The relationship between videogames and girls is a strange one. There’s a lot to say about the portrayal of women in games, but that has been discussed time and again on the internet and I don’t want to go too much into that here. I’m going to have to touch on it, however, in order to get to the root of what I do want to talk about: the way guy gamers treat girl gamers.
We’ve all seen “Tits of GTFO” or “Make me a sandwich” in response to a girl revealing online that she is, in fact, a girl. There’s requests for pictures of the shapelier parts of her body, incessant friend requests on Xbox Live and plain old namecalling. Sexual ethics get brought into question. I’ve even heard about threats of rape. It’s rare, but the fact that it happens means we have a problem.
The reasons that girls online are being made targets for abuse are as numerous and complex as the reasons for why humans do anything. I can’t hope to cover them all here, but we can have a look at a few of the bigger problems surrounding the issue.
First off, games don’t do a whole lot for one’s attitude toward women. Look at cosplay, look at E3’s booth babes, look at pretty much any girl in any game. If you’ve got a few spare hours try to think of a compelling female lead in a videogame.
Keep thinking
You’re ten seconds and a Google search away from your fill of hot girls dressed as videogame characters. It might just be that they’re so numerous because if you’re a girl who plays games, in this world that’s where you fit (or not, in the case of many of the corsets on offer). In the name of fairness a friend of mine suggested I try to find a hot male cosplayer. There was actually this guy.
A visual representation of sexual equality.
But it was telling that there were a negligible number of ‘hot male cosplayers’ compared to ‘hot female cosplayers’. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming the female cosplayers. They should be able to dress how they want without fear of creating an environment in which a whole gender cannot be taken seriously.
Next, there’s the fact that women playing games online are simply an obvious minority. They’re rare, and they stick out because their voices sound different on a microphone (if they’ve got the nerve to use a mic at all). In the verbally violent realm of online gaming, anything out of the ordinary is a target. Moreover, we’ve got to accept that people just like to display their dominance by demeaning those who are different, and in the male-dominated world of videogames women are vastly outnumbered. They’re an easy hit, especially when the attackers know they’re far more likely to get support rather than condemnation from the community.
I think there’s more to it than ‘ease’ though. There is a sense that girls are intruders, that they’re ‘on the turf’ of a group among whom they are not welcome. I don’t want to be accused of generalisation here, but for a long time games have been a retreat for a lot of males. They are something that teenage boys in particular use to form part of their identity, that they can use to identify ‘their kind’, something that not everyone understands. Then you get some girl putting in a disk of Battlefield 3, and she represents to you everything that games don’t. So you call her a whore? Well, yeah, that’s what happens. But it’s not right; I’m trying to provide explanation rather than justification. I find it strange, when a lot of gamers like games because they provide a community within which they don’t feel marginalized, that they are then so quick to target a minority within themselves. But they’re only human, and I guess that’s what humans do.
Undeniably, gaming reeks of male-domination and it provides a forum in which it seems ok, to a lot of people, to rip girls. It’s not. Now I know the internet is a horrible place a lot of the time. Many formative moments in my life were provided by 4chan. But that’s no reason to settle for this. We can’t just accept a problem because it seems insurmountable.
Alyx Vance wouldn’t just accept it
Increasingly, games feature empowered women (like Alyx) with more…er…realistic dimensions than previously. Which is a good start. But we can do more to balance the scales: we shouldn’t be afraid to stand up for girls online. It’s easy to just watch or listen as they get mocked; everyone just accepts it as part of the game. Maybe banter is (that’s a blog for another time), but making people feel rejected because of their gender isn’t on. You’re an anonymous voice, probably half the world away from someone throwing sexist abuse around online. You’ve got nothing to lose by speaking up for girls, and you could start the transition to an atmosphere where it’s no longer the norm for lassies to get ridiculed. I think the gaming community has the potential to be a warm and welcoming environment for everyone, and we should do out best to make it that way.
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