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My own experiences of harassment don't equivocate well here - it's challenging to telegraph your orientation over voice chat. But I sympathize with the panelists and the people who have communicated with them about the catharsis and the sense of solidarity that comes with sharing your experiences of the crap that online gaming communities can offer, and the sometimes difficulty that can arise from the commentary that other people have on that sharing.
I've developed fairly thick skin for this shit over the years (elsewise, I wouldn't bother playing games anymore) but still these incidents crop up periodically. Playing prophunt in TF2 I was once treated to a 5-minute long angry rant about the "gays" and "black folks" (I euphemise his words) after someone used an Obama spray, and it put me off playing multiplayer games for a few weeks. A habit of picking female avatars in other games (principally WoW) has also exposed me to some of the things people will quite readily say to anyone they perceive as a woman online.
One of the panelists offered the "politics of fun" solution at the end, which made me reflect on how I've responded to this issue. The assessment is rather bleak, being that it involves mostly retreating to the spaces I know are safe and clean. Struggling with the balance of preserving my own sense of fun and relaxation with the impulse to try and educate or otherwise deal with assholes has always tipped to the former, and so I sometimes wonder if I owe some effort in the latter to the people who came before me, dealing with way worse shit and carving out those spaces in the first place.
Their point about the assumed ages of these people is also worth mentioning. Not only is it inaccurate to lay the blame on kids and teenagers, it's also unfair and rather flawed. The assumptions that are carried with this (that they'll just grow out of it) are annoying, as is the general sense that it's somehow less bad that they're young people.
