https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtBogA9mwVg
This video is intended as a parody
and was made, I assume, in all fun and games, but it highlights a major problem
within the gaming community, sexism.
Being both a gamer and female myself, I have been fortunate that most of
my fellow male gamers have accepted me at face value but I have indeed
encountered the sexism that runs rampant in our community. Usually it’s not anything too horrible,
mostly just sexist comments about my looks or such. I do know plenty of other women who have had
much worse happen. My little sister
inherited my nerdiness and is a pretty skilled Call of Duty player. However, she refuses to speak during
matches. She’s worried she’ll get kicked
off the team, as she had been in the past once her male team members found out
she was female. Not to mention had some
horrible remarks thrown her way, and much wounded male pride, insisting that
she had to be cheating. That’s not to
say that every single male gamer is sexist, both myself and my sister have had
very positive responses once our gender was revealed.
The video put a fun little spin on
this in the end though. The video starts
with the girlfriends trying to pry their boyfriends away from whatever co-op
game they’re playing. The video paints
them as stereotypical women-always wanting to go out and party, listen to music
the boyfriends don’t like, and do “cheesy” things together like cooking. Eventually the girlfriends get tired of this,
and decide to get even. The twist is
that they are all gamers themselves, and fairly high level/skill gamers at
that. They are all good enough at their
respective games to sign in and quickly lay waste to their boyfriends. It’s a nice little positive note for the
video to end on.
I agree that the video does show the issues with the gaming community. I myself and not a part of the gaming community but, when I was younger, I was into gaming. I always played with my younger brother but, around the time I entered third or fourth grade, it started to become something that was labeled by peers as a “boy’s game”. For some time, I played but never mentioned it to peers. After a while, I stopped playing altogether.
ReplyDeleteI have a good friend from high school that attends USC and develops video games there. She is one of only a handful of girls in the program and her entire production team is men. When she was accepted to the program, many classmates and her family thought it was odd that she applied to be a part of a program “for guys”. This was actually said to her. What is funny though is that, like the girls in the video, she can outplay most guys in these games.
The gaming community does have a problem but here is something else that the video does not point out, most female gamers are introduced to gaming by either their boyfriends or their brothers. If they play along with their boyfriends or brothers they seem to be more readily accepted since another male voice is vouching for the female's skills. Also there is a support then for them to continue on. I do not play COD because of the issues that are seen in the community except when my brother and cousin are over and I have a buffer. I do enjoy the twist at the end when the higher skilled girlfriends kill their boyfriends, as their skills are not often celebrated. The fact that these women understand what their boyfriends are doing makes the video have a new meaning at the end and plays with stereotypes.
ReplyDeleteI certainly agree that there are problems with sexism within the gamer community. Though, I believe that a bigger takeaway from the video would be the fact that the women are not only active in the video game community as well, but also very skilled. This makes a very important point, and breaks the stereotypical mold that exists concerning girls and gaming. This stereotype has roots in the fact that video games are normally associated with being “male”. Further dividing male and female gamers is pushed along by the fact that for every 1 female character portrayed, there are 5 male characters, this means that more often than not the male characters also play the central roles. This is certainly done with the male gamer in mind, looking to create a sense of being relateable and connectivity. It’s hard for women to fit into a sphere that is so predominantly aimed towards men even during the production phases. It’s unfortunately not surprising that women have issues with sexism in this field.
ReplyDeletehttp://radford.edu/~mzorrilla2/thesis/gamerepresentation.html