by Courtney West
Eve Femmenino is a girl gamer, but don’t say that to her face. She admits that she used to judge girls that called themselves gamers but only played the hot title that everyone was talking about. Or girls that only logged on because their boyfriends did. Or girls that gamed just to get guys’ attention.
After her boyfriend introduced her to a series of games, she is working on not judging as much. It can be hard when the list of stereotypes about girl gamers goes on and on.
I. Girls only play video games because their husband, boyfriend or another male close to them plays.
Femmenino’s boyfriend, Mitri Hajj, is also a huge gamer, and the two have similar interests in terms of which games they both play. However, Femmenino has been plugged into gaming longer than she has known Hajj- since the ripe, old age of six.
Walking inside the apartment, posters for Blizzard games compete for space on the otherwise drab walls. Cataclysm, Wrath of the Lich King, The Burning Crusade. All scream for attention, scream to be popped into the computer and explored.
A narrow hallway leads to Femmenino and Hajj’s room. “Don’t disturb, I’m gaming,” declares a sign around the doorknob.
Opening the door, eyes focus immediately on the MacBook in a bedroom crammed with video game paraphernalia. Final Fantasy posters adorn every inch of visible wall space. Microphones and headphones sit in a pile at the foot of the desk, ever within reach. A framed Starcraft poster blocks a chest of drawers. Action figures line the window frame above the bed.
Chaos.
The MacBook slowly whirrs to life, humming along in time with the game’s loading screen. The keyboard clacks in time with Femmenino’s typing, which peters to a stop as the intro music creeps into the speakers. The clash of metal on metal signals the start of the fighting.
II. Girls do not play video games. If they do, it is because they are unattractive, socially awkward, or cannot make friends any other way.
Rosa Mikeal Martey is an assistant professor at CSU in the Journalism and Technical Communication department who studies gaming and social interaction online. She describes World of Warcraft (WoW) as a game for mostly straight, white, relatively young men, and their characters follow this general assumption. As a result, lots of trash talking flies around against people who do not fit into this identity, including racial or ethnic minorities, older players and especially female players, Martey explains.
From game genres filled with violence and fighting to overly sexualized female characters, at a glance the world of video games seems to be male dominated. And with massively multiplayer online (MMO) games like WoW, it really is. According to Martey’s blog, Wowmusings, 80 to 85 percent of all players on Wow are male.
When girls do play, they are generally typecast into two different images. A meme going around the internet showcases the two ends of this spectrum perfectly. On one end, there is a box with the caption ‘How gamer boys see me.’ This box shows a gorgeous, scantily-clad Asian girl holding a controller and posing in front of a video game on a big-screen TV. On the other end of the graphic, above the caption ‘How society sees me,’ is an obese girl in a T-shirt and underwear, holding a controller and wearing a microphone.
According to Martey, the images above these two graphics can be interchangeable. Either they are unattractive girls using the game to meet people and make friends, or they are the stuff of fantasy, incredibly attractive and perfect in every way.
III. Female characters in games are usually played by males anyway.
Martey and her team have conducted plenty of research on games like WoW, and have looked at gender issues and inequalities within the game. In a study about which genders play male and female characters, she found that both genders have a tendency to gender-bend. However, males will gender-bend- that is, play a female character- three times more than women will.
I have no personal experience playing WoW, but growing up my brothers and I played a similar MMO called RuneScape. I remember the gender of our characters never being tied to our actual gender. I played a male knight character, because I wanted other characters to take me seriously and not treat me like a wimp. My brothers, on the other hand, always played female characters. When I questioned this, my brother Alex West has simple reasoning.
“When your character is a girl, people give you stuff. It’s that simple. It doesn’t matter if you aren’t actually a girl, all you have to do is pretend you are and you get all sorts of free stuff,” he recalled with a laugh.
Briana LaForce is another gamer that had no problem gender-bending. LaForce, a “technical senior” at Front Range Community College, played WoW avidly since her early teens. She laughs as she remembers instances of male players questioning her gender.
“I’m just as rude and crude as the guys and I generally beat them in that section,” LaForce says. This, combined with a preference to play male characters is what LaForce said allowed her to pass as a guy.
Not being able to pass as a guy or girl leads to a phenomenon called ‘outing,’ or revealing a player’s gender in-game. LaForce and Natalie Kreider all remember moments of being outed or what they did to avoid being revealed as girls.
For the most part, LaForce says that she never had really negative experiences being outed while playing.
“I’d accidentally let something slip,” she says, “or I’d frame something in a way that made people ask if I was girl.”
“After they found out that I was a girl they were too in awe of that fact to be mean to me,” LaForce explained with a smirk. “I don’t suck, so guys never had a problem with me playing.”
Guys’ reactions were exactly the opposite whenever Natalie Kreider played WoW as a teenager. Sophomore English education major Kreider, who says that her brother got her hooked on gaming, had more of a negative experience with male gamers.
“No wonder you suck,” is the one comment she says she heard the most in her heavy gaming days. But other reactions were more varied.
“Some guys had respect for me until they found out that I was a girl. They said it explained my flaws,” Kreider says, rolling her eyes. She leaned towards the undead characters because there are no real distinctions between the different genders. This way, guys would assume that she was a male player as well.
Having a male character does not hide a player’s gender all by itself. Kreider took a series of precautions while playing to ensure that she would not be outed. One of the most obvious of these precautions was to not use a mic during a raid or group effort. This allowed her to play anonymously while still in the group’s protection.
“Guys would always go easy on me if I got outed. They’d assume that because I’m a girl, I’d get upset if I lost, so they always let me win,” says Kreider. As fun as it might seem to always win, she remembers getting annoyed at this constant treatment.
So she tried harder to act like a guy while playing. This included changing the way she talked, to not say like so much. Kreider also remembers not talking as much in general while playing. She says that this made her appear like she knew what she was doing, and as a result other players would not pester her as much. She likens it to the stereotypically male “I don’t need to ask for directions” mentality.
IV. Male gamers do not take girls who are plugged in seriously.
In a male-dominated arena like video games, anyone that does not fit into the majority group as Martey established- specifically female players- is going to take some flack from players.
Not all male gamers exhibit this mentality though. David Sigaty, a student at the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, Arizona, says that a lot of the blame for gender stereotypes in gaming should be placed on the industry itself. In a Facebook comment, Sigaty said that he feels that the largest gender differences in gaming are the “societal implications.”
“There are most likely fewer female gamers out there because the industry is like “these [games] are for you!” when they would be perfectly satisfied with standard games.” Attached to the comment was a picture of a game called Imagine: Babyz for the Nintendo DS.
Joshua Cooper, an avid WoW player sees the inherent gender bias in massively multiplayer online (MMO) games like WoW, but he says that this can be avoided by playing with people that are connected in real life.
“Most of the women I played WoW with I knew in real life, which also caused less of a gender bias. I had to watch how I treated them because I would hear about it at the post-raid Perkins raid. Because several women were guild officers, and most of us had met outside of the game, it made for a much different atmosphere, “ explained Cooper.
Sigaty and Cooper both say that they are perfectly aware of the stereotypes in gaming, but neither treat girl gamers as negatively as some mentioned by the girls in this story.
V. Attractive girls who game are few and far-between.
Male gamers and the media have stereotyped and sexualized girl gamers into these supposedly rare fantasy women. In reality, all the women interviewed for this story could list other friends of theirs that were gamers. All three agreed that girls plugged into gaming are actually more common that society would make them out to be.
Femmenino shakes her head at this idea. “I hate it when guys say they want a girl gamer who likes Star Wars or something. They have this idealized idea of a gamer girl and they don’t realize that girls like that are pretty common, they just don’t feel the need to advertise it.”
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