No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry

This is the sort of journalism I would expect to find on Jezebel, rather than Polygon.

Filled with us vs. them mentality: no man can understand, men all think this, men always tell us that. Men never deal with harassment, death threats, or rape threats. Well, here's a little variation on Hitchens' Razor: what can be proven with anecdotal evidence can be dismissed with anecdotal evidence.

http://www.edge-online.com/features/toxic-games-community-co...

http://i.imgur.com/HBxSZBF.jpg

The worst of it is, one paragraph opens with "Women in the industry are told by men what is valid for us to feel." and only a scant few paragraphs later is an entire article written by a woman telling men how they should act and feel. Part of which is "so great" that it deserved to be made into an "inspirational poster". Everyone thinks what they have to say is inherently valuable, I'm pretty sure that's a major component of the human condition.

Wow, I'm really glad I read this.

I'm making a video game myself right now, and this such a relevant issue that I never even thought about. It never occurred to me that women in the gaming industry were mistreated, but it kind of makes sense-- video games often cater to young males, and often the easiest way to cater to those young males is by over-sexualizing women.

I'm not going to say that that strategy doesn't work on me (I am, myself, a young male), but I am going to say that I don't think it's right for games and other media to capitalize so heavily on that. I think the over-sexualization of women in games and in other places often makes men think with their penises instead of their brains. They say and do stupid things that they really never should. It's inexcusable, and it's a two-way street: men should know better, and mass media shouldn't be encouraging that kind of thinking. I also don't think it's right that someone who just wants to follow their dreams in the gaming industry (or really any industry) should ever experience what any of the case studies in this article experienced.

I'm not sure what I can do to help here, but if I find a way, I hope I can! Right now I'm working on a gaming startup with a couple of my best friends and, at the very least, we have made a commitment to ourselves to never resort to over-sexualizing women in order to advertise our game (many similar games do, and it frustrates me). I'm also going to make a conscious commitment right now to be aware the way I behave around women in the gaming industry and make sure I'm doing my job to help stop the issue, not propagate it.

Thank you so much for sharing this.

It is sort of related. It's a rant. I have many friends in the STEM field, or friends I play video games with. And I simply cannot introduce them to any of my females friends, or any friends from different social circles for that matter. They are a special breed of people, brilliant and quick, and they are also egotistic and mean.

They are very quick to make jokes of your mistakes or shortcoming. The way they pry and tease is the manifest of how exceptional they think they are. They believe they are above social norms. Being nice is for the weak and unenlightened mass. They have an opinion, they will have you know.

They deliberately choose to ignore and not understand why making certain remarks and some conversation topics make people uncomfortable. And when they want to insult you, they will insult in the most uncivilized way. When they want to hurt you, they simply do not understand when a line is crossed.

And I am sure they are not the minority. Even if they are, they are the loud and obnoxious minority that gives everyone a bad name. I absolutely understand why people decline to be part of that community, why there aren't as many females in that workspace. Stigmas and stereotypes are for a reason.

I always find it very strange that we don't apply spam filters and recent machine learning techniques to the problem of filtering comments.

If I looked at my email unfiltered, I'd think one in three of the people sending me messages in the past day were unusually concerned about the state of my penis.

From a not-adding-anything-to-the-discussion perspective, dead baby pictures and random threats of rape or acts of violence are even less useful than those adds telling me how to work at home. From a cost-benefit perspective for the people involved, it's very easy for someone relatively unimportant to get an outsized influence on social interactions if they can easily reach people who actually matter with harassing comments, at virtually no cost to themselves.

So why don't we use tools to shape the online discussion and feedback mechanisms, the same way we do with our email inboxes?

Perhaps I'm just too out of the loop to see it being done.

> I lead a development studio that makes games. Sometimes, I write about issues in the games industry that relate to the equality of women. My reward is that I regularly have men threatening to rape and commit acts of violence against me.

My suspicion is that she is not threatened because she leads a development studio, but because she is a writer. She's not asking for it, but she is making herself a public figure and they are usually targets of such behaviour.

I'd hope that the women I work with aren't regularly getting rape threats from my co-workers...

> I’ve personally never heard of a man in the games industry getting rape threats for having an opinion.

Because men are not women, and women are not men, it goes a little something like this: rape is an act of power (not sexual satisfaction). The threat of rape is the threat of asserting power over someone else. When these lowlifes are offended by a woman, they respond with the animal instinct of threatening to overpower them and rape is the closely available tool. None of them would actually ever have the guts to rape, I'm sure.

When men have contrarian opinions, rape is not threatened, but a whole chain of events occurs, the purpose of which is to remove as much power as possible from that man.

Consider famous causes that you know of where men who are not independently wealthy and have voiced opinions that are controversial to some. What happened to them? They were fired, demoted, jailed, investigated etc. The PyCon case some time back comes to mind.

Consider famous cases of women who did the same. What happened to them? Threats of rape. The same woman involved in the PyCon case, I'll bet, received rape threats. Additionally, she did get fired because she was a public spokesperson for her company.

These threats are about asserting power over dissenting viewpoints in a bid to make yours dominant. You perhaps won't outright hear of a man getting threatened with rape, except maybe in prison or during a competitive game, but you will definitely hear of men being hurt in different ways for having opinions that make people uncomfortable.

I read articles like this, and I think to myself, "Damn, I'm glad I'm not one of those guys."

Then every time I see a photo of Marissa Mayer, I think, "Damn, she's hot." And then I hate myself for making that my first thought instead of something more equal like, "Damn, she's accomplished and brilliant" like I do when I see a photo of Robert Downey Jr or Idris Elba or Benedict Cumberbatch. But no, if it's a woman, my first thought is about her looks instead of... well, instead of anything else.

I'm really glad I don't have kids (yet), and in a lot of ways, I hope I don't have a daughter. I'd rather raise a son to treat women fairly and with respect than to have a daughter who has to live in a world where articles like this are written. But if I had a daughter... I'd do my best to help her be strong and confident, and to make her way successfully in a world where this kind of shit goes on.

So senseless. :(

It's depressing that the first few top level comments here have been deleted due to their ridiculous content, people presumably read the article then decided to post things like "its banter, get over it. Men deal with it all the time".

Just shows how deep the problem goes I guess.

> We live in a society that’s sexist in ways it doesn’t understand. One of the consequences is that men are extremely sensitive to being criticized by women. I think it threatens them in a very primal way, and male privilege makes them feel free to lash out.

I don't mean to "Not all men" this, but I wish we would stop treating behavior like this as a normal part of the male psyche. It's not. It's seriously disturbed. It's an unfortunate consequence of the Internet and any area where you have a large audience that a small active segment is going to produce a large impression.

Yes, maybe your friend and even most men feel differently when a woman criticizes them than when a man does. No it is absolutely NOT a normal, male response to start making rape and death threats because of it.

I think these responses are a combination of seriously disturbed individuals and literal or mental children who haven't yet fully internalized that there are real live human beings on the other end of the keyboard and are trying to be shocking.

I think making a few examples would deter the idiots who think this is amusing. I mean, that one kid in Texas made an offhand, sarcastic comment about shooting up a school and got himself arrested within a couple of days. It would be nice to see police take other threats as seriously.

I'm a male in the software industry, and I never really know what to make of these sorts of articles. It's terrible that someone should have to go through this. The anonymity of the internet is a great and terrible thing -- some people really get off on being horrible to people, and unfortunately when that person is a male, and they know they're talking to a woman, the low-hanging fruit is base sexism. But what is supposed to be done about it? More specifically, what am I supposed to do about it? I know that I find that kind of behavior abhorrent. I would never think that stuff, let alone say it. Knowing my coworkers as I do, I'm 99% sure that the same can be said of them. So, I just don't know how to respond to this. Should I feel guilty? For what? I didn't do this stuff. The issue that I have with this is that I feel like I'm supposed to feel like a bad person because of my gender. Quotes like "men tend to inherently [insert stereotype here]" are apparently great enough to be made inspirational posters out of. Is the author oblivious to this sexism? Or is it OK, because it's targeting men?

I think it's deplorable what the author and the women she describes have gone through. I think that we all should re-examine our behavior to ensure that we aren't perpetrating this sort of thing. But I wish that the article, and others like it, weren't couched in terms of demonizing half of humanity.

Ironically, "woman is the nigger of the world" is a quote from Yoko Ono and the title of a song she did with John Lennon; it was meant to be a piece of feminist sloganeering.

Somebody got a bit confused.

While this is all horrible things human beings are saying to other human beings, the idea that men do not get criticized is false. I wish the article would stop trying to repeat this over and over again, since it distracts from the issue it brings up: The words use when people send insult directed at women.

Insults are different when directed at a women than men, and the cause is not as simple as typing the word sexism. Insults, like swearing, is rooted in social norms. People use terms and concept which is understood by others in their social environment. This is why men will not get rape threat, since in most social groups, people think men can not get raped. It make no sense to threaten others with something that they do not think could happen in the first place.

People who send insults are expecting a predicted reaction (Remember several research papers making this specific statement). If a specific insult directed at a woman would not result in the same reaction as if it was directed at a man, then the insulter will change which words they use when insulting men. Which words they use has actually very small meaning given that they receive the expected reaction.

Rather then talking about how women get harassment and men do not, maybe we should talk about why the culture of insults are so personal and violent against women, and so focused on skill and ability for men. Why do not men get insults like "dam, you look ugly" and women get "don't quit your day job, you suck!". When was the last time you saw someone go up to female speaker and say "you do not understand this!", or loudly being argued with by someone in the audience over a technical detail.

Culture for male and female behavior is not identical when it comes to bad behavior. The article says: "I have yet to talk to a man who has had to call a police officer due to a stalker". The obvious reason is that female stalkers tend to focus on celebrities (small number of people), while male stalkers tend to focus on people they find in the local area. Stalking is bad, be that male or female stalker, and who they target is not same. Pretend that one do not exist because it is different is not going to make sexism less in society.

What should a game studio to do counter this and make its employees safe from it?

I'd say that internet could use a whole lot more killfiles, hellbanning, spam filters trained not only against commercial messages, whitelisting. The only reason that default is to allow for communication is that it's easier to implement. In the old times only kings could afford decent cutlery. Nowadays every peasent can. When I try to communicate with Obama today I won't succeed. Maybe in not so distant future if someone would want to communicate with me he will have to prove that he has something I'm interested in hearing. And another rape threat is rarely interesting.

Despite the actual point of this article, I'm really happy to see the frequency of posts from many writers at Polygon/The Verge about sexism and related issued in the gaming industry and game development. I'd guess and say they publish at least one or two articles on the topic per week, and all of them are fantastic. To whomever at Polygon/The Verge that decided to go on this editorial route, thousands of kudos.

"Footnote: Two of the names of women that agreed to interviews for this article were changed at their request."

It's telling (about the state of the industry) that two of these women felt uncomfortable sharing their names even while interviewing for an article about this very topic.

It's sometimes sad to look at our social maturity or lack thereof. But articles like this are important to force us to look at ourselves. The problems highlighted in the article are a result of the anonymity of the internet and the immaturity and natural aggressiveness of young men. It seems we're fighting our primitive selves, and for that there are no easy answers.

Would just like to say though, that most men are not the perpetrators of such acts, and in fact are quite often victims of men like these in one way or another. Women have many natural allies amongst men.

Anyway, it seems to me that such behavior wont survive being exposed to daylight, and that over time progress will be made.

I would argue that men don't get rape threats because most men don't see rape as a realistic threat to themselves.

Instead, we have our masculinity, loyalty, abilities, work ethic, and/or integrity attacked, because those are the things that cut us to the core.

I'm not saying that women don't care about those things, I'm just saying that when someone is trying to be a dick they're going to go after the lowest hanging fruit.

Of course, I think we all need to keep working to end this kind of harassment. We all know it exists, and most of us guys disapprove of it, but few of us are taking the extra step of saying "that's not ok, dude" when it happens.

In the meantime, I've had some pretty hurtful/maddening stuff directed at me in the past by a group of people online, and I learned that you either take the Phil Fish route and flame out, or you have to find some way to distance yourself emotionally from the bullshit or ignore it. It's fucked up, but you have to protect your sanity until the problem is fixed (which it might never be).

Edit: Unrelated to the topic, but it's interesting how this comment got a large number of upvotes before the downvote brigade started trickling in. I'm not anti-feminist here, folks. Just trying to elaborate on the discussion and hopefully learn some things.

> "When a woman criticizes me, it goes to a different part of my brain than when a man on my team does. I get defensive really quickly."

This point isn't stressed enough. Majority of people treat criticism differently depending on the gender of the source. Other types of interaction are also hugely dependent on gender. We even refer to each other with different pronouns depending on the type of sexual organs our bodies are equipped with. This isn't right.

I was disappointed by the "Letters to Women" video because I kept waiting for a gender-specific slur, and there weren't any! A different "letter" might have been chosen to make the point better.

If you put your anthropologist hat on, being called a "tasteless, stupid-ass, bitch-ass f--ktard" who should "go f--k your slutty-ass bitch mother" is a kind of acceptance. You're on the receiving end of all the same deeply offensive, vaguely emasculating language you'd get if you were "one of the guys" who happens to be a stupid noob, being criticized for your taste in games(!) along with your general cluelessness and total impotence and inadequacy. It's the kind of acknowledgment you get when a fellow rapper pours his heart into explaining that you suck and he rules.

I guess what I'm saying is, this letter is an example of "you-are-a-low-status-male" invective, and it's pretty easy to walk into a stream of it in certain communities. The fact that it was knowingly directed at a woman is what strikes me first, and in that sense it seems less like sexism than some sort of f--ed up equality.

I'm going to leave this here, don't accept the form of argument from the article quite yet:

>Keeping in mind that actual stalking has never been dealt with in any significant way ever, the desire of a few female writers to curb online anonymity wouldn't be enough to get an @ mention, except that this happens to coincide with what the media wants, and now we have the two vectors summing to form a public health crisis. "Cyberbullying is a huge problem!" Yes, but not because it is hurtful, HA! no one cares about your feelings-- but because criticism makes women want to be more private-- and the privacy of the women is bad. The women have to be online, they do most of the clicking and receive most of the clicks. Anonymous cyberbullying is a barrier to increasing consumption, it's gotta go.

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/05/cyberbll.html

Yeah, this is bad. It really is about the culture in which we are raised.

Boys are raised to deal with these types of insults and threats by standing up for yourself and being assertive (even aggressive) when dealing with hate.

So, boys learn to seek out weakness and exploit it. Boys also learn that from an early age, when you talk shit or are an asshole that you could end up doing it to the wrong person and end up with a whole world of shit.

And by the time they are older, boys have generally learned this lesson. Essentially, boys learn to fear other boys.

However, boys don't learn to fear women in the same way, so they continue this type of asshole behavior to adult women since they don't fear the repercussions.

Basically, women in the gaming industry are not raised in the culture are seen as weak outsiders who can't defend themselves (easy targets for assholes).

It's sad and I don't really see a way around it.

I'm not shocked by this at all. Spend some time in a Twitch channel hosted by a woman and you'll see what kind of misogynist, overly sexual advances these streamers have to endure every day.

Yes, some women streamers do flaunt their sexuality (wearing low tops while streaming for instance), and while many view this as perpetuating objectification of women, I view this type of decision as a marketing decision. I think these women are intelligent enough to know sex sells, but aren't so shallow as to actually believe their attractiveness defines who they are.

Unfortunately, the average person is a moron, and it doesn't help matters when group-think is rampant in chat rooms.

My view of how these things happen: Game studio is developing a game revolving around Battle of Nanking. Two teams compete on how many civilians they can rape and kill in five minutes.

Presumtive buyers are drooling with excitement over this great game.

A woman joins the company and start arguing that the game is bad for our youth. It promotes rape culture. The game should instead revolve around a secret romance between two homosexuals in the army.

The people at the studio start thinking that, you know maybe she is sort of right, and post that on their blog.

Those who have been longing for the game get extremely upset. They feel that an outsider is destroying "their" game.

The craziest few of them threaten the woman.

> "They filled my Tumblr mailbox with the usual anon posts like, ‘Die, you fucking cunt!’ And, ‘You'll know when I rape your mouth hole, bitch!’ When I turned off anonymous messages, they made new Tumblr accounts and continued to spam me. Later, they discovered the link to my personal webpage and sent hate mail through there. I still get an occasional random hate message through my website."

There is an assumption that all these anonymous posts are from men, but there is the possibility that some are from women.

I've read a few articles like this, but I cannot remember one which looks at sexism from a world wide web oriented viewpoint.

How does the Feminist movement square itself with the fact that many women actually like being prized for their beauty and sex appeal?

I'd like to start a campaign called "It's cool." It would require some form of an indicator. A sticker or button perhaps? Women who like having their beauty and/or sex appeal noticed could wear it on their person. Posters with these women could have it on display. Men would know, "It's cool" she likes that I appreciate her looks.

Would this satisfy the Feminists? Doubtful. More than likely these women would be attacked and ridiculed for what makes them happy.

One thing I could understand that why she's being hated is, it is not the first time she post feminism stuff with strong opinion on website, and then refuse anyone to comment it. She just acts like those garbage class politician that trying to brainwash you while preventing ppl from discussing the sensitive opinion. I wouldn't say it's owned, but I know why some ppl will not like her.

Can someone explain to me if this is just the online gaming culture intruding on the professional game dev industry or actual industry professionals making comments like this? I have been heavy into CSGO this year and rarely does a match go by without very offensive comments from someone. I have grown a thick skin to this sort of thing online but could not imagine it intruding into real life.

>One of the consequences is that men are extremely sensitive to being criticized by women

What the fuck? Only the weakest and most cowardly men negatively react to criticism from women (and other men).

If someone is objectively or logically criticizing you, then they're doing you a huge favor. Thank them, regardless of their gender.

HN clearly sunk this thread. Why?

Why can't we get any sensible articles about this problem? Do they just not get any attention on aggregation sites?

Call this "victim blaming" if you want, but I'm going to critique the article because it's bad. I'm not commenting on any of the surrounding events because, honestly, claiming you've been harassed in the past doesn't excuse bad journalism -

She starts the article by alienating her intended audience: Leading with a "triggering content" warning and the worst example she had may be eye-catching, but causes both men and women who might be sympathetic but ignorant to immediately write it off as extremist hysteria. I had a lot of trouble pushing myself to read the rest of the article.

Her evidence is severely lacking: Again, case studies are good for sensationalist articles, but they don't hold up to any amount of skeptical scrutiny. She presents 4 brief accounts and two of them are relatively anonymous. You can collect four respectable people who believe just about anything if you try.

She uses sweeping generalizations: All men feel this way, all women feel that way, all women are censored, ect. Even more insulting to an intelligent reader is that she backs up her assertions with hack psychology.

She refutes statistical trends with anecdotes: "The Myth: The game industry is a field men are drawn to more than women." I'm sorry, but the male predisposition towards video games and game development is just a statistical fact. Yes, there are exceptions. Yes, it's less true now than it once was due to advances in technology. Don't lie to your reader and tell them it's a myth, rather, explain why it doesn't excuse the behavior.

I think this is a problem in some places. I want women to feel comfortable in game development and journalism. I want women to feel more comfortable in a lot of industries. This article is the wrong way to spread awareness.

These are the sorts of issues that make one wish anonymity online was impossible or always traceable. The cowardice that lives in people is astounding. For those muttering the free speech line: freedom of speech ≠ freedom of consequences.

We need to fix this. Whenever someone feels like they are in a position of power, things like this happen. This power can come from anonymity (eg: the internet), it can come from a position of authority (boss), or sometimes it can come from just being dominated by an in-group with a much smaller out-group.

What's happening here seems like a mix of the power of anonymity on the internet mixed with the fact that women are underrepresented in game development. The former lets people harass, taunt, and threaten with many times very few consequences, whereas the latter leads to favoritism to other members of the in-group, and derogation of the out-group.

So what can we do? Unfortunately, the issues are larger than me to grasp. But since we are on Hacker News, I'll give a few technological solutions I've taken a few minutes to come up with that may help:

1. We have spam filters right now on email -- what if those filters also watched for hate words? If it met a certain threshold, the message would not be shown in the main article. We could mark email/comments as "hateful", and when it reached a certain threshold that comment would be hashed and added to a repository that could be checked against for future comments. People would try to get around it like they do spam filters (I H.A.T.E Y.O.U., etc), but with enough training I feel a good deal could be filtered out.

2. HR departments should be moved to unbiased third party services. I feel many employees are afraid to report discrimination or harassment because many times their HR coordinator knows the people involved. If you move it to an unbiased third party, you can report pseudo-anonymously (they will know who reported, but won't tell the company until after they have confirmed or need to follow up with the company) without the worry that the third party is biased towards a specific party.

There needs to be a lot more thought put into how we can fix this than the few minutes I spent above, but it might be a good first step.

EDIT: modified for brevity's sake. (I'll replace with the original again if people want to read it)

This is the sort of topic that shouldn't be allowed to have comments. People are far too reactionary to have a productive discussion.

Why is this getting flagged to hell?

In my experience, men and boys talk to each other this way too. So, if women want equality - isn't that what they're getting?

"The Reality: If you are a woman in the industry with a critical opinion, you will get a disproportional amount of criticism, hostility, and scrutiny compared to men."

I disagree. The reality is that if anyone has a critical opinion and expresses it online, you will get harassed. As a test, go on Reddit, pretend you are a guy, and post a critical opinion in one of the gaming subreddits.

The problem is that the Internet has given everyone a voice, and a public email address or twitter feed means anyone, with almost no effort, can send you a message, and try to get to you.

"I've personally never heard of a man in the games industry getting rape threats for having an opinion."

I have..and much worse.

"When a woman criticizes me, it goes to a different part of my brain than when a man on my team does. I get defensive really quickly. I’m trying to get better about it." I don’t think his is a unique experience."

Nobody likes criticism..and most peoples reaction is to get defensive..it doesn't matter who is giving it.

"One of the consequences is that men are extremely sensitive to being criticized by women"

Based on what evidence? Your friend saying it? I see no direct evidence in your entire blog post besides hearsay.

"Women in the games industry get special treatment for being women, and your life can be made easier by your looks"

This is a fact in any industry. Women (and men for that matter) that are attractive get treated better (there have been numerous studies on this). To change this would mean changing human nature..which isn't happening any time soon.

"A look at the YouTube comments for her 2010 PAX East panel is stomach-churning. A shocking number of them personally attack the women of Girlfight."

I will give you some advice: ignore Youtube comments. Trolls on the Internet will say anything they can do destroy you and make you break down. It seems to be working.

While we are on the topic, it is getting pretty scary how we are moving toward mob Internet justice. Look at the number of people that were fired, had their careers ruined, or were forced to step down due to mob mentality on the Internet.

The ex-Mozilla CEO is a good example of this.

"I have yet to talk to a man who has had to call a police officer due to a stalker, only to be told nothing can be done until they are physically assaulted. "

Are you kidding? I know plenty of men that had to call the police about a female stalker/ex-girlfriend and were told the EXACT same thing.

"Growing a thicker skin isn't the answer, nor is it a proper response. Listening, and making the industry safer for the existence of visible women is the best, and only, way forward."

Growing a thicker skin is the answer. Have you ever played any Xbox live game online with a headset? What do you hear? Teenage boys calling each other the worst names imaginable. I just turn it off and keep playing.

You are an adult (I presume) trying to change the gaming culture of teenagers and trolls on the Internet (some of which aren't even located in the US). This is futile and will most likely never change unless there are serious restrictions put on the Internet, worldwide.

It sounds like you don't like the gaming culture. I don't like it either, but it has little to do with men being sexist and more to do with trolls and children harassing anyone online because it's easy.

The people that succeed learn to ignore the noise and concentrate on what matters.

I support and applaud the author. I will offer one negative reaction so that if others wish to avoid this reaction, or preempt it, they will be aware.

Throughout the article I was looking for actionable suggestions, at the end I was told that "Listening" was key. This plays directly into my stereotypes. In other words, I was not surprised. The article had less impact because it failed to offer a memorable and surprising suggestion to conclude.

Finally to avoid hypocrisy, I will offer an actionable suggestion. Create or coopt a new label for such men and allow people who support you to disassociate themselves from that group. For example "Alphas". Men who are pre-release technology. Incomplete specimens. And dually, men who imagine being big and strong and loud and dominant is what matters. I hate Alpha types.

So f*ck Alphas and everything they stand for.

> Myth: Everyone in the games industry experiences harassment. Women are just too sensitive about it.

This is not a myth. The difference is for whatever reason, the men being harassed (due to race, sexual orientation, etc...) don't have the courage that women have to come forward.

The video game industry is by and large dominated by adults who never grew up in more ways than one, though the larger the company the less this is an issue (though still a problem) due to the existence of HR and legal departments.

Gaming is full of rage, everywhere. Sore losers will always attack their opponents. They usually stick to generic attacks, unless they know something about you, when it gets specific. If you play a certain class, some insults will contain class specific terms. If they roughly know your age, they will either call you immature or too old to be alive. If they know where you're from or your religion, they will use racist insults. If they know your gender, they will use that to make their insults hurt you more.

This post reminded me of the there's-nothing-you-can-do-about-them "I want to stick my long-necked giraffe up your fluffy white bunny" http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-t... .