TheWeeJenny.net

I’ve been up all night (waiting up to record one of my good friends being interviewed on BBC radio, but that’ll have to wait for another post) so I don’t think I can adequately articulate how awesome this is.

My previously mentioned friend Tony has posted an early draft of a really kickass article, A Guide to Gamers A to Z, on his Vox blog. The part I want to highlight especially, is the section entitled, “Grrl Gamer”, and I’ll tell you why after you read it.

Grrl Gamer

The Grrl Gamer is interesting in that her main “powers” have nothing to do with games themselves, but rather through her ability to look provocative. Usually this means posting pictures of her holding controllers, wrapping herself in wires or wearing skimpy video game clothing (or even cosplay material) in settings that are easily accessible to anyone that dares to look… i.e., all over the damn Internet.

It is clear through our own relationships that Grrl Gamers are far from being the average female gamer, but they do manage to take the limelight away from those that might otherwise be deemed most “legitimate”. Legitimate, in this sense, referring to those female gamers who do not require utilizing their gender’s unique assets to prove their interest in the hobby.

This is something that’s fed into by the Internet and most male gamers in general. Unable to keep their hormones in check, most male gamers will quickly debase this into a question of “hotness”. This does not necessarily mean direct comparison of looks, but even just comparison of the female’s approach. You will see this under the guise of “true gamer” complaints, in the sense that a male might state that he thinks it’s more “attractive” when a girl just enjoys games and doesn’t take on the Grrl Gamer stereotype.

In fact, all this really does is to promote a side aspect of this stereotype and the main thing most female girls would like to get past in the first place: any sense of objectification. As such, the concept that the male gamer deals with even this lone aspect of the issue in terms of image simply adds to the problem. The argument, on its most basic scale, should not deal with what’s more attractive, what looks better or what sounds the most enticing. It should simply deal with the fact that these girls happen to play games. There’s nothing inherently gender-specific about playing video games, but these basic concepts seek to keep it that way (whether consciously or not). They’re not girls who play games as much as they’re gamers who just happen to be girls.

The male equivalent is unlikely to be seen. Male gamers are still predominant within this hobby and as such there is no intrinsic need for them to feel as though showing themselves off will have anything but detrimental effects. Doing so would most likely have the unintended effect of coming off as “homoerotic” and will generally lead to unnecessary insults unless localized on a site where this is already deemed “acceptable”.

In my early days on the internet, I spent a lot of time at the official forums of OPM magazine. There were a lot of us girls on there, and as you can imagine we encountered a fair amount of crap at times from a small percentage of the other posters. The death knell of those days for me were when the magazine writers (who actually hung out with us poor serfs in the forums and in an irc chatroom) published an article about how to get girls into games.

It was vile, and flipant (Tell her to pretend the point are shopping credit! Point out that Parappa the Rappa is a cute doggy!) and completely dismissive of the existing female readership, and we couldn’t believe they could write (or commission to be written actually) such crap when they knew that they had an active female audience. We brought our concerns to their attention, hoping that they would acknowledge that it was in bad taste and print something to that effect the following month.

What actually happened, was they mocked us. They said it couldn’t be sexist because it was written by a woman, that it was a joke, that WE were sexist for having a problem, that we were looking for stuff to get pissed at. All of these claims were rebuffed, and there was some heated debate on the boards for a while. Finally since no actual progress could be made, I and probably others that I don’t know about, voted with our wallets and stopped buying the mag. I made sure to mention before leaving that if I’d been looking for something to get mad at I could site at least 10 other things off the top off my head that could’ve been construed as sexist that I never raised a fuss about, and that for several years I’d PAID THE NEWS STAND PRICE ON EVERY ISSUE I’D EVER BOUGHT FOR FIVE YEARS, hardly ever missing an issue to boot, and wouldn’t be buying it any more. So there.

I’d left that experience thinking that I’d just have to grit my teeth and deal with the fact that a good chunk males who enjoy this hobby I also enjoy, would always see me and other females as irrelevant at best, objects and novelties at worst.

Tony’s article made me feel like that won’t be true forever, and that’s not a bad way to start yer mornin.

On another hopeful note, I have often felt that slowly we’re being less marginalized now than we were even a few years ago, despite the infamous WoW community at large. In fact, the bad attitudes in general have a bit of a “quaintness” to them that they didn’t before.

As a bit of an Epilogue, I give you Google’s top search result for OPM magazine. And I quote;

You have reached a page that is no longer in our system. Click here to go to the home page.

Yup, they is gone. Allow me to indulge in a last laugh. Har. Dee har. Dee har har. :3