To be completely honest, I had a very difficult time trying to set up the structure of my essay. I wasn’t sure of the direction I wanted to take my essay. The question I wanted to explore came naturally, as it’s something that I deal with on almost a daily basis and something I knew other females encountered frequently as well. However, talking about sexist remarks in multiplayer games felt like a very generic and one directional topic to me. Female player gets into a game. Female player talks. Female player gets harassed by male player. Female player feels bad. The End.
I needed to find a way to stretch this topic beyond just talking and detailing the experiences that these female players go through. I had a huge mental block at this point, because I wasn’t sure what else to talk about, but then I tried to think about the topic in a much more broad sense. This made me question things such as how these sentiments came to be and the further implications of these feelings. I wanted to know if the sexist mentalities these players would just stop at their computer screens, or if they would be carried out into the real world. These two other questions helped me make the framework of my essay. By introducing and educating the readers about the topic of sexism in the online world, then talking about the formation and implantation of this idea in people, and finally talking about the connection of this to the offline world, the readers would have an easy time understanding this situation.
I guess in order to make this easier on myself the next time I get to pick a topic to write about, is to approach it with an outsider’s point of view. If I approach it with a point of view that I’m familiar with, I’d probably see the issue at hand in a very one directional way, as I did when I first came up with the topic. If I approach it as someone who has no idea about the topic, it allows me to have so many more angles to tackle the question from, which can allow for a more thorough investigation of the question.
