Any guy dumb enough to think I exist for him to date isn’t smart enough for me to consider mixing genes with.

I’ve met a few other people like me. One thing about us is that we are usually very serious about our characters. If you meet me in an MMORPG, you will probably assume
I am female. (And, yes, fending off the suggestive comments does get really annoying.) You’ll never know unless you ask. In contrast, there are a lot of female characters which are very clearly being played by males, who usually don’t bother to hide it or to get into character very much, and who reveal their ignorance of what it’s like to be female to a degree even *I*, a male who believes that there are few if any essential differences between men and women, can spot.

I know of at least one case where a serious male role-player playing a female character really shocked and offended a male player, because their characters had been having a romance, and when he found out that her player was male, I guess homophobia kicked in….

Just random thoughts.

I have to raise one issue in your article. I am a heterosexual male gamer, and I feel I’m quite a sympathetic person generally, but I find it VERY difficult to play female characters, or even homosexual males. That being said, I can see Dahlen’s point - I read it more (in the excerpts) as him saying that he feels tied to gender stereotypes when he plays within his own gender, but feels freed by gender-bending. Your reading is valid, and you’re right - I’d never have spotted that normative language had you not pointed it out. But I still don’t think that particular example shows normative language being used to enfoce feminine passivity - I think it’s more about allowing him to escape the stereotypes enforced on him by hos perceptions of masculinity. I may well be wrong. Ironic that I’m still arguing for the primacy of masculinity when i’m not intending to…

On the other hand, amen to your point about geek girls not being geeks for geek guys. My gaming-social group is full of men who THINK they are being progressive by saying they love ‘confident’ geek girls, almost word for word from your example. The fact many of the women in the social gaming group don’t game but are there for like-minded geek company (but NOT necessarily dating!) doesn’t seem to do anything but exacerbate these men’s assumptions that geek girls are only there in support of geek guys - the gaming is the main event, the girls an added bonus.

I think may be guilty of this as well; I have at many times in my life felt I don’t want to date a gamer, but I tell myself it’s more about not wanting uncomfortable meetings post-breakup - you can’t escape anyone in a scene this small. Recently I’ve been feeling I WOUDL like to date a gamer, because shared interests are good things in relationships. Your article makes me realise that no matter how much I rationalise it, these viewpoints are still objectifying people in terms of gender and subculture - I may as well be saying I’m looking for someone who is a geek for me!

However, I don’t think that the slotting of male characters into four character types represents a wide variety of personality types. It’s four. That’s not many. Any list of personalities will give you about four times as many (Myers-Briggs, frex, but the specifics here aren’t really important, just that four archetypes are not a lot). I also read ‘neutral territory’ differently, as something that can be shaped with less restrictions than the previously conquered militarised zones of the alpha male (for instance). This certainly leaves women as Other, if you consider the four male options presented (I will concede that the author probably has more in mind than just four) as Self. However, I don’t think it’s a restricted Other, it’s an Other the author is using because it is clearer than Self: it does not have the filters and stupidity attached to “alpha male” or “insecure wisecracker” which cause the character to “never come out the way [he] wants”. I’m not trying to suggest that playing a male character is as fraught with difficulty as our massively oppressed male lives (please note: joke), but that by not being male it’s possible to avoid parts of the major stereotypes in action on the internet (I say major because the majority of players are male, not female, and so the majority of stereotypes are about male behaviours - the stereotypes about female behaviours are just as problematic, if not moreso, but they are less prevalent due to the demographics of the internets), and play, for instance, a wisecracker who is perfectly comfortable with herself, or a leader who does not have to react to challenges with violence and put-downs, as an alpha male must do, etc etc.

All the protesting aside, I do think that there does need to be a lot more awareness of gender issues on the part of geek boys all over the world, and maybe we should pick up that you’re geeks first, girls second (actually, that’s probably just as bad - perhaps that you’re geeks orthogonally to your gender) as a collective.

Also, as a side note, I’m pretty sure that the percentage of cal tech geeks who go to ballgames is really small, and they can’t really be relied on as exemplars of geekdom, in terms of the amount of team-sport jock-worship. I know a large percentage of the geeks at my university, and they don’t go to sports events. Ever.

Um. To summarise my position, if I can: Guys, in general, are still dumb about gender stuff. There’s still an expectation that girls are there for guys’ benefit, some kind of hybrid eye-candy and provider of the thrill of novelty thing. That needs to change. But I also think that many geek guys are aware of these issues (obviously not all of us - I’m probably as ignorant as your average goat, feel free to tell me how wrong and stupid I am, if appropriate) than your average guy, and I also think that many readings are performed with the mindset of the reader as a given, not in a vacuum. It’s easy to interpret something as sexist, while others interpret it as neutral or even quite positive in terms of gender relations, and it’s very hard to disentangle the mindset from the reading. I can’t do it, I apologise that my reading is pretty firmly entrenched in a male mind (I do try to be aware of my privilege, though). I hope it can be useful as a sparkpoint for further discussion, though. I’m not very attached to my viewpoints and I enjoy having them challenged/changed…