I know this installment was supposed to be about the greater “boy’s club” of gaming, but getting a new gaming group here has brought some more personal issues to the forefront. In particular, being “one of the boys” (but not really). You see, I can never be “one of the boys” because, well, I’m not a boy. Or a male. Or so much male identified, although I tend to fit more into “masculine” gender roles than “feminine” ones. I am female, and that’s enough to set me apart because my main gaming group consists of two men.
I know of two women here who like games, but I haven’t had a chance to have them over to play yet (one of them was supposed to come Saturday, but apparently her previous engagement went long, so she didn’t make it). It also doesn’t help that the guys I game with live in my building, whereas the women I want to game with don’t. For reasons that I want to explore, it seems harder for me to form primary gaming communities with women. I could brush it off here as random obstacles — physical distance, language barriers (the men are American, the women are Taiwanese), etc — but, I think it goes deeper than that.
Do the sexes game differently? Is my inability to game “like a woman” what keeps me out of primarily female gaming environments? Is that fundamental difference why I often feel like an interloper in my gaming communities? I don’t know, really, but I want to find out.
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I have been a gamer almost all of my life. I was 4, maybe 5, when a cousin who was staying with us introduced me to Dragon Warrior. I could barely get my character around the world, but I was in love. I played with my mom, I played with my best friend, I got calls from the elder brother of a family friend when he and his friends were stuck in games like Zelda. When I was old enough, I started playing them by myself. I bonded with many of my friends over my Nintendo, or Genesis, and later my SNES.
It wasn’t until high school, though, that I realized I wasn’t quite welcome in the greater gaming community. I would be at a party held by my male gamer friends and they would all gather around the N64 and play Goldeneye or Mario Party and I wouldn’t be welcome. It’s not like they said, “No, Andrea, you can’t play this,” but if I tried, they’d do little things like forget my turn, or gang up on me first, etc. I don’t think they meant to do it, but they still did. So I started just playing games alone. If I got to the parties early enough, I could hog the big TV and play Space Channel Five or whatever, but if not then I was stuck in another room playing whatever PSX game was available. Unless people were in there trying to play Marvel vs. Capcom or Street Fighter or something. Then I just sat around and watched. Which suited everyone just fine. Everyone, except me. Fighting and shooting games are probably the most shitass boring things to watch.
Read the rest…
This is a subject that is very personal for me. So personal, in fact, that my original introduction was too bitter, too angry, and not productive enough to be considered suitable for this blog. I posted it in feminist_gamers instead. The incident that lead to all this, in which some feminist gamers blogged about their disappointment with Oblivion and male gamers got nasty about it, made me think, yet again, about my own experiences in the gaming community. About the arguments about “female gaming” sites. About how “gaming site” is synonymous with “male gaming site”, even if it has female subscribers. And it made me sad. No, worse, it made me sick. This is my life. This is what I put up with day after day.
All I want is to have communities available to me that aren’t exclusively for women. I want to be able to be seen as an equal — not a “gamer-lite”, not a potential date, not a Second Class Geek — in gamer groups that include men in them. I want to be able to talk about the issues I see in a game without male gamers dismissing the concerns as “ridiculous” or making “jokes” about panty fights (what the hell is a panty fight, anyway?) and making dinner and whatever. I want to be taken seriously, as a serious gamer, and a serious human being. And I want to finally have a gaming community that accepts me, not despite of who I am, but because of it.
I have written in the past about gaming communities from the perspective of examining what, exactly, defines a community. In revisiting this subject, I would like to focus on gender issues in the communities. The first post will be on my personal experiences being a woman trying to find gaming communities throughout my life. The second will be on how general gaming communities are “boy’s clubs,” with a look a recent kerfluffle more-or-less started by a popular gaming site, Kotaku. I’m going to leave the series open ended for now, since I may want to write more on it in the future.
