Gamer girls

[SailorMars1994]

This is to the trans girls here born primarily in the 80s and 90s. Has anyone else noticed the video game culture is getting more femme? Like as a kid I always thought video games were "boy orientated" but as I keep moving on in life I have noticed over the last few years, I know more females that game then guys. Have you girls seen the same thing? Equally both my trans and cia female friends play games at a rather high margin.

[Angela H]

Yes, I agree. Video games were originally a boys club. I think this just happened 'naturally' because of their roots in early computers.

The earliest video games were really inaccessible for the average person so only the hardcore tech nerds played them. Hence, they became a 'guy' thing.

Nowadays everyone plays games and you don't need to know anything about programming to get into them. There's nothing inherently gendered about playing a game so women play them just as much as men [emoji16]

Although personally I played games for hours every day before I came out as trans and now I hardly ever play them. I was mainly using video games to escape from reality I think, and nowadays I like my reality. So I'm not really a gamer girl [emoji28] lol


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[Sephirah]

This is to the trans girls here born primarily in the 80s and 90s. Has anyone else noticed the video game culture is getting more femme? Like as a kid I always thought video games were "boy orientated" but as I keep moving on in life I have noticed over the last few years, I know more females that game then guys. Have you girls seen the same thing? Equally both my trans and cia female friends play games at a rather high margin.

The weird thing about this is... I don't know that I'd call it more femme, as you put it. I know that more and more games want to appeal to a female audience. But there's always a lot of pushback from the male gaming audience. Who are usually the most vocal. I move in a few gaming circles, and to hear people talk in that, you'd think women gamers were like unicorns. I think a lot of guys want to hold on to the idea that it's one of the last bastions of male culture, in spite of evidence to the contrary.

A lot of games want to try and appeal to women but when they do... the misogynistic people crawl out of the woodwork and aren't backward at coming forward, as it were. Female protagonists in games can get a lot of resentment from the male gaming crowd. Who don't want to play as anyone other than a cigar-chomping, muscle bound stereotype.

But I do think there's a shift in attitude, and a realisation by publishers and developers that not everyone who plays their game is a hormonal, sex-crazed teen guy who only want the giant chested, skimpily clad women as little more than eye candy. Which can only be a good thing, in my opinion.

[ChrissyRyan]

I used to play Spyro Dragon games, it was fun finding the dragon eggs.  It's a game that certainly appealed to girls, and even more games likely are now.  Even Spyro is coming around again!

I am too busy becoming a new girl now though to play much, so I am not really a gamer girl. 

Chrissy


Never be a n00b but being a newbie is okay.  You have to learn sometime!   

[Lynne]

I was born in the 80s and I got my first gaming console and computer in the 90s. I got my computer just after I started to realize what is 'wrong' with me and I quickly got addicted to playing games, they were a great way to take my mind off things. I spent unhealthy amount of hours in front of my computer.
When it was possible I always chose female characters and later I started to gravitate toward games with open worlds where I could be a woman. Until the end of my teenage years I haven't seen any real gamer girls and even then, they were rare.

I agree that a lot more girls are playing games nowadays, there are a lot more games to choose from, they are bound to find something they like. Some game publishers realized that half of the population is female and there is money to be made but still, l feel that girls in the gaming community are usually underrepresented.

I remember, whenever I saw a gamer girl I felt validated. If she can play games then I can be a girl as well.

[Sephirah]

I remember, whenever I saw a gamer girl I felt validated. If she can play games then I can be a girl as well.

It's actually a pretty even split at the moment, at least in the US:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/232383/gender-split-of-us-computer-and-video-gamers/

The days of it being a guy orientated thing are pretty much over. Some of them just need to realise it.

[Lynne]

It's actually a pretty even split at the moment, at least in the US:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/232383/gender-split-of-us-computer-and-video-gamers/

The days of it being a guy orientated thing are pretty much over. Some of them just need to realise it.

It would be interesting to know how these statistics are calculated exactly. Did they just use the number of registered male and female users? Did they take into account how regularly people play and how much time they play? It would be also interesting to see what games are more popular among girls.

Edit: Oh, I just saw that the data was based on surveys.

[Alice (nym)]

I used to play Guild Wars and then Guild Wars 2. When I started my guild, everyone just assumed I was female. As a result we attracted a lot of women and families. A lot of my members grew with the guild from childhood into adulthood because their parents were also playing.

But I would say that about 40-50% of the guild was female. Later when we formed alliances, I would put it as about 25% of the alliance was female. A guild = 100 people at full capacity and we had a policy that you had to be active. An alliance was 10 guilds.

Guild Wars 2 the dynamics changed slightly because my guild was also split 50/50 between the US and Europe. GW2 meant that it was difficult to stay together as a guild, especially as many of us had drifted into pvp. I was on SFR server when it started to rise and eventually dominate pvp. I would say that there was a healthy number of women on the server. The guild that I joined was male led but had a lot of female members... not as many as the guild I started myself but still about 20-30% female. However, I only ever heard one female commander on the server. The commanders were almost all male but we did have an openly gay commander for a while.

...And the women were just as good and often better at playing than the men.

Also, many women, in fact most of them, played male characters. It caused a lot of confusion when people heard my voice for the first time. Because people thought that the voice from the woman playing 'bob' was me, and that my voice was 'bob'. When it finally twigged that the voices and characters were not matching it caused a big stir in the guild. Several members left. I got a lot of abuse from some about being gay etc. As it turned out, quite a few of members in the guild had a crush on me. But we overcame that, it was sad that people no longer treated me as female, the language became a lot worse, so I had to introduce a rule of 'no swearing' because we were still a family guild. People were less kind, less helpful, and more aggressive... so in the end I stepped down as leader and put a cis woman in charge of the guild so that it returned to a better atmosphere again.

She had 90% control to do her own thing but any major changes had to be passed by me. Namely the only main thing was that the cape and logo stayed the same. I spent a lot of time and effort in the guild branding which is part of the reason why we became an Anet notable guild and were invited to alpha test GW2.

But, yep, definitely has been an increase in female gamers. 

[cassiebythesea]

I'm one of those unfortunate people that really want to be a gamer, but there's two problems: one, I'm bad at nearly every game ever; and two: I have insanely bad gamer rage. I've broken more controllers than I'd care to admit.

I was always that kid that would pick female characters whenever given the chance, and I'd always find some creative way to explain it. "Oh, she's just got the fastest stats." "Well, I need to beat the campaign with every character, and she's just next." "Um , I uh... you see, she's..." My dad would always give me crap for it.

The only thing I've ever been good at was the Armored Core franchise. And you know what's gender neutral? Giant robots.

[Alice (nym)]

oh I nearly forgot... I started gaming online in 2004 with Eve Online. At that time I joined a female only corp called the Glamour Bunnies which later became Daughters of Eve (Dove) after the leader quit playing and it two lesbians took over the corp. In order to join the corp you had to prove that you were a woman by telling them something that only women would know... so I gave them make-up tips, like how to apply lipstick (double coating) and because TS/Ventrillo wasn't popular at the time, I got in. Although I did eventually get to talk to the lesbian couple over TS in GW... they were shocked when they heard my voice.

When I transferred to GW, I founded my guild with a man from Eve Online who knew that I was one of the bunnies. So that probably helped quite a bit in people believing I was a woman. Sadly Jeff was one of the members who quit the game after he found out that I wasn't female (well I was female, just not cis - I think you know what I mean).

(\(\
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sleepy jazz bunny

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(-.-)
((_))o

le petit lapin

I miss being a bunny... lol

[Kylo]

No.

I was born a girl in '79 and I was playing games from the word go. My uncles were both game designers in the 80s and there were games all over their house and ours, as well as Commodore 64s, Atari/Amiga setups and early consoles. My female cousins had game consoles even before I did and so did my female best friend (who happened to be muslim, you'd think they might have had a problem with the daughters playing video games because their upbringing was definitely more sexist, but all the kids in that family were playing video games). They were big fans of Mario Bros. games, if I recall.

I did not notice a lack of females playing games, or any sort of unwritten rule that girls can't play. If there was a console in a girl's house, she was playing with it or had played with it. It was just seen as another kind of kids' toy.

Maybe it's a UK thing. We don't have the same sort of teenage culture as in the US and elsewhere, more indoorsy. It makes sense we'd all be playing games than driving cars around or going to the mall.

[Gabrielle66]

This is an interesting thread for me. After my trip to Vegas I was feeling a bit body dysphoric this weekend. So I fired up Mass Effect 2 and created my first custom female character. I tried to make her look a bit like I wish I looked. Role playing her helped me to alleviate some of my tension. It was nice to be a woman even if it was only in cyberspace. The lady who does the voice for the femshep is fantastic and gives more depth to the character's lines. Kudos to Jennifer Hale for her awesome performance. I'm still not sure when or if I will ever be able to get to a point where I am presenting as female in the real world. So this definitely helped me quite a bit. Love and faith.

Gabrielle

[salaniaseviltwin]

Little fact of Nintendo history here, because of the neutral colors that the original Nintendo had, they couldn't decide which side of the toy aisle they wanted to market their product on. Because if this, they ultimately decided to gear it toward boys by adding photos of boys playing the console in the box. They could have just as easily marketed it toward girls, though with Mario being their primary hero, it would have been a bit awkward to market it at the girls.

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