Confessions of a (female) video gamer

[kodalai]

I was the video gamer in the family, inasmuch as we had one. Computers had always been a part of our childhood, and games were a part of that from the beginning (I have very fond memories of a flat, slow-running, pixellated predecessor of The Sims; I can no longer remember the name of the game, but it involved a little pixellated man in a house, and you had to keep him happy. You could do this through various ways including feeding him, having him talk on the phone, or sit him in a chair that patted him on the head. If you didn't, he would turn blue, look sad, and refuse to move.)

There were other games, some more fondly remembered, some less; I am still to this day a Zork geek. We annoyed our father all the time by asking him for answers to the questions in Carmen Sandiego -- he would usually try to refer us to an atlas to find our own answers, which rarely worked. Our father was himself a champion player of Arkanoid II, and it eventually became a bonding experience for us. I remember that when I heard the sound of the opening music play, I would sneak out of bed and come into the den to watch him play (in fact, I remember at least one occasion on which he deliberately turned the music up loud so that I would be sure to hear it and join him. (By the way, agingparents, the other day I was in a video arcade and saw an arcade version of Arkanoid II -- natsukashii!!) There were other games; puzzle games, logic games, card games, and one or two platform jumping games.

As we got older, computer and video game technology progressed; our old Apple II was replaced by a shiny new Macintosh, and a new set of games with it. (Although I remember being sorely disappointed by the selection, and refusing to even touch the new "internet" connection -- it was like nothing so much, I figured, as a huge newspaper, and even more boring.) We had Solitaire; we had Tetris; we had Sim City; we had pinball.

One thing we rarely had in our house, however, were video games. As a young child I had once encountered a Gameboy, prized possession of a cousin we rarely saw, and become infatuated. I begged my parents for a Gameboy of my own, but they refused, so I was completely despaired of receiving anything larger from them. (I later learned, however, that my parents would actually have been more willing to acquire a console for me than a hand-held game; they didn't want me playing video games at school, which I grant you, would have been an issue.)

When I began earning some more money of my own, I finally became determined to get a console video game whatever the cost. My friend's older brother had a Dreamcast and let us play Soul Calibur, my first (and still constant) fighting game love. I told my parents that if they didn't get me a Sony Dreamcast, I would buy one myself. Much to my surprise, they were willing.

So I got a Dreamcast, and a copy of Soul Calibur of my own, and my house became a regular hangout for my friend-group. I like to think that I got pretty good at Soul Calibur; I could whup any of my friends' asses with Kilik. Even with my own copy of the game, however, I never played all of the content through to the end.

After the console game, more advanced video games began appearing on our computer. My father bought Myst, which both intrigued me with its mystery and annoyed me with its complexity. (In the end, I beat the game entirely by accident; since I couldn't figure out the puzzles, I wandered around the island interacting with things until I stumbled coincidentally upon the shortcut to the end.)

Around the time my oldest sister went off to college (age 12 or so, for me) I started finally acquiring some of the more advanced video games available for the time. Unreal Tournament was my FPS game of choice; ReVolt my racing game; Myth II was my foray into real-time strategy games. Although I enjoyed the games, again, I rarely made any effort to play the content all the way to the end, and I never really found myself in situations where I was competing with other players.

When I did find the option of competing with other players -- Unreal Tournament has a party option, after all, and Myth II was one of Blizzard's first forays into online multiplayers -- I found the experiences extremely uninviting. Partly it was the general unpleasantness of the (mostly male) gamer population I found myself interfacing with, but mostly it was the fact that compared to most of these people, I couldn't play worth shit.

So there is the heart of the matter. I have never been a very good video gamer. I am unfamiliar with the vast majority of the backlog and classic games which any good video gamer worth his salt knows like the back of their hand (I've never played a Mario game, for instance.) Never finished Return to Zork. Never finished Xeen. Never, for that matter, finished Destiny Knight. Never finished Spellbreaker (thanks to the damn cube puzzle there at the end!) I can only name a few games off the top of my head that I ever played to the end, and in most of those cases I never bothered with the more advanced replay options.

My reaction time and reflexes are not very good (I was unable to play Myth III, sequel to my beloved Myth II, because they disabled the options that allowed you to give commands during pause) and puzzle-solving on a time limit has never been a particular strength of mine. Most importantly, I don't have the commitment you really need to be a high-class gamer. Not just in terms of playing a game for hours and hours and hours, but in terms of the tenacity to figure out all the tricks, and/or cheats, to locate and secure the out-of-game resources you need to enhance your in-game play. I just don't have enough interest for that.

Another contributing factor is that I am not particularly ambitious. Although I enjoy gameplay, I'm not particularly enamoured of challenge. Defeating a game on a harder level is no more particularly thrilling to me than defeating it on a lower level – it's the same measure of satisfaction, but with less time and sweat and curses wasted, so why bother?

And, one of the key factors is, I am not particularly competitive. Much of this probably came out of the fact that in my formative experiences of player-versus-player, the players I found myself up against were not only several orders of magnitudes better than me, but also very bad winners. I had no particular drive to win and I despised losing, so I simply avoided player-versus-player situations.

So why am I saying all this? Why does it matter? To a certain extent it doesn't, to me, or I would have done something about it before now. But in the last year or so, I’ve found myself fully immersed in a game to an extent I never had before; not only a game, but an intrinsically player-versus-player type game of competitive leveling and skill: World of Warcraft.

I still despise losing. And I'm still not good enough to win. But I can no longer avoid player-versus-player fights, and that's a constant low-lying irritation that greatly reduces my overall enjoyment of the game. When I enter the game, when I enter any encounter, I do so with the muted, background awareness that I am simply not a very good player, and I never will be.

And, unfortunately, it becomes entangled with issues of gender. How much, I wonder, is this inferiority complex self-inflicted, from past bad encounters, and how much of it is leaked in from the outside, based on my gender? Would I be a better player – or, at least, more motivated to become a better player – if I were a boy? Am I judging myself as worse than I am, due to this background expectation? Do other people perceive me as a lesser player than I am because I am a girl, and is this affecting my own perception? And more importantly – to me, at least – as a female gamer who is not particularly good, am I failing to uphold my gender's reputation?

Sexism is, unfortunately, thriving and strong among the mostly-male, mostly-white-middle-class, mostly-high-school-educated majority of the gaming population. You cannot go from one server to the next without encountering some rude, boorish snot, some misogynistic joke regarded as the height of sophisticated humor, nor hearing some unfortunate tale of gender discrimination, and for every female player who is honest about her gender there is likely at least another who chooses to keep silent about it. The astonishing thing honestly is not that I have encountered as much sexism among World of Warcraft as I have, so much that I have also encountered as many male players who are tolerant, polite, and understanding as I have.

Girls can't play video games. Or if she does, she's only doing it to please/impress her boyfriend and isn't interested in the game itself. If she has none, she's probably an attention whore just showing off, in order to compensate for some basic failure of her proper role as a girl i.e. looking pretty. Girls may achieve rank and proficiency in a game, but probably only with surreptitious help and favor from some boy, because while some girls may play video games, she will certainly never be as good at it as a boy.

I am a woman, and I am not a particularly good gamer. I'm aware of this, and on most levels I don't care, because I honestly have more important things to spend my time, money, and energy on than video games. But being told, explicitly or implicitly, that I'm a poor video gamer because of my gender – that I will forever be fundamentally incapable of becoming a good gamer because I'm a woman – really just gets to me sometimes.

And damn if it doesn't make me want to prove them wrong.

Comments

[sukino.livejournal.com]

I have to admit that I felt the same way when I started play WoW and was killed instantaneously by a horde when my back was turned or I stopped for just a moment to do something. I don't like to lose, but that wasn't the reason it bothered me so much. I just hated when a Level 70 would run by or some other ridiculously high leveled character would run by and decided that I just had to get hit in the back of the head. It bothered me for a bit then I stopped caring and either ran away or tried to beat them the best I could. I never really thought of it as a gender issue, just that I needed to level more. I suppose it didn't help that I had many of my male friends on the same server and guild that I would call for help when I was being "picked on" as it were.

When I was honest about my sex on WoW, I mainly got guys going, "Really?! No. . .I mean really, really?!" I can't recall if I had some players that were rude to me and the like, but I have to say I didn't talk to other players all that often since I had a big group of friends on my server.

I'm not sure where I'm even going with this. I suppose it was that I've never though that girl gamers can't be as awesome as boy gamers, then again I'm don't consider myself much of a gamer. I don't play many systems, mainly my DS and occasionally Jessica's Wii. I think I have this mentality because Jessica, who is one of my best friends, is a gamer and I've seen her be more awesome than the boys she plays with at her gaming group.

Ok I've rambled enough and I'm not even sure I've said anything. @_@

I'M ON UR LJ EATIN ALL UR SPACE

[alphasean.livejournal.com]

This is an issue I have thought about at some great length. I may never know for certain why there are more gamer men than women, but there are. No studies, no statistics, I simply know very few women who are even willing to pick up a controller, while the number of male gamers I've met are countless.

I always thought it was upbringing. Women can be just as competitive and just as good at these things as guys. It's not like the introduction of estrogene prevents one from executing a well placed dragon punch, or impedes the area of the brain that lets you plan out an attack 3 seconds in advance. I theorized that women (in general) are never taught how to compete. You may think its something you don't have to learn, but the more I compete the more I realize that it isn't. The idea of taking a loss impersonally and being given the chance to improve is not a mindset everyone has. If you're never taught to learn well from loss then you get discouraged or frustrated easily in competitions.

Thusly, this isn't entirely about video games. It's about being competitive. Think about it, of the people who refuse to play competitve video games, how often do you see them do anything competitive that they are not superb at? I've seen men and women behave very ungraciously during a loss. No one really likes to lose. It is undeniable evidence that you are inadequate. I take loss extremely well, but I can't say I enjoy it.

Now, nothing I say here applies to ALL men or ALL women. In fact, I hope to be wrong one day. I can hope this because I see something of a miracle in a concept I once despised.

Pokemon.

I hate how it sounds, too. However, when I see kids play it (aside from ravenous obsessions over the critters) they are extremely good sports in a competitive setting. Children emulate what they see. I did when I was a kid and I am pretty sure you can think of some examples of when you were a kid (at one point I melted gummy bears in a microwave to create scalding gummi berry juice). In pokemon, all the heroes are good sports and all the villains are poor sports. At the end of a match you thank your opponent and you give them your respect in spite of the outcome. I was flabbergasted when I saw 9 year olds emulating something I don't see often enough in grown adults.

Now, I am not a woman. I may never know why women really are so apprehensive about video games, but in a world where boys play football and girls cheerlead there's an obvious lack of education being distributed.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

Wow, awesome post. Since it's not locked, I sent the link to zendzian, who I think will find it really interesting. (I'm hoping you guys will friend each other some day, though I'd understand if you waited until you'd actually met each other...)

[reikah.livejournal.com]

I've always had video games in my family, and my dad was a hardcore gamer throughout his time here. I grew up playing sonic, then mario, on the sega genesis then the n64, and my brother and I were forced to share. Karl always did better than me, and I let him, because I was more than willing to give up if something was too hard. I didn't see the point of playing until it wasn't any fun anymore.

When The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time came out, I discovered, quite accidentally, that I was by far better at it than Karl was. Before then I'd been content to stake my expertise into RPG games, because I have a ridiculous level of patience and was perfectly happy to spend hours running in pointless circles to level up my characters, but with the advent of Zelda, I found I was pretty damn good. I suck at FPS games because I don't much care for running about like a lunatic bashing a button wildly; the only time I played Unreal Tournament with my father and brother both of them said they wouldn't play with me anymore, because I tended to camp out with a sniper rifle, wait for them to get into range and then off them that way. *g*

Diablo II was my first online gaming experience, and I hated it. I haven't played very many other games online since. The crude jokes, the boys who would follow you all over the server asking 'so u got a boyf????' or who would try and kill you just so they could boast that I, as a girl, was weaker than them... (they made an error there, since I never play pvp and thus my characters were kitted out in weapons and armour banned for being unfair in pvp matches. oops.) I just found the wqhole thing very crass and obnoxious. I wasn't a bad player in Diablo II, and I suspect I wouldn't be a bad WoW player, either, but I'm not particularly keen to try - most male gamers, in my experience, are pre-teen boys desperately trying to prove their masculinaty. If this means they have to follow a certain player around the online world and punish her for the crime of being female (and possessing cooties!) in their cyber-treehouse, then damnit, they sure showed us stupid bitches, right enough. *eyeroll*

[aging-parents.livejournal.com]

There are all sorts of activities, from chess & mathematics to business & politics where women have had a hard time penetrating to the very top; only some of them offer the excuse that men are ganging up to exclude them. Part of the reason seems hard-wired: men have nothing built-in warning them against focusing on one single thing in the world to the exclusion of everything else; women tend to need more balanced, from internal as well as external pressures. That doesn't mean a sufficiently determined female can't move to the top -- but the reality is that most human monsters in the world are male, and that the highest levels of achievement are mostly by personality types that are extremely imbalanced, even disturbed.

[kodalai.livejournal.com]

and that the highest levels of achievement are mostly by personality types that are extremely imbalanced, even disturbed.

You may be right about that! In order to really make the best of the best, there's got to be some additional motive for training yourself other than the practical ones. Take cooking, for example. I don't think it would be unfair to say that in the U.S even today, the majority of the cooking that goes on gets done by women. And yet the top gourmet chefs are mostly men.

There has to be some sort of motivation to move beyond "competent cook," beyond "good cook," even beyond "of all the skills in my life, cooking is the one I am most proud of" and into "not only am I a good cook, but I am rated above all the other good cooks in the country." For most people you start to hit diminishing returns after a point, so something has to drive you on, and it may not be love of the thing itself alone.

[kodalai.livejournal.com]

the idea of it that i had was that in the gaming world, girls were so few and far between that they were drooled over by a bunch of extremely socially awkward high school aged dorks

You aren't wrong. That element certainly exists in the gaming community. But, consider this train of logic to its end. Female gamer, possibly attractive (let's say for the moment she is, at least by their standards) appears in a formerly all-male gaming community. Aforementioned high school aged dorks drool over her. This is also where a lot of the "she's a gamer to impress boys" mentality is coming from; even if it's not her intention at all, guys tend to assume it is, because it's working, isn't it? They're impressed. And since the universe revolves around them, she has to be doing it on purpose.

However, despite the fact that she's female, attractive, and there, she's still not available; either because she already has a boyfriend or she's not looking for one. This can cause one of two reactions -- one is to get annoyingly pushy about it, which I have experienced and can get quite uncomfortable making. The other is to withdraw and feel resentful, and let it reinforce the notion that all girls are inherently evil destructive of relationships and feelings. After all, as a girl gamer, she of all women ought to understand them. But she doesn't.

They also, depending on the guy, may feel panicked and attacked by the notion that the entire world of interacting with -- by which they usually mean, dating -- girls has suddenly intruded into a place where it was not formerly necessary for them to have. In an all-male community, it doesn't matter if you can't talk to girls, as long as you can get the Mario Kart high score. But now suddenly you're required to do both? How unfair!

There's also, behind or despite the "whoa, a girl!" excitement, a general resentment at having their clubhouse, their male 'safe space,' invaded. You see this spirit turning up a lot, and I mean a lot, on gaming message boards and other communities. It may be more disguised -- for instance, intensive discussions at girls having "their own" games which they should "stick with," or it may be more overt, but it's usually there to some extent.

Other guys in the community who may not have been interested in the girl initially grow annoyed by the bad feelings surrounding her, both because some guys have had their feelings hurt and because other guys are acting like morons chasing her. When there's a lot of disruption surrounding one person it's hard not to blame that one person even if none of it was intentional -- which is where a lot of the second-wave discrimination, "I don't have anything against girls, but I don't want them in my community because they cause trouble" comes from.

And, unfortunately, some of the girls who are gamers who go in there are making trouble -- if not for the sake of trouble itself, then because they're silly young fools who have never had this much attention paid to them before and either can't or won't handle it maturely. And they live a big, bad impression on the male gamers around them, because it often ends in tears. A guy can meet and play well with nine girl gamers but will forever hold a grudge against female gamers because of the one who made trouble.

All this is a pretty sweeping generalization -- as I said, I have met and made friends with many nice, well-mannered, funny guys who were not interested in dating me and thus there was no drama. And, on the flip side of the coin, I have seen romances and relationships conducted over WoW -- either to start out with, to continue with, or occasionally to finish with (and boy, doesn't that cause drama.)

[jayofamber.livejournal.com]

Being originally from one of those 'all male-gamer groups' (which has become a mostly-male gamer group over the years), I can say you don't necessarily need to restrict the groups to high schoolers. Nor do they need to all be socially awkward or even drooling.

I remember a conversation I had with a friend where we were discussing girls, relationships, and whatnot... basically we came to the conclusion that when girls are concerned, most (single) guys don't go looking for just 'friendship'. This is what I think poses the greatest problem to female gamers who wish to just be part of the group, either just to be 'one of the guys' or just share her interests with those of similar interests.

Whenever a 'reasonably attractive' girl (especially a single one), joins a single male dominated group...every guy is gonna think "Chance!" Because let's face it...these guys don't meet many girls. And this girl is exactly what they're all looking for. So, I can definately see how that can be quite overwhelming. And it definately can cause drama in some groups, with or without the girl's help.

Given that most of my interests (videogaming, tabletop gaming, computer gaming, anime) tend to be predominantly male populated...I must say it's difficult to find a girl who does have similar interests. And I've seen this sort of scenario pop up more than once.

Personally, I don't get the feeling of having my space invaded if/when a girl joins the fold. And I've never thought a girl was playing games just to impress guys...after all, why would you do it if it wasn't fun (most non-gamer girls turn their noses up at us, rather than try to impress us). But I am aware that it can change the dynamic of a group (especially if the group is completely male to begin with). Plus, especially in tabletop games...it's good to have a female perspective around.

In the end, I think the best female 'friends' I've made have been of the completely unavailable kind (i.e. already the girlfriend of one of my close friends), because the idea of anything more than friendship never enters the mind...and thus it's easier to be more comfortable around the girl, not trying to impress her or anything.

To finish up, I think I'd like to state that it is such a shame that the average dumbass 14-17 year old has to ruin things for the average female gamer (especially online). Those types of guys annoy me as well, both because of their dumbassery, and for the way they treat their female counterparts. Maybe this is part of the reason there aren't so many female gamers...or that a lot of girls give up games at a younger age than guys do (if they do at all).