing an invasion of privacy bothered Romero, she said the incident was out of character for her otherwise inclusive audience.
"I feel very blessed and fortunate about that fanbase and being able to create that kind of environment," she said. "I got an influx of all these followers and I didn’t know how to handle it or what to do ... I made sure to create a welcoming space, because as soon as negative comments were said, it got shut down immediately."
ASU gamers
Despite facing difficulties in the general gaming world, on-campus Esport clubs are providing a space for women to engage with gaming more freely. The National Association of Collegiate Esports estimates that over 200 United States colleges and universities currently operate varsity Esports programs, and as of 2022, ASU's Esports Association has over 2,000 active members.
Gregorio is a member of the Society of Wondrous Adventurous Gamers club, based on ASU's West Campus. She served as the club's president for a period of time, saying she wanted to help the community become more accepting and open to everyone, regardless of their video game experience.
"Even if they didn't want to play games, they could just hang out and do their homework in the corner," she said. "I wanted to provide some place for everyone to have something." The club currently hosts weekly meetings where students not only play video games together, but participate in board games, card games and other competitive pastimes.
Gregorio said one of the biggest obstacles surrounding women's inclusivity in the gamer community is belittlement from male players, even during baseline dialogue. On-campus clubs are an opportunity to change that. "It's too bad as a female gamer, you're still in that zone where, if you try to talk to a guy about it, they're gonna either knock you down or don't even start the conversation," she said.
"The last time I tried to talk to a guy about video games, they would just retaliate, or they would just shoot me down and be like, 'You shouldn't be talking about this. Just go to your own conversation.'"
Anna Fiore, a senior studying media arts and sciences, grew up playing LEGO Star Wars with her brother on their PlayStation 2. Today, her favorite game is Fortnite, which she often plays with members of ASU's Friends of Esports club.
"We've seen a big increase in attendance for all our gaming events, which has been really cool to see," she said. "I don't know if it has anything to do with the lounge being in a new spot, (or because) it's triple the size of the old place, and just the technology is newer."
As a self-proclaimed "tomboy," Fiore admitted she's never felt directly excluded as a female gamer. "Personally, I've not, you know, really experienced anything blatantly sexist or whatever," she said. "I would honestly quite say the opposite of that (female exclusion) is true with the Esports Lounge, which is why I really enjoy it."
Sydney Begin, a senior studying bio-medical engineering, shared a similar sentiment about ASU's Video Game Completionist Club. "We're very much a casual gaming club. We don't design games. We're more focused on playing games," she said.
"The community is fairly welcoming and inclusive. It's still very much male leaning, but not (because) they encourage a more male audience." She said that because the club is new and was originally started by all male students, female players have been slower to trickle in — although their demographic has increased over the years.
"From what I've seen, I haven't seen much of any of that inequality (on-campus). Obviously, everyone in the club's friends tease and joke with each other, but it’s never 'Oh, you're a girl. You can't play these games,'" Begin said. "For the most part, a lot of that inequality and separation (of the) wider gaming community hasn't really been here in college."
Edited by Natalia Jarrett and Abigail Wilt. This story is part of The Culture Issue, which was released on March 25, 2026. See the entire publication here.
Reach the reporter at lmesqui2@asu.edu and follow @leahmesquitaa on X.
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