Category: Gaming Communities

Gaming While Female [Gaming Communities, Part 3]

tekanji

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.

I. Do Men and Women Game Differently?

One of the difference I see in male gamers and female ones is that female ones tend to have a bigger life outside of games – we have multiple friend groups that we often go out with, interests outside of geeky culture that we will pursue with the same vigor as our games, and we don’t tend to let our gaming get in the way of our health or other obligations.

Which is not to say that my generalization is a hard and fast rule, but rather that it’s a usual pattern that I’ve observed in most of the gaming communities I’ve been a part of. I, myself, often straddle the line between what I’ve defined here as “male” gaming patterns and “female” ones, so that alone should tell you that it isn’t a truism any more than the idea that more men than women play videogames is a truism.

Take this past week for an example — I’ve thrown studying to the wind and have spent almost every night playing video games with my friends. One of the days I didn’t, I held a dinner party that one of them attended (the other was working). I’ve stayed up much later than I should — which is to say that I’ve gone to bed anywhere between 12am and 5am, depending on whether it was a school night or not. But I haven’t missed school, and I haven’t slacked in my classes.

The boys, however, would either leave my place to go play more video games, or I’d leave theirs because I was falling asleep. Once or twice one of them would leave before I would. But usually not. They will miss school, or stay up all night, or skip meals (okay, I can’t get on their case too much about this one — I’ve been known to do that in the past, too), or what have you. And none of this shocks me, because that is pretty much what would happen in my old gaming group.

The girls I haven’t had a chance to play with don’t, to my knowledge, stay out late. They often have other things going on that will run late. They keep wanting to game, but they never seem to have any time. I can relate because in between gaming I’ve been going out with friends (dinner, lunch, just hanging out) quite a lot. The only reason I have time is because, instead of going to bed after my nights out, I’ll do what my gaming guys do — bid my friends goodnight and then go play video games.

II. Hardcore? Casual? None of the above?

“But wait,” you say, “Doesn’t that just define thel line between hardcore and casual gamers? Doesn’t that just reinforce the idea that women are casual gamers and men are hardcore?” To some extent, yeah, I am kind of postulating that here. But I think that there’s more to being a hardcore gamer than making oneself sick playing games all the time.

I, for instance, heavily identify as a hardcore gamer — when I get a new game I like, I obsess. I will play it whenever I have free time, often to the point of ignoring my friends. But that’s always a temporary state for me; after a while, I’ll go back to keeping a more balanced schedule. Because, well, I like having friends, and friends don’t stick around if you ignore them for too long.

Another issue that I think factors in to whether one is a hardcore or casual gamer would be how much one spends thinking/talking about games when not actually playing them. I personally have this habit of almost always talking about games — to the point where I often lose the person I’m talking with. Just yesterday, I was talking to a classmate about my DS Lite (bought on Friday — be jealous, ye suckers who don’t live in Japan!), and she said to me, “When you talk about games it’s like you’re speaking another language.” And, I mean, it is. Not to mention that it’s slowly becoming the class joke that anytime a question is asked about what I want to do, what I like, my hobby, etc. that I’ll say gaming. And those of you who read my blog regularly will know how often I talk about the intersections between gaming/geekery and other issues (like feminism).

In this sense, are women less likely to be hardcore? I don’t rightly know. I’d argue that the prevalence of gaming blogs and sites by women would say no. But, given the hostile environment (which I will talk about one day, I swear! the post is already half written), it’s hard to truly gauge how many women are “hardcore”.

III. Male Gamers Looking at Women

What about the perception of women, though? Just a few weeks ago, I was in the school bar chatting with another student. As is often the case with me, the discussion turned to games. And this guy called me a casual gamer. You’ll hear this story again whenever I get around to posting about the greater gaming community, because that’s how much it bothered me. Not that I think that it’s necessarily a bad thing to be a casual gamer, but he assumed that I was because I was a woman. I mean, unless it’s become standard fare to give that label to someone who has been shooting the shit with you for like 5 minutes about various different kinds of games. And, come on, this guy didn’t even really play anything besides like PSX/PS2 and PC games. I don’t think he even did emulators. But, you know, I was the casual gamer.

As for my gaming communities, past and present, what did they think? Well, I know my old gaming group knew I identified as hardcore. My cousin and I would rent or buy games to play together — we especially liked playing RPGs together, but we didn’t confine ourselves to that. But I didn’t like games like Smash Bros. or fighting games (way too much baggage attached to those styles of games), which ruled me out of a lot of encounters. And that made it very stressful towards the end of my stint with them.

I can’t honestly say what my new group thinks of me. They’re happy to have me — I think, but I’m going to talk more about that in my next post (this one got too long). They are more than happy to include me in whatever game they’re playing. For instance, one of them just got an XBox 360 (which is not selling at all over here in Japan), and got a soccer game. That we all suck at. But since the XBox is 4 player, I was invited to join, and join I did. They never shirk my turn for Sengoku Musou, and part of the reason I got to be so friendly with these guys in the first place was that when they heard that I had a Gamecube they were smitten (with the console, you perv!).

I don’t think that they’d call me a casual gamer if someone asked, but would they say that I was as hardcore as them? I don’t know. Does it matter? Maybe, maybe not. I’m hoping it’s more towards the not, but given the way my last group imploded, I don’t feel so secure.

IV. Conclusion

This is the first time I’ve really sat down and examined some of the whys behind my expeirences “gaming while female.” I’ve always dealt with feeling excluded, or being the interloper, or what have you, but I’ve never looked at possible reasons why that might be. And, of course, after all this I’m left with no answers, but a lot more to think about and eventually talk about. But, that’s for my next post.

"Girl" Gamers Not Welcome [Gaming Communities, Part 2]

tekanji

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.

It wasn’t all bad. In university there was a year in which a group of us would head down to an internet cafe every friday and play Counter Strike with each other. I would play games like Resident Evil and Tales of Symphonia with my cousin. Although he was just a casual gamer, John (he was my boyfriend for two years) and I would play things like Half-life and Alice together. During those times, I didn’t feel excluded, or ignored, or not welcome.

Not long after John and I broke up, I brought an acquaintence of mine into the friend group. We had known each other for a while, but for various reasons we would only really see each other in school and at parties. It seemed like a good idea at the time: he liked to game, we liked to game, he was nice, we were nice… he seemed like he would fit in. And, really, he did. He fit in so well that the whole community I had created changed. He liked to play things like Smash Brothers, and he brought in a few (male, of course) friends of his who felt the same. Suddenly it was High School all over again. At first it was just something little, something stupid. He invited my cousin to his birthday party, but not me. I confronted him, he said it was an honest mistake, and things seemed better for a while.

Then the guy and I entered into a “friends with benefits” style relationship, which meant that I saw more of him, and I realized that it hadn’t actually gotten better. They had just gotten better at excluding me without my knowledge. Now, if I wanted to spend Friday nights with my cousin, I’d have to put up with them, too. And they would get vicious when we played games. So vicious it would make me vicious, and I’d end up feeling shitty afterward. It was like playing Carcazzone and getting into Sheep Wars with another friend of mine. It made the game not fun anymore. All of this, plus other personal shit, led to a spectacular blowup between me and this guy. That fed into a blowup with my cousin.

Suddenly I didn’t have a gamer community anymore. I still don’t. I’ve actually met a few geeks since coming to Japan, so I’m hopeful, but all of them are men. And I’m afraid of getting back into the pattern. Afraid that, even if I’m the one creating the group, that ultimately I won’t be welcome because I’m just not like them. I am, after all, a woman.

Introduction [Gaming Communities, Part 1]

tekanji

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.