and the failure of Purple Moon.
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| They're probably enjoying Wolfenstein 3D, like I once did. |
I'm not a sociologist. I'm not a psychologist. I'm a graphic designer who wants to be a game designer/animator. This has been my goal my entire life. I was first introduced to computers when I was not even four years old and I've been playing video games of many varieties for as long as I can remember.
The only time when being a girl in the gaming world was an issue for me,
was when people started giving me this stupid shit:
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| What the fuck is this fucking shit? |
This was the beginning of a nightmare for me as a kid, what I now know is called the "Girl Games Movement." This was an era when I was given games that weren't about games anymore and about a social agenda. I played Rockett-whatever. It, like all of those games, sucked.
Final Fantasy VI & VII were great, Starcraft was great, Metal Gear Solid was great, as was Pokemon and Mario and Zelda and whatever else you want to remember from the mid to late 90s that people like to remember.
It was a painful time to be a girl interested in games. I began to keep my gaming and my love for anime a secret because it wasn't socially acceptable. My classmates and even the mothers of my friends slandered me pretty severely.
I'm not an exception or a special case, though. Female gamers are engulfed by gender stereotypes that surround gaming culture--stereotypes that most people just shrug off or ignore. I hesitate to make any commentary on gender issues because I simply do my best to ignore them. Like Brenda Laurel's experience with both gamers and feminists beating her down, it seems that any sort of stance puts you in hot water with any number of people.
But what I know is my personal experience.
One of my classmates, for their thesis project, did a series of videos that focused on empowering young girls to get them interested in STEM disciplines. Another classmate made a pitch for a cartoon series that teaches young girls to face their fears and be strong. In my gaming class, we read Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and spoke extensively throughout the semester on how women are objectified in games and other media.
I can't ignore it. It's a problem.
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| Alyx Vance (Half Life 2) - Before user mod/after user mod |
As it was pointed out in our critical gaming class, women are super sexualized in games. Alyx Vance is praised as being a positive female character, possibly even classified as nongender. In the class, we looked at the shocking user mods for certain games like Fallout 3, which I love. But this image of Alyx above is only a sadly funny and tame version of the mods that I've seen out there for several games. The mods that I'm actually concerned about are just...disturbing, psychopathically sick.
At the heart of all games is gamic action (Galloway). What makes a game a game and not anything else is our ability to act upon the time and the environment. So when I see a mod for Fallout 3 where you can rape women and animals, nothing happens in my mind other than rage because I already lost my faith in humanity long ago.
I don't like the way we're having to "empower" women all the time either. The worst part of considering these issues is that I really don't know what the answer should be. One thing that I'm certain about, though, is that I don't want to see games for "girls" or "boys", but I want to see games that transcend these agendas by focusing on their gamic abilities and functions.
In the article, when it says that Brenda Laurel sometimes lost her job over suggesting that games be more than the norm, I can't help but feel like she made really stupid suggestions that get away from what make a game a good game--gameplay. This is something that, amid the jungle of bullshit comments on the Kotaku article, I can agree with.
When I play online, I don't flaunt the fact that I'm female. You could even say that I hide it. I just don't mention it at all when I play with people online. I've found in the past that there are problems when people realize that you're a girl. When my Team Fortress 2 community found out that I was a girl, I was treated like a fucking elusive unicorn, impeding on my ability to enjoy the game normally. But I also believe that those who make their gender apparent have an agenda in mind themselves, such as when girls appear on various Starcraft channels and talk about how they're girls, or when men masquerade as women so they are treated differently in WoW.
I think that most female gamers don't really talk about their gender because they hit the same roadblocks as me: they're disrespected. I mostly ignore it because my interests in gaming (I would like to believe) are separate from these issues.
I blame the way we raise girls. When I was little, it was nailed into my head that I would be a scientist or work for NASA. For almost my entire life, I was subscribed to EGM and National Geographic. It wasn't "empowerment", it was a push to avoid living an otherwise mediocre life. But those are my values and they don't sit well with everyone. Maybe I'm more privileged because I've had tech my whole life.
As someone that I follow on Tumblr said, "Specialization is for insects."
I never really had to directly confront these issues until recently. And even now, I feel like the best solution is to ignore it unless there is serious correction that needs to take place.
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