Ever since the bizarre social backlash now known as #GamerGate first erupted in August, we’ve heard a lot of alarmist, entitled nonsense from self-described gamers who are pig-biting mad that so-called Social Justice Warriors and, you know, girls, are invading what is inevitably described as “our hobby.”
Thing is, guys, it’s not your hobby. At least it’s not only yours.
I don’t call myself a “gamer” – largely because so many of those who do embrace the label are such immature assholes – but, guess what, I play games too.
Indeed, as you can see from the picture above, I own more than 100 console games, some of which I’ve devoted hundreds of hours to. Over the years I’ve owned five different consoles – seven, if you count replacement consoles bought because I wore out the originals.
I first encountered video games in high school, playing Space Invaders in the basement of the University of Illinois student union. I wasn’t very good, and gravitated more to air hockey and pinball and other purely analog games instead. Still, by the end of the 80s I’d been bitten by the electronic game bug – starting with the bootleg version of Tetris I installed on my Mac in grad school to distract me from the tedium of actually working on my dissertation.
In other words, I’ve been playing games, off and on, for longer than many #GamerGaters have been alive.
But I’m sure many of these people wouldn’t consider me a “real” gamer at all. I’m not what you’d call hardcore. I’m basically a console gamer – I don’t even have Steam installed on my laptop. And I’m always little behind the time. I haven’t shelled out for an Xbox One or a Playstation 4. I didn’t beat Destiny ten hours after it was first released; hell, I probably won’t even pick it up for at least another six months or so when the price drops a bit. And I’m not a full-time gamer either. While I regularly get obsessed with certain games and play them to death, I also take breaks from gaming for months on end.
I also play a lot of the “casual” games that hardcore “gamer” types dismiss as not “real” games – addictive little timewasters like Bejeweled and Peggle and Candy Crush – as well as decidely un-hardcore games like Super Monkey Ball (which I played mostly for its billiards minigame) and Sega Bass Fishing. (That odd device in the picture of my game collection? A Dreamcast fishing controller.)
And while I play a lot of shooters – as you’ll see if you look closely at the picture of my collection – I often play on the easy setting, and I never play multiplayer at all. My favorite games tend to be those that give me the option to goof off for hours on end. I don’t even want to imagine how much time I’ve spent in the various Grand Theft Auto game universes, driving off cliffs on “taxi missions” gone wrong and generally causing trouble. (It would be nice if these games were less blatantly sexist, but Rockstar sure as hell knows how to design compellingly immersive open worlds.)
So, yeah, I’m pretty far from hardcore. But, you know what, angry gamebros? This is my hobby as much as it is yours. I may not fit your gamer stereotype, but I play games too, and the money I spend on gaming is as green as yours.
And there are a lot of us out here – game players who look a lot different from the angry gamers now ranting about evil Social Justice Warriors trying to destroy their supposedly male preserve. Hell, the comments section of this blog if full of them, many of them aficionados of RPGs and obscure interesting indie titles I’ve never heard of.
As Misha wrote in the comments to a recent post here, addressing one of the many gamebros out there incensed that non-dudes are invading a gaming world he sees as rightfully his,
Newsflash: It is not YOUR hobby, OR the hobby of your hapless diversity-hating gamebros. The individuals who want to see games evolve beyond depictions of harmful cultural stereotypes and tired sexist tropes also, wait for it, Play. Games. I play games. I am so excited by the recent footage released for FFXV that I could puke. You do not own them, and you do not speak for me.
Me neither.
Another commenter in the same thread noted that women have been playing video games from the beginning:
What I find so ridiculous is the fact that these guys act as though women playing/creating games is a new thing. I’m 3-freaking-6 years old. I’ve been gaming since the Atari 2600. I OWNED a copy of the ET game – yeah, that same one that most of those putzes only got to read about being discovered in a landfill in whereverthehell.
I’ve been a part of gaming allllll this time. Just because they didn’t want to recognize that or acknowledge my existence or the fact that I was right there, the entire time, playing in the WoW beta, playing in the Guild Wars beta, playing in the City of Heroes beta — that’s not my damn problem. They were the ones living in their own happy little penis-centric, he-man girl-gamer-haters club while I was over here, doing my own thing and having fun.
Their obliviousness is nobody’s fault but their own.
Buttercup Q. Skullpants added:
I’ve been gaming since the days of Pong, ELIZA, Merlin, Space Invaders, and Pac Man. Back then it was something both boys and girls did after school. It wasn’t seen as nerdy – in fact, the arcades were where the delinquent kids hung out.
It seems like today’s crop of misogynist gamers have their core identity way too wrapped up in being the coveted marketing demographic. They want to be pandered to and flattered with hypermasculine characters and alpha storylines.
It’s kind of hilarious that they’re treating this whole thing like it’s a RL video game, complete with black ops, sockpuppeting “missions”, evil shadowy enemies, rallying cries of threats to individual liberty, and an anything-goes mentality of inflicting maximum damage on opponents. Except the consequences of stalking and harassment are real, and permanent. In their imaginations they’re a group of beleaguered rebels taking a brave stand for freedom, but they’re actually the bad guys. They’re fighting against social justice and ruining a lot of people’s lives in the process.
It’s just a hobby, fercrissakes. I can’t imagine, say, model railroad enthusiasts getting all bent out of shape about more people taking up their hobby, and embarking on a hate campaign to define it as for old people ONLY. These guys really need to grow up and get some perspective.
Amen.
Elsewhere in the thread, M. the Social Justice Ranger described her experience,
I haven’t been gaming for quite as long as some of the other women here, but I first picked up a keyboard in 1989 and a controller in 1990, so it’s certainly been a while. Sure, I prefer single-player to multiplayer, Nintendo to PlayStation or Xbox and platformers, RPGs, pet sims and puzzle games to shooters, but I do consider my hobby to be a large part of my identity, so other gamers are usually (not always, but usually) willing to count me as one of their own…
… Until they discover that not only have I committed the cardinal sin of being born with a vagina, but I’m only interested in others who’ve committed the same sin. Then all of that flies out the window for rape threat after rape threat after rape threat.
Sigh.
I don’t want to destroy their hobby, I just want to enjoy our shared hobby…
#GamerGaters, is this really that hard to understand?
Aaaaah, fromafar2013, WHY DID YOU SHOW ME THIS THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING.
Srsly though, my thing with mods is super-immersive harsh landscape type stuff, which means basically everything can kill me. I’m currently playing an assassin character (which has been interesting because chaotic neutral is usually as evil as my character gets) and I’m just avoiding Riverwood so the dragon quest can’t start because I’m so bored of it. It’s so nice being able to run around and get my business done without a random dragon spawn every time I venture into the wilds.
Also just installed Expanding Towns and Cities and would highly recommend, it’s really lore-friendly while adding lots of character and new places of interest to the towns and smaller hold capitals.
In conclusion, gamergaters are saying what about gaming now?
First time commenting, but I’ve been lurking for a while, now!
I’m 20, but I’ve been playing games since I could use a computer. I remember my first game was on the PC, and it was some weird game where you played a farmer and had to collect crystals. It was fun! Since then I’ve hoarded a fairly large collection of video games. I even dreamed of working to help create video games, particularly working on the art direction.
But it’s hard to uphold such dreams when there is a wave of people working against you. These gamerbros don’t have to worry about using their voice to create whatever they want, or say whatever they want, because they will more than likely not receive death, rape, bomb threats from strangers, or actually be stalked in the real world. But as a female who wishes to have her voice as a feminist gamer be heard, those things are a reality for me, and I have already received such threats. It’s just really saddening to see people working so hard, and in such awful ways, to make sure that their little circle of “reality” is upheld in the gaming world, which is harmful and alienating to the thousands of other people who share the same hobby who weren’t “blessed” with white skin, a penis, and heterosexuality.
I’m glad I could get that off of my chest!
Also, the best thing that has come out of #GamerGate is that we can now refer to the reactionary baby men who think they own an entire hobby as “GamerGaters”, which is a useful way to distinguish them from gamers more broadly.
@ Michael McG
Holy shit, funniest thing I’ve seen all day! Love it.
OMG YES. Love love love the immersion mods. I can’t ever play without Frostfall (http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/11163/?) and Realistic Needs and Diseases (http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/26228/?). It just isn’t Skyrim anymore without them!
I’ve got some of the single city expansions now, but I’m going to look into that one. Thanks!
I’ve also gotten braver about trying more script heavy mods since I installed the save game cleaner that erases orphaned scripts and resets havoc in your saves. Almost never CTD now 🙂
You’re lucky I’m at work or I’d go through my entire (200+) mod list and post them all.
yeah, video games at my house were never “boy” specific, either. My mom was obsessed the the SNES Legends of Zelda and Tetris, (she’s still a total tetris freak.) We all loved SimCity, my brothers both liked PilotWings and everyone also enjoyed Super Mario World. I remember being really sad when we beat Bowser and the world turned to autumn!! Ugh!
I’d still totally play Legends of Zelda and SimCity now if I had them. Now my mom and I have a Minecraft server, where my 8 year old daughter abuses the command privileges on my account to get up to all kinds of mischief.
My husband really only plays whatever version of NHL for Playstation he’s had for years now… and Candy Crush. lol
*reaches nerd-vana*
I’m still playing Skyrim, too!! Female Khajjit sneaky archer currently.
You can push the story forward all the way to Whiterun and avoid dragons. Just do not go the watchtower and kill the dragon in “Dragon Rising,” and there will be no random dragon spawns.
I’ve avoided mods because it seems like they mostly involve making the female characters incredibly busty and scantily clad. Although I wouldn’t know where to start making my own.
I hate those kinds! You’d like these more practical armor mods then 🙂
http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/48160/? (the one I use)
http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/3296/? (older and no longer being updated, but still good)
Oh my god… Did someone say skyrim? I,very logged close to 2000 hours playing that game since I bought it in December. And that,so not counting the hours spent on building the perfect homes for my chars and learning 3d modeling and creation kit for a very specific set of mods for my Bosmer. Tiny, if you like etac, try running it with jk’s city mods. Makes for a lot more fun running around the cities, especially for thief and assassination types.
I probably have over 300 mods running(thanks wyre bash!) and I have never had so much fun with a game. And this is coming from someone who spent enough money playing arcade games to fund a college tuition.
As far as I’m concerned, the gg’ers can come and tell me about how games only belong to men when they can show me the code they wrote to cheat games designed for a ts 800. Or the graph paper they used to create ascii pics for their bbs boards.
Add me as another vote on games not being sex/gender specific in our household. I remember my first game being Pong on a Tandy at my cousin’s house. I grew up with an Atari2600 and NES. I remember taking turns with my male friends playing Mario during high school. Can anyone else say M.U.L.E.? lol
I can’t play the games I like anymore due to physical issues but I still like to watch. My husband has a computer hooked up to the tv so he can play the games on his steam account. He’s a big fan of the Kingdom Hearts series. We don’t have an xbone but we have a PS2, PS3, and a PS4.
Yeah, every time I hear this ‘they’re invading our precious hobby, waaaah’ routine I am just sitting here thinking, seriously? I’ve been playing games since I had to spent ten minutes loading them from cassette tapes onto my shitty ZX Spectrum in 1987. I’m severely disabled, often stuck at home for weeks at a time, and videogames have kept me entertained and saved what’s left of my sanity more times than I can count. So no, whiny manchildren, *you* get out of *my* hobby.
Not that I, or anyone else, should have to prove their ~~real gamer~~ cred before asking to be treated like a human being, obviously. I’m just amused/irritated by the irony of guys half my age claiming that I’m somehow invading their territory by, uh, continuing to do something I’ve been doing since before they were born.
(I keep meaning to try out the Alternate Starts mod because I’m getting a little sick of the standard one! But this week I’ve mostly been too distracted by the 1.8 minecraft update. Ocean monuments, whee.)
I’ve never really considered myself a gamer because I never thought I played all that much… But thinking it over now, as a kid I was playing breakout and various edutainment games on the computer (oh math blasters, you are so strange in my hazy memory), my family constantly rented N64 games, and when I got my own computer I put god knows how many hours into things like Runescape and Titan Quest.
Hot damn, I’m a gamer. I only own a couple games, so I don’t have a lot of diversity, but the games I do play I play a lot.
Gaming in my house was pretty sadly gendered. Mostly my brother and I played on the N64, while I don’t remember my sister being interested. My sister got a Barbie’s Movie Studio game, which I played a lot (it felt like programming to me, even though I didn’t know what programming was at the time) until my dad pulled me aside and told me I shouldn’t play girl games.
*mumbles angrily*
But yeah! Games! Woo! Makes me wish I had any sort of experience with 3d graphics so I could finally program my dream procedurally-generated landscape explorer.
Man, you’re all making me so jealous with all the Skyrim talk! My gaming PC blew, bah. I can’t wait to get back in the game, I’ve put about 500 hours into my charrie so far (chaotic good Bosmer ranger, specialising in archery, Restoration and WARHAMMERS) and I have so much DLC to catch up on.
As for mods… I think my favourite has to be that one that puts top hats and monocles on the Mudcrabs. It’s so stupid, but it makes me laugh every time.
It’s also frustrating how the goalposts keep moving with regards to which gamers are real gamers. You have to play Starfox, you have to play Zelda, you have to play Call of Duty, you have to play Halo. I get the distinct feeling that I will never “count” because I primarily enjoy simulation/strategy games like The Sims, or Civilization. I love games, but I’ve stopped identifying as a gamer because of all the gatekeeping tests I have to pass whenever I tell a dude I’m a gamer.
Sadly, a lot of women defending themselves as gamers do some pseudo-gatekeeping too, or at the least they often don’t challenge the douchebro framing of the gates: “I’m a girl but I’ll beat your ass at Halo, so I’m totally a gamer, umadbro?”. Well, I’m a girl, and I don’t want to play Halo and I certainly don’t want to beat your ass at it, but I’d love it if we set up neighboring cities in Sim City and built a cool metropolis together. Or maybe we can play Mario party?
Oh Skyrim. I had a bit of a mental meltdown a while back, and I turned to Skyrim for my escape. Logged over 100 hours over the course of a week. Haven’t played it much recently, though. I love making character builds, so I tend to restart the game a ton, then I keep getting frustrated with playing the same quests over and over and then feeling like my level advancement is way too slow to get where I want.
It’s why I tend to gravitate towards roguelikes instead. Quick deaths, lots of experimentation, lots of chances to make a conceptually cool character and then watch as my expectations don’t match up with the game’s and the character gets slaughtered.
I really, really want to like Skyrim though. The game is beautiful and there’s so frikken much to do. I just haven’t been able to get myself to do it, and stick with one character long enough to get all the skills I want to use.
Going to find pictures of this RIGHT NOW! LOL.
I can’t even…just don’t:
Fifty Shades of Lisa Always and the Candy Crush
LOLWTFBBQ
In related news:
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Can someone please remove the embedded xkcd cartoon in my last post?
Upon further thought, I think it’s in really poor taste…Sorry.
I was trying to be self-deprecating but well rape-y…:(
There are a few words left out in my last post, but I don’t want to repeat the phrase because I don’t want to repeat the words that I used
What I don’t understand is the whiney crybabies league acting like the only games that will be put out for them to play from now on will be “Put down the toilet seat!”, “Hang the TP correctly”, and the ever popular “Taking out the trash 2000!”
Whatever.
Oh God, posh mudcrabs is the best mod ever. I love it so much.
@kirbywarp I kind of did the same with WoW for a few months when I was going through a really bad time. I spent a lot of time healing raids and dungeons because it was one of the few things that would push other thoughts out of my mind for a while. Though I also spent a lot of time just wandering around Northrend or Moonglade because I found it weirdly comforting for some reason.
Ugh, I encountered a ‘gatekeeper’ at a party hosted by my sister’s boyfriend recently. Somehow word got around to this guy that I’m a gamer, or I like games, or something, I’m not sure what exactly was said but it prompted him to track me down. He said something along the lines of, “So I heard you like games? I didn’t think a girl like you (I was a stranger to this guy, btw) would be into gaming. What have you played? And no (arbitrary list of casual, puzzle, app style games that I don’t remember) don’t count!”
So I said, “DIE THALMOR SCUM.” And walked away.
Posh mudcrab images made my day! Thank you
Yes J.J! The amount of time I spent on that game is just … stupid. I still hum Epona’s song in times of pondering, a decade and a half later. The Hyrulian shield is branded into my cortex.