Edit// I wrote this the day after I attended the event, but I had unknowingly saved it instead of publishing it. Enjoy
Women in video game culture (a term too broad for the many separate categories and genres of games) face the struggle for genuine acknowledgement. Not as a female gamer but just a gamer. Womanhood (or being perceived as feminine) takes precedent against all other factors, and the term itself insinuates that the default is male. Evidence that nearly half the gaming community is female is met with the question of, “where are they?” But when women get on chat in a multiplayer game or stream on Twitch or anything that would identify them as a woman, they get harassed into silence again, perpetuating the cycle. For other women, having women silenced makes it harder for them to find each other in these environments to band together.
I went to the Retro Gaming Expo in Portland this last weekend. I took the Max light rail to get there and missed more than a few panels I was interested in, but I still managed to get in and listen to the SupaPixelGirl Presents: Women in Gaming panel, featuring SupaPixelGirl, Kinsey Burke, TamashiiHiroka and Cheratomo. They talk about their unique experiences in the gaming community – in streaming/video entertainment and development – as women. One important topic brought up was the concept of “git good” (though not in those words).
There’s an argument against the concept that the gaming community is hostile towards women that openly and visibly exist in the space as women. The comment refuting argument is, “people don’t care about gender so long as you’re good at what you do.” SupaPixelGirl and the others went on to combat this idea, sharing personal stories of commenters commenting on their looks, asking for them to wear more makeup and less clothing, how often they get death threats and how often those death threats are specific to their gender.
In one instance, Kinsey Burke talked about how she tripped over a wire and broke an old console and received death threats because she broke a guy’s console. Yeah, breaking an old console sucks and it might be hard to see one get broken, but there were even comments that demeaned her as nothing more than “the girl in the video.” She postulated that if she was a guy, the incident might’ve been seen as nothing more than guys playing around with an unfortunate consequence. Sadly, there’s no way to prove it, but it’s still easy to pick at how absurd it is to receive death threats for something like this, something as simple as tripping on a wire and accidentally breaking something with no obvious ill will between the two content creators.
Most interesting about this panel was the discussion they dived into about the concept of the “gamer girl.” Not the group of people that play games and identify as women, but the fetishized concept of the gamer girl fantasy and how it can lead to a hostile environment for women existing in spaces for games. They all acknowledged that yeah, it’s fine to like someone who likes the same stuff as you, but when you show up to a hobby shop to play a tabletop game and everyone looks at you as a possible girlfriend rather than someone to play the game with, it becomes uncomfortable. They aren’t a person to play with as much as an object to project a fantasy upon.
As a finishing end to the conversation between the panelists, they talked about support groups. Maybe everyone needs them, and all the more power to it in this community and culture, but women and minorities have strength in numbers when you have people to turn to in stressful times and difficult situations.
We might be better than we were ten years ago in terms of inclusivity and diversity, but the community itself is stuck in old ideas and behaviors generated by years of being seen as a “boys club” and being allowed to exist as such in the public eye. That’s what we need to tackle, most of all: that the myth of the rare “gamer girl” doesn’t exist, that gamers are men and women alike, that it doesn’t exist in a binary of gamers and female gamers.
Video Games Deconstructed 