Girl Gamer

It’s not as oxymoronic as it used to be, so we’re getting somewhere, but the idea of a ‘girl gamer’ seems to conjure the image of some super hot ass kicker. I don’t know whether this taps into some sort of Freudian part of the male brain that enjoys being dominated, but it’s kind of odd how much guys will fall over themselves when they realised you’re a gamer.

The problem with a male dominated industry like this one is that often, in order to appeal to the demographic, there have to be boobies involved and it has to seem like those boobies love games. It’s for this reason that you have booth babes at E3 or The Frag Dolls. (I’m not going to deny that they’re gamers, because they obviously love what they do and they kick some ass. But let’s face it; there is a reason they’re all attractive young ladies…) If you type ‘girl gamer’ into google, you end up with a plethora of images of beautiful women with headsets on and a controller in their hands, conveniently semi-clothed and somehow in front of a camera. I remain unconvinced. Of course there are hot women out there who game but I'm always suspicious of them if they make it really obvious, with lots of flirtatious pictures and lots of, "yh, Im a gurl who luvs gaming, bet yur suprised! come game with me boys, my gmrtag is: XxXboxCutiegmrgurl123XxX!! lol" (I'm suspicious of 'lol' at the best of times.)

These ladies don't help the rest of the female gaming audience fit in; they just further the idea that we're mystical creatures, only there to impress guys. Most guys really don't care whether you're a girl, guy, shemale whatever, they just want to kick someones ass online, but there are still a fair few guys who have to realise that not all girls who game are there to be singled out and fawned over like some sort of oddity; they just love the hobby as much as you and they’d be happy to talk about it, but they don’t want to have boob pictures requested of them; they just want to kick your ass.


This girl obviously isn't an actual gamer, or she wouldn't
be doing this. A true gamer knows how much sweat has gone
onto that controller and barely wants to touch it with
their hands, let alone their mouths. *shudder*


But the whole 'guys getting excited when the realise a girl games' phenomenon is pretty easy to explain though. I’m going to try and not sound sexist now. Here goes: guys are driven by their manly bits (Pssh, not sexist at all…) and when they find a girl with whom they share common ground, they’re going to be pretty chuffed. Add the anonymity of the internet to the mix and you’ve got some pretty bold guy trying to woo you over a headset.

But seriously, putting on my non-sexist hat here for a moment; finding common ground is always nice and considering that gaming is seen as an inherently masculine past time, it must be nice for some guys to meet a girl who loves gaming as much as they do. I don’t see the problem in that and I’ve made some wonderful male friends through the initial mutual love of gaming. It’s amazing how one minute, you don’t know each other and the next minute, you’re involved in an intense debate over which Call of Duty was the best. The love of gaming can really jumpstart a friendship and I really like that aspect.

But I know that for many girls, this distinction and attention can be irritating because it shows that they’re being considered as ‘different’ when all they want is to be recognised as a ‘gamer’ not a ‘girl gamer’. Which is fair enough, no-one wants to be singled out for their differences. Positive discrimination still has the word ‘discrimination’ in it. This will take a little while to change though, because we can’t change the fact that gaming is still a male-dominated activity. It’s like when women first wore trousers, the men thought they were insane and now it’s completely normal. Norms and values take a little while to change, but change they do. Eventually, I think we’ll reach the point where girl gamers are considered as normal as guy gamers.

And then at least, we’ll only have the rest of society thinking we’re weird!