I made a friend in Sea of Thieves and learned why girls don't play pub lobbies

My polycule recently got into Sea of Thieves!

I've had this game for years, but I never really played it, because it's much more fun with friends. Well, now I have friends to play it with. I've already got a sloop and a brigantine! But since I live in Australia and My polycule are American, I'm often alone in the afternoon, wanting to play but having no friends online.

So I hopped onto the Sea of Thieves discord. Now, My first experience on this discord was a lot of fun and very educational, but not very cozy. Three boys joined the lobby and acted like, well, boys. One of them made jokes about "oh my god it's a gamer girl!", while another put on a rural English accent and told a lot of questionable jokes. That particular boy persuaded us to sail for the Reapers (the player-killing faction), and attack another ship of players. We lost miserably, and then he went to bed for the night. Sigh... boys. My ship is covered in damage now. And then we sailed right into the middle of a ghost armada!

The next day was a lot more chill. I saw someone in LFG chat say they were getting back into the game, so I invited them aboard My sloop. When they arrived.. they sounded like a woman! They asked if I was a woman. I explained that I'm nonbinary trans, and we shared a bit of mutual grieving over the state of the man community. Then we set sail and found a bunch of treasure!

The day after that, I didn't go to the Sea of Thieves discord, or any other LFG group. I played with My new friend. She's nice, and we understand each other, and we have fun doing the same sorts of things. We don't need the pub lobbies anymore. We'd rather play with each other, than put up with boys doing boy things.

I think I know why there's this culture that video games and tabletop games are a "boy thing", and all the public spaces are full of boys. I noticed the same thing years ago when I ran a tabletop RPG for a bunch of girls from the quadball club. It's that the boys who need to go to these LFG spaces aren't very good at making friends, and women don't want to be around them. They'd rather just play with friends.

There are millions of "gamer girls" out there. And they're having a great time playing with their friends.