by Valerie Valdes
You’ve seen a video like it, or a comic, or read a story. Some poor dude is being berated by his girlfriend or wife for spending too much time playing one of those gosh darn video games. She’s sick of the late-night raids, the screaming at guild or team members for pulling at the wrong time or getting in the way of a shot, and when was the last time he showered? Why does he keep yelling “Leroy Jenkins”? You wonder why they’re even together. She’s a bitch, or he’s a jerk, or both. It’s unrealistic. People aren’t like that, and the ones who are, well… They’re idiots.
What do narratives like this imply? That gaming is still inherently a gendered activity. That men have poor impulse control and worse communication skills, and that the women in their lives are either nags or victims of their partners’ immaturity. While cheap jokes are certainly not exclusive to gamers–substitute “sports” for “games” and not much changes–it sometimes feels like the people writing these tired tales must live in an alternate reality. I imagine them talking like Pops from Regular Show: “Yes, a joke about a young man being derided by his lady friend for playing the electronic games machine, how droll!”
But the counter-narrative is becoming just as pervasive and annoying. Behold, the gamer grrl! She’s just like a (stereotypical) guy gamer, but with boobies! You know, the nice kind, not the chubby man-kind. Sometimes she’s as slovenly or brash as her male counterpart, and sometimes she’s a sultry vixen with a perfect figure and raging sex drive. Sometimes she’s a shy social outcast who cowers in her room and shuns the sunlight, despite being absurdly adorable. It’s like a modified Madonna-whore complex, with Felicia Day on one end and booth babes on the other. The alternative is a mirror image of the male-centered narrative, but with the genders swapped. What a twist! The man nags his woman! Truly, we have entered the Feminist Twilight Zone.
The truth is not so neatly packaged; this is the third narrative emerging across the internet as ladies get mad as hell and decide they don’t want to take it anymore. Gamers are individuals, so stop stereotyping. Boy and girl can raid together, then fall asleep watching the latest episode of Game of Thrones. They can head shot each other until one storms off in a fit of rage while the other says to stop QQing, you baby. A dad can give the kids a bath while Commander Mom Shepard flirts with Garrus and wonders briefly if she should feel like she’s cheating before shrugging and going for the cheevo. Moving past the heteronormative, two dudes or two ladies can hadoken each other to death and then do, you know… The same damn thing as everyone else.
But if we accept as our premise that the goal of feminism is gender equality–not a universal sentiment, I know–then the fallout we must contend with in dealing with media portrayals of gamer “grrls” is that they’re going to, generally, suck just as much as the male versions. There’s no drama in watching ordinary people do ordinary stuff in an ordinary way. And, frankly, gaming has become pretty ordinary. Clinging to the old tales is a way to classify, simplify and mock gamers, and that’s not likely to change anymore than sitcoms are suddenly going to stop having goofy, bumbling dads and eye-rolling moms. Likewise, the “edgy” stories will still be extreme examples of preconceived notions of gamer culture, twisted versions of the cliches that themselves are stereotypes and cliches by their very nature.
As more women self-identify as gamers, the mythology stretches to accommodate us, and like most mythical creatures we find ourselves warped and flattened. We’re like the jackalopes of cryptozoology, relative newcomers cobbled together from existing animals and put on display for the public to ogle, disdain, and dismiss as ridiculous. We are, dare I say, vampires that sparkle in the sun–part of the diaspora that is “vampire” but with a modified taxonomy that feebly attempts to account for perceived differences, or create ones where none exist. And society can’t decide whether it wants to screw us or stake us.
Beyond society in general, marketers are going to keep doing what marketers do by trying to pin down similarities and cater to them. As more ladies buy games, and more marketers realize there are cash monies to be gained from taking our preferences into account, we’re seeing more of that gendered targeting. It’s in their best interests for female gamers to be reduced to one-dimensional caricatures, however unpalatable we may find those portraits. We’re experiencing the same distillation process that male gamers have suffered through for years, like every other consumer subgroup.
But unlike men, women can be more sensitive to the marginalization, having struggled–and still struggling–with inequality in so many aspects of life. Certainly there’s as much a backlash against stereotypes among the fellas, as previously mentioned, but ladies face the additional hurdle of balking gender convention by engaging in a perceived male-dominated activity. We got flak back in the day for wanting to do things like vote and wear pants, with people turning feminists into man-hating she-demons bent on unraveling the fabric of society. Now gamers grrls are mannish or sex kittens or social outcasts; same crap, different era.
The bad news is, no matter how many blogs you post, or articles you write, or rants you record about how you’re a gamer but you don’t conform to the gamer image, so like, don’t act like you know me, man–it’s not going to stop. Or rather, it’s not going to stop just because you’re QQing about it. Cultural shifts don’t tend to happen overnight, and this one is no exception. If mostly dudes play games, then dudes are going to be the target at which most companies sling their crap because it’s an easier target to hit. If portraying gamer grrls as smoking hot succubi will sell more games, then hello boobs and bat wings. If you’re on Facebook and you get nailed with an ad for the latest Zynga game because you are what some might classify as female, don’t be shocked, especially if you’re roughly mom-aged.
But make no mistake: you’re not alone, and you don’t have anything to prove to anyone. Your identity as a gamer is as valid as anyone else’s, whatever genitalia you happen to possess, possibly in a jar on your desk. You can be a girlfriend, or a wife, or a mom, and that doesn’t mean you have to gripe about FarmVille tarnishing the image of “us gamer girls,” or bemoan the fact that some chicks just play games so guys will like them. We don’t need a self-imposed pseudo-solidarity to fully realize this aspect of ourselves. No, we’re not a cohesive group, anymore than humans with wangs are. But maybe someday we won’t need to see the “girl” label attached to the “gamer” one.
