Gamer Girls and Stereotypes

[Aensland]

You know, maybe it is just me, but my entire life growing up every female friend I ever had was a video game player so I never understood the whole "girl gamers are a myth" thing back in the 80's and 90's. Nowadays, it seems like the female demographic have been recognized but yet are still striving to be equals and I STILL don't get why. I've heard people say chick gamers aren't as skilled. When I was in the top 10 global for World at War on hardcore team deathmatch on Xbox 360 for several years, one of my clan members was a middle-aged woman and just as skilled as me, also in the top ten - my entire league was - and she played whilst taking care of a child, cooking, cleaning, and other 'womanly' things - so chalk THAT up into your 'women cannot multitask' pool as well!

Despite all the aforementioned dribble society drools out I also hear people often say they are not as 'well-versed' as male gamers in the going-ons on the gaming world. this, also, irritates me as the ones whom I know that don't know it openly state "I honestly couldn't care about it. I play for fun and don't live on the consoles", which I totally understand and agree with them on.

Don't get me wrong, I make a lot of racial and gender stereotype jokes, so I know a lot of people do it not because they believe in it, like myself, but for the laugh at the cliché therein. however, a lot of people genuinely think these things and it is then that it irks me.

Saw this comic and it makes a great example of this:

http://www.dorkly.com/post/46874/female-fantasy-iii

Anyway, I was wondering other people's feelings on this.

Oh, and Brunn, remember; you don't exist so your say is not valid

 

[CM30]

It depends a lot on the gaming fandoms you're involved in. Put simply, some are extremely heavily male dominated, some are extremely heavily female dominated and some are mostly 'equal' in percentages.

If you like Mario, Zelda or Pokemon, you're probably not going to believe any gender of gamers are a 'myth' or rare or anything else. My experience there is that between 40 and 50% of those in the community are female, and there isn't really much in the way of judgement towards them.

On the other hand... some fandoms and gaming communities really are heavily dominated by one gender. Fan fic communities about games are obviously female dominated, so you might well end up believing that men are worse at writing or something stupid like that if you stick to them for too long.

And hacking/modding communities are pretty much 99% male.

That's not an exaggeration. One forum for AR codes I came across had literally 2 out of 3000 members being female. And if you put the entire userbases of SMW Central, ROM Hacking.net, Sonic Retro and various others like them together, you'd probably have about fifteen female members total. If you were heavily part of those communities, I can sort of see why you might imagine girls in gaming to be a myth or extremely rare, because you'd probably never encountered one before period. The communities are so skewed demographically that female users are actually rarer there than they are in internet memes.

Part of me wonders whether some of the design decisions on such sites actually help that along a bit, given the rather hilariously stupid system on Acmlm's Board inspired sites where your username is given a colour based on your gender, with blue names for male users and pink names for female users. If you ever felt 'uncomfortable' on something like Xbox Live because of your gender... well, imagine using a site where you've basically got a bullseye painted on your head and a giant arrow pointing down saying so.

 

[Brunn]

I'd think that a lot of the 'gamer girls' are a myth thing stems from the fact that the majority of girls that game probably don't reveal themselves as being female, because it leads to harassment. Or so I've been told, and read, many many times. I personally have never been harassed in a game for being female, nor know of anyone who has been. Apparently there's quite the problem with it in World of Warcraft, but I never faced it personally, and raided and ran with several guilds over the course of 8 years that not only had many female players, but we were just as skilled as the male players, held ranks within the guild just as high, if not higher, etc. There was never any difference between treatment, besides which body parts to include in your raunchy jokes on vent. XD In any case, maybe I just got lucky through my play time, but even through official polls, it's always reported that a significant number of the player base have been harassed for gender, and frequently just decline to mention their gender and don't use voice chat to avoid anyone knowing that they are female.

And hacking/modding communities are pretty much 99% male.

That's not an exaggeration. One forum for AR codes I came across had literally 2 out of 3000 members being female. And if you put the entire userbases of SMW Central, ROM Hacking.net, Sonic Retro and various others like them together, you'd probably have about fifteen female members total. If you were heavily part of those communities, I can sort of see why you might imagine girls in gaming to be a myth or extremely rare, because you'd probably never encountered one before period. The communities are so skewed demographically that female users are actually rarer there than they are in internet memes.

I'm definitely sure this is true, but you have to remember that for the most part, girls are consistently pushed away from studying the sciences and computers from a very early age. They're not considered 'girly', and it's no doubt that in previous times women likely wouldn't have the programming knowledge to be able to contribute if they had been given the option of wanting too. I'm sure as time goes on, and the more recent computer based and gaming generations start growing up and having children, that this will even out some at least, as women continue to break gender stereotypes, and push into fields of study more that they didn't typically enter or weren't allowed too. I'm sure there are probably at least some people who are hiding their gender identity as well.

Really, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that most women players probably don't advertise the fact that they're female. I've read far, far too many articles about female streamers and online gamers getting tons of comments of 'Show us your tits!', to outright death threats and the like when the women actually do well. The most recent one I read about was based around Magic the Gathering, not video games but relatable, and pretty darn horrifying that anyone, regardless of their gender, would have to go through something like that. I'm sure a lot of these people who are doing the harassing are more trolls then they are representative of the actual male gaming public, but after a while being treated as a piece of meat surrounded by rabid dogs gets old really quickly.

So there's probably actually a lot of great gamer girls out there for all those gaming boys- they just act like idiots and drive us all away.

 

[Aensland]

So there's probably actually a lot of great gamer girls out there for all those gaming boys- they just act like idiots and drive us all away.

Hey, didn't I tell you not to reply because you don't exist as an entity? lol

In all seriousness, though, I've been harassed by male gamers on Final Fantasy 11 many a time because I used a female avatar - go on... guess the name. If you instantly thought Morrigan Aensland you were correct lol - and then again on Perfect World, RuneScape (FAR too often due to it being FtP and full of children - and Perfect World International as well. I've also had to be mediator or console friends who were involved in some serious harassment cases for being female on FF11. TigressStar used to play by my side in real life and people would hit on her and she'd be like "My husband is watching this convo, you know lol" and they didn't believe her even with "Wife of MorriganAensland" in her status that popped up when you examined her.

As per twitch. I got highly offended just last week, actually! Being as strongly intrigued by Japanese culture as I am I found myself lucky to find two streams of Japanese people going on at the same time when I checked my Live From Playstation on PS4. both were streaming The Playroom - which is basically a webcam app where you can do anything so long as it is within reason. One of the streamers was a young emo-looking girl coddling a stuffed animal. If I had to guess I'd say she was 14-16 years old. I can't read Japanese outside of romanji, so I am not sure what the Japanese viewers were typing but I could understand her replies, which were a lot of "No, yes, thank you" type responses. However, whenever anyone typed in English it was "bewbs!" or "take off your shirt" and crap. I got offended for her as much as for myself! I mean, here is someone from another culture allowing us to see their bedroom and how they live and cool things like that which I found interesting and crossing the language barrier all they get in return is lewdness!? I got offended as an American because of that. Then you have gentlemanly males being made ill too, because presumably those people were all males and they make the males who are actually polite get instinctively frowned upon and considered "faking it".