Female Gamers in the Community

Video games and the communities revolving around video games have become extremely social in the past decade. With the beginning of VOiP and multiplayer based games, cultures and communities have grown and developed around specific games and game types. In the past, it was a group of neighborhood or school kids getting together to have a LAN party or play on the same console. Now there are tournaments that span continents and raids with a group you met from fifteen different countries. With this rise of interconnectivity, however, there has been something that many gamers have run into that, quite frankly, shocks them. This shock comes in the form of meeting a female gamer.

When I first met a female gamer, I honestly was for a loss of words. The idea of a girl playing Battlefield 2 was so foreign I did not believe it at all. The way she played the game and knew what she did was shocking. She was on the top of the leader boards. No one in the game could believe it. People were treating her as a god. The lines for the helicopters and jets did not exist for her. She cut the lines and queues for everything worth waiting for. Everyone was in awe that someone with breasts played video games like Battlefield.

This encounter with this warrior princess was four years ago. Now she and I are good friends. We talk and Skype as well as play games together. The funny thing is; she is normal. She has become a part of our gaming group, a group of about fifteen people who like the same things in games and real life. We even have two girls in the group. This has brought me to get out of the “Awe” factor and just see them as regular gamers. This, however, is not how the rest of the gaming community sees them.

The first way female gamers are seen in the same way most of us see them, including me. They are the gamers on the pedestal and above all the Trolling and trash-talk. They get the gold in WoW and the epics in Diablo given to them by randoms. It was funny to see this happen in the first couple of games I played with the group, but after it happened for about a month, it got old. Both girls like the free stuff but they are getting sick of the pubs trying to befriend them with gifts and gold just because they are females.

The second way our two girls are met in games is by the Epic Trollers. There are always those gamers who get online just to troll others. This usually happens in a lobby of a FPS when we are talking before the game starts. When they hear female voices, the trolling starts. They talk about how women should be in the kitchen and not online. They talk about how our girls are going to be awful in the game and how there is no way we are going to win. It seems to be worse when we have clan tags on and have a fill team. These trolls eventually change to calling us Try-Hards because our clan, females including, destroy the games with crazy scores. This takes the flak away from our girls and directs it towards all of us. We have gotten use to the trolling so we just laugh it off.

The thing is, both of these ways of treating female gamers should not happen. Most girl gamers like the attention of people but these two ways are not what they want. IronTigers and BearOfManyColours, our two female gamers’ user names, want to be recognized because they are good gamers, not because of what sex they are. We as a group have had many conversations about the topics. They want the gifts in MMOs because they did something nice, not because they are girls. They know that there is trolling in games, but they are puzzled and confused about why people troll because they are females. They want gamers to treat them as equals, not above the rest and not below. They want to be recognized and talked about because of their skills and teamwork on games. IronTigers has even stopped talking in games until she has proven her skills after a few rounds in game. She likes being treated normal in the game and likes to prove herself as a good fragger. That is all our girls want from the community. Nothing more and nothing less.