Where Are The Gamer Girls? A Brief Commentary on Hostility Experienced by Women in Gaming

The gaming atmosphere for women is undoubtedly more hostile than the atmosphere for men and only until recently have I been able to articulate to myself why that is. The conclusions are no less angering for myself as they are sad. Games and gaming culture are misogynistic to their core: by design and by experience. In this blog, I dive deeper into this dynamic, detailing the terribly unfortunate truths of gaming and one of its most marginalized communities.

All-female professional LoL team Vae Victis eSports (Image courtesy of Esports News UK)

    Firstly, in order to understand the marginalization of women in gaming, it is important to analyze the place of a man in this context in order to try and derive the branching point between the two. If you think of the terms “manly” or “heroic”, words such as strong, brave, or even womanizer may come to mind. The term “geek” does not align with any such term, instead invoking mental images of social ineptitude and poor hygiene. The term geek entails two critical connotations: accelerated smarts to compensate for a lack of braun and an affinity towards fantasy over reality. Salter and Blodgette point to common geek representations such as the Big Bang Theory and a questionaire by The Armory to demonstrate how the term geek is perceived in these ways, and how men have come to adopt this term as their own. They show that it would only make sense then that the world of video games would be an incredibly potent attractor for all who tag themselves with geek on their identity. In worlds where braun and social ability don’t matter, geeks can find a fulfillment they would have never been able to otherwise. Finally, their brainpower is a metric worth something of value, their lacking physicality is no detriment, and geeks can finally embody the heroes they could only dream of being.

    What does this mean then, for the woman who is also a geek? Would she find a place in her identity amongst endless libraries of story-based and expansive role playing games portraying white, male, entities of war and conquest such as Doom, Halo, or Call of Duty? Or similarly, would she identify with games where our hero’s only end goal is to be a savior to the damsel in distress in series’ such as Super Mario or The Legend of Zelda? Certainly not here, since there are so few heroes which any girl could identify with, should she venture to embody them by playing. Game developers of old and even in the modern day recognize the allure to geeks of the worlds that they create, specifically of men, capitalizing and profiting off of the desperation of these men to become “manly”, or at the very least, to feel “manly”. Again, Salter and Blodgette extend upon this point by demonstrating how the white man is gaming’s default avatar, pointing to games such as Duke Nukem. It is in this way that these sorts of games are not made for gamers, but for men.

    If not in story driven games such as these, maybe in games with established competitive aspects? This would include first-person shooters like Overwatch or Valorant, MOBA’s such as Dota 2 or League of Legends, fighting games such as Tekken or Street Fighter, strategy games such as Pokemon or Magic The Gathering or even games not inherently competitive through activities such as speedrunning or tournament play in games like Portal, Tetris, and the entire rhythm game genre. These games sport competitive communities targeted towards, and in turn, populated by geek men, still desperate to prove their worth against the normal definitions of manly in the only way that they possibly can: through intellectual or physically unintensive shows of skill. Salter and Blodgette dive deeper, again analyzing The Big Bang Theory and The Armory to show how men vie for intellectual superiority in their struggles to carve out a counter-cultural masculine identity for themselves. A woman would certainly not be welcome here, as the men present are animalistically territorial. This is the only space where many geek men can find excellence within themselves. If a woman were ever to demonstrate higher proficiency than her male counterpart, the man would be exiled again from their achievements of intellectual and executional proficiency, by a girl nonetheless. These communities are viciously gate kept from women in order for the men there to preserve their fragile egos.

EVO Championship Fighting Game Tournament (Image courtesy of EVO.gg)

    Therefore, the library of games for women has been whittled down to low-skill, low-intensity leisure games, including sandbox games such as Animal Crossing or Minecraft, simulation games such as Powerwash Simulator or The Sims, simple puzzle games such as Candy Crush or Sudoku, AFK Tycoons such as Cookie Clicker or Clash of Clans, and other games of the sort. Certainly a woman could be comfortable in her identity as a gamer here, right? Not even close, as the same desperate men who don the word “geek” as their mainstay must again guard their sense of identity by disparaging these games, claiming they’re not real because they don’t necessitate commitment or talent. They say to be a gamer is not simply to play games, but to live games, to breathe games, and above all, to be good at them, as that is the thing which gives them worth as a gamer. If it takes nothing to be good at your game, then it means nothing to be good at your game, and there’s no way you can be a gamer if these are your games of choice.

    As a young, naive boy who was neck deep in the perils of discovering one’s own identity at that age, there were two identifiers in particular that had cemented themselves within my psychology even back then: “boy” and “gamer”. I’ve never considered myself to be particularly attached to any given grouping or archetype that I exemplify, even as a little one. Despite that, as my young self was sitting in an airport terminal waiting for a flight one afternoon, my attention was immediately drawn to a documentary that they had playing on one of the televisions, as the documentary was talking about gaming. Specifically, the documentary was addressing women in gaming culture, and on that day I was made privy to a statistic that has never left my mind since. The documentary aimed to refute claims that gaming was not for women by asserting that the ratio of gamers based on gender was close to 50/50, but that was only if they included mobile games. If they didn’t, then the “expected” ratio held true, the majority of gamers being men. The documentary spokesperson smiled, saying things to the effect of “so gamer girls do exist!” and “mobile games are real games!” At that moment, I stopped watching the documentary as my horribly naive self, almost a little annoyed, determined that the documentary had no idea what it was talking about. “Those girls aren’t gamer girls,” I remember thinking to myself.

    I stand today a little bit older, hopefully a little bit wiser, but no less bothered by the statistics, obviously for different reasons. While I don’t know how valid or scientifically based the documentary I saw was, it has still left a severe impact on me as an aspiring game developer. In my own observations, there seems to be a severe lack of women present at the upper echelon of competitive eSports. One of my favorite games is Super Smash Brothers Ultimate, and the majority of the women I have either played the game with or seen playing, in a game that has almost 90 characters to choose from, only a few are prevalent: the “princess” characters, such as Zelda or Palutena, the “baby-mode” characters such as Yoshi or Kirby, or the “cute boy” characters such as Ike or Cloud. I would assume that the technical limitations and higher accessibility of mobile games incentivize mobile developers to jump at making non-expansive games sporting high levels of reward and low-skill ceilings. The glass ceiling in the gaming community and industry has crystallized to be bullet-proof, and it is not only on gamer guys, but on game developers as well to usher in a new definition of what it means to be a gamer - one that lets girls be gamers too.

Sources:

Salter, Anastasia, and Bridget Blodgett. “Come Get Some: Damsels in Distress and the Male Default Avatar in Video Games.” Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media, 2017, pp. 73–99., https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66077-6_4.

Salter, Anastasia, and Bridget Blodgett. “Introduction: Actually, It’s about Toxic Geek Masculinity….” Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media, 2017, pp. 1–16., https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66077-6_1.