After three years of silence, Rockstar Games surprised the world with an update for Red Dead Online, the MMO-lite spinoff of its acclaimed open-world western. Strange Tales of the West is a humble affair compared to previous updates, which introduced things like new classes, but players are saddling up and joining posses all the same. And it’s upon this return that some players are being reminded of a disheartening reality: It really sucks to play as a female character in Red Dead Online.
The conversation has been bubbling in the weeks since Red Dead Online’s sudden July 1 update, which adds a slew of supernatural-themed missions to the game. In a viral TikTok that’s been watched 1.2 million times, a player with the handle Arthur’s Ex shows off what is supposed to be a rousing moment. She’s galloping amid the plains when another player shows up with a woman hogtied to the back of his horse. He starts going in circles, which the player interprets to mean he wants her to see what she’s carrying. Arthur’s Ex responds by whipping a lasso toward the other player to yank him off his horse, only to hogtie him instead. She then releases the other player and runs away.
It’s a funny moment of retribution, but the comments are ablaze with thousands of replies, many of them from other female players remarking on their time with the game.
“I remember the first time this happened to me I didn’t even know they could do that,” reads a comment with more than 14,000 favorites from other TikTok users. “Dude took me to his camp with 5 other players and they were all surrounding me so I exited the game [and] was like uhhhhhh,” she recalled. Many of the replies in that particular thread are of women sharing similar experiences in other games ranging from Roblox to Call of Duty where other players abuse in-game mechanics to imprison and at times simulate sexual assault.
“I stopped playing RDR Online because dudes were too mean, they make it not fun by ganging up on you [in] every town you go to and following you, like wow [you’re] so funny and original, you hogtied me and killed me,” a TikTok user named oilbead replied.
Fans familiar with Red Dead Online know that Rockstar games in particular are vectors of chaos, and when most of the gameplay options are violent, getting attacked by other players is arguably an expected part of the experience. It’s not a Wild West if everyone is tipping their hats to one another cordially, right? But women aren’t complaining about the idea that they’re encountering any tension at all in Red Dead Online. Rather, there’s a pervasive sense that female characters are primary targets who are often harassed more quickly, more often, and in more aggressive ways than players with male avatars.
“My main is a male character and when I made a female character on a side [account] I got attacked more in a week that I would in MONTHS on my main,” one player remarked on the TikTok with an appended skull emoji. “It was crazy.”
The TikTok, it seems, is not an isolated incident, based on more recent conversations emerging on sites like Reddit, where players who have picked up the game recently are sharing their experiences. Some of these players are returning for the update, while others have picked it up this summer for no reason in particular. In one Reddit thread with more than 1,000 upvotes titled “The harassment against women in this game is real. And it sucks,” one player describes a situation where they customized their character to be more conventionally attractive — only to be “harassed like crazy.” The player says that they’re fairly skilled in PvP, so they can often fend for themselves — but they worry about newer players who are just jumping in.
A quick draw can only take you so far when Red Dead Online is plagued with hackers as well. There are multiple threads where players share footage or screenshots of themselves playing as a female character only to get wrapped up in absurd, uncomfortable circumstances. One player who redownloaded the game this month, for example, says they went AFK in the game only to come back to their player floating in the air, rendered completely naked as another player pinned them down with gyrating hips. Another fan controlling a female character shared footage of themselves sitting glued to another male character who rocked them back and forth. To add insult to injury, the hacker had forced both of them to sit in between a circle of NPCs who are singing a song that repeatedly tells them to not cry in Spanish.
Image: Rockstar Games
Like GTA Online before it, Red Dead Online has long faced a hacking problem from players on Windows PC, who can install what are known as modding menus to wreak havoc. Most of the time, hackers use their powers specifically to ruin other people’s time, but the nature of the harassment can differ depending on the gender you play.
Beyond simulating digital assault, another common tactic women are facing in Red Dead Online is hackers who spawn valuables on them to encourage other players to attack them, like legendary pelts and chests. In the most popular thread about this topic, women say that harassment is often followed up by hackers having the audacity to ask them to add them as friends or to share real-life nudes.
Threads describing situations of this nature have become more common in the last month, sometimes by newbie players who don’t know how to fight back. When hogtied, for example, it’s possible to break yourself free — but only if you have a knife equipped beforehand, and if the attacker isn’t wielding an unbreakable reinforced rope. Affected players also have the option of respawning themselves manually, but in many cases they say that the other party will find them again and continue their rampage. Fresh players are also at a huge disadvantage to begin with, as their shoddy equipment does not match the firepower that longtime fans pack. Players do have the option to elect a “defensive mode,” which is supposed to prevent things like getting hogtied. But it’s not foolproof: Players simply come up with more creative ways of griefing, or they hack others into submission by disabling the mode altogether.
Though Red Dead Online is not intentionally built to encourage negative interactions, it’s been an ongoing phenomenon in the seven years since its release. In this case, women are speaking out about their experiences, but historically playing as any type of marginalized character can lead to awful situations. Fans who have gone online as Black characters, for example, have faced abusers in the past who modded the KKK characters from the main game into the online portion. Though Rockstar banned the ability to spawn these characters, players can still dress in all white if they choose. The lack of white supremacist characters also doesn’t remove the inherent connotation that comes from players attempting to “hang” Black characters with their ropes.
Image: Rockstar Games
Women in particular are choosing to band together in exclusive posses or social groups in the hopes of finding like-minded fans. Some just want to have a nice time, so they’re retreating to private servers where they can’t be bothered by jerks. Others are coming together with the intention of enacting revenge on anyone who tries them.
Men aren’t just standing idly by, either. In the viral TikTok, some fans say that they intentionally play as female characters to bait players with poor intentions into situations where they get hogtied and harassed right back. The player in the video even claims that she goes online with a dedicated group of male bodyguards.
Arthur’s Ex says that she “loves them so much and don’t even know them IRL. They have made people leave lobbies for targeting me.”
Supporting women can take on many forms. It can mean readying up your revolver to fight back against harassers, even if they’re not bothering you specifically. Other times, it might mean giving people exactly what they ask for.
“I did have one time someone in my possee messaged me for nudes,” recalled a male player in the popular Reddit thread. “I didn’t send them nudes, but I’m sure they appreciated my hairy ass in speedos at the pool on a family vacation. I think I was blocked after that lol.”
