A Twitch streamer called on Riot Games to ban players for threatening speech during gameplay.
On Monday, Australian Twitch streamer Taylor Morgan shared a clip to X of an interaction she had with a fellow gamer while playing Overwatch. In the clip, Morgan appears to engage in competitive banter with a male gamer, to which the male gamer responded with a threat of sexual assault.
"Be honest with me, do you know what rape feels like?" the male gamer asked Morgan.
"No, I don't actually," Morgan responded.
"Well, do you want to know?" the male gamer asked.
Morgan asked the male gamer if he was insinuating he would sexually assault her.
"You're heading down the right path right now," he responded.
The Twitch streamer reiterated her question, to which the male gamer said, "It's not rape if I like it, is it now?"
Morgan then abruptly ended the game session visibly upset.
The video was later shared to Morgan's X account and has since gone viral garnering over 20 million views as of Wednesday morning.
"I have never made a more desperate plea that what I am about to say right now," Morgan wrote, tagging Riot Games and Riot Support's X accounts. "I need you guys to f---ing do something."
"I am an incredibly strong person and I have been streaming for a very, very long time. But absolutely nothing prepares you for someone saying this to you," she added.
"The suspensions are not enough," her post continued. "Nothing will ever stop these men from acting this way until hardware bans go into play. They should never be able to play the game again."
"I know you hear us. I know you see us," Morgan wrote. "If this goes unpunished I am taking this as an active act from you that you do not give a single f--- about any of the women and minorities that play your game, and I will rally to boycott."
The Twitch streamer's post drew the ire of many fellow gamers who criticized Morgan for engaging in conversation with the male gamer rather than employing in-game muting and blocking features.
"If you are this emotional over an Aussie threatening you in voice chat you should probably stay off multiplayer games," wrote one user. "Tell him he's a fat retard that can't even get up from his own chair, throw a mute and move on instead of acting like a victim for 'content.'"
"You would have melted in your chair during the Xbox 360/Xbox Live era," wrote another user in reference to online gaming in the mid-2000s, which infamously featured aggressive conversation between players.
A third user claimed, "Women have irreversibly ruined gaming forever."
Morgan's video also drew praise from fellow gamers expressing similar sentiment about her interaction.
"'You'd never survive a MW2 lobby.' Bro, I'm sorry you had to," wrote a fellow Twitch streamer regarding Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2's online game chat. "I'm sorry you were put into situations like this at a young age while you were trying to enjoy yourself."
"People should not have had to experience this kind of atrocious behavior years ago and it’s unreal that it’s still happening now," the user continued. "You angry, empty boys have no interest in breaking the cycle of rancid toxicity and it fucking shows."
The fellow streamer then similarly called on Riot Games to take action on players engaging in aggressive language.
"I'm still convinced based on the comments that 99% of men don't have a sister, empathy, or know anyone in their life who has been affected by rape," wrote a male X user.
Riot Games has not responded to the controversy as of Wednesday morning.
