‘They stab you, they shoot you, they bind you in ropes.' Rebeca Figueiredo Amorim/Getty Images
Until recently, I did not consider myself a “gamer”. I still flinch at the term, probably because the reputation of gaming is impossibly, incorrigibly lame — adolescent, feverish, and with the stale whiff of the teenaged bedroom. I, conversely, am 25, and I have friends, relationships. I go out, I can hold eye contact with strangers, and though my flat is small, it is decidedly not a basement. But despite all this, I have been suckered in. It can happen to anyone.
My obsession is with the cowboy game Red Dead Redemption 2. Its world is a microcosm of a late-1800s America, in which you play a gunslinging outlaw — hunting for animals and bounties, robbing trains and rustling horses in the malarial swamps of Louisiana and the lush heartlands of Oklahoma. It is a utopia of sorts, and one of the prize assets in the stable of independent publisher Rockstar Games, makers of the Grand Theft Auto series. More than anything, it is innocent fun. After all, the victims of my blood-soaked bank jobs aren’t real. Or, at least, I thought they weren’t — until I went online.
I played the main, offline, “story” version of this game for a year, becoming so fixated that one friend tried to stage an intervention to stop me banging on about it. But by then, I was too far gone. I could no longer resist shelling out an extra £6.99 a month for the online iteration, with its expanded plotlines and features. I expected more of the same — though in this version, other gamers play with you.
In the main game, you play as a man. In the online version, you may choose a female avatar — and you can create her in your own image (in my case blonde, overly made-up and probably quite vain). I called her Martine Horsese, and her steed would be Hoof Hefner. Take note, “gamer girls”: a dose of irony is needed to retain a modicum of cool when diving into dorkdom. But the smirk was wiped off my face the moment I started playing. In this new world, all the worst things women fear men would like to do, were there no consequences, happen — all the time, and to you.
As you go about your business, posses of male characters — almost certainly men, given their gamer tags: fightclub247, meatgrinder2001, bitch_flayer — lurk behind you. They stab you, they shoot you, they bind you in ropes and carry your hogtied, still writhing body on the back of their horse. They dump you in abandoned houses, where they take turns to jump on you — the closest simulation of rape the system will allow. Someone called Messi69 will “emote” by spitting at your body. On the voice chat, or in your message inbox, you will be told they can find you, that they will rape and kill you, that you’re a whore.
In a world where players can do almost exactly as they want, why do men keep choosing to rape? Until the 2010s, online gaming was still a niche. Then it exploded: Call of Duty launched online in 2012, GTA in 2013, Red Dead in 2018. We are now living, one critic said last year, in the “golden age of the online multiplayer”, where players have never been more connected. You can now have unscripted conversations with other gamers, and, rather than being PacMan or Mario, you can play as yourself — or an idealised version of yourself — and act beyond the strictures of a heavily enforced plot. You can do, in other words, almost exactly what you want. It is this, the plugging-in of fantasy to real-life social networks, which has created a space for the darkest human urges to be played out, over and over, with wearying predictability, on the usual victims and by the usual suspects.
