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In case you were wondering, there are still dudes out there who simply refuse to believe that women and girls play video games. Consider the reaction to a recent Twitter thread in which a video game industry analyst announced the results of a recent survey of video game players that revealed, among other things, that women make up half of those who own a gaming PC–and more than half of those who own a Nintendo Switch.
The gatekeeping gamebros simply refused to accept the data.
Some were convinced that the people who bought the Switch weren’t the ones who played the games.
Others suggested that these women were playing games that weren’t hardcore enough for them to count as real gamers.
A surprising number of commenters decided the survey results had to be suspect because the survey makers were counting trans women as women instead of as men.
One commenter seemed to blame it all on … Chad?
I would say, “found the incel,” but I think we found a bunch of them already.
We’re out there. We are just avoiding these losers.
These are the same people who are incredulous when I say my second or third date with my spouse of fifteen years was playing Diablo II. And then they get mad when I point out it’s a hell of a lot easier to find a gamer girlfriend if you believe such a thing exists, and you don’t push back on it when you do find a lady who games.
Presenting the story of Lori Baker—by way of her columnist husband, who’d hitherto had no inkling that he was married to the Queen of Tetris:
https://archive.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2007/08/19/bizarro_world/
mmmm that bonus transphobia. not surprised in the least from people who are obsessed about which gender is more serious about what–for most people who play video games–is just a pleasant diversion. why should we be surprised that half or slightly more are women? slightly more than half of all humans are women. the horror that they participate equally in consuming media!
honestly in spite of gaming with relative frequency, I refuse to describe myself as a ‘gamer’ simply because so many of the self described gamers I’ve known (both male and female – and yes, for any assholes lurking, both with dicks and without) have frankly been huge jerks. That said, of course, I’m sure these dipshits could come up with some arbitrary reasons that what I do doesn’t count as gaming.
Why are so many dudes such defensive gatekeepers of gaming, anyway? In what possible way does it diminish their own gaming experiences to believe that women enjoy games, too? Is it purely because they don’t want to have to admit that women are individuals with varied human interests, and not the hive mind/monolith they’d like to believe we are?
Or is it an even stupider ‘if women can play games also, that makes my gaming abilities less impressive bc if a woman can do it it must be dumb and easy?’
@freneticeferret
I would say all of the above
The dad here looks like he’s so glad that the girl with the Kubrick stare has won the game so it’s the blissfully naive kid who gets sacrificed to Cthulu. I guess she was his favourite.
But anyway, as someone who can remember the very early days of video games, they were very much advertised as for all the family. I wonder when the idea they were a boy thing came in?
It became a boy thing when straight white teens adopted it as an entire identity, the same way they did with comic books, science fiction, and rpgs. It’s also the primary reason they try so hard to protect it from “deh womenz”.
After all how authentic of an identity can it be if everyone else is doing it too? You find it’s not much of a definition of “self” at all in that case.
I play animal crossing on mine
Hmmmm… So if you don’t like the results, start No Scottsman arguments to exclude games like Animal Crossing/Minecraft/anything on a phone/etc, gatekeep out the casuals, so on and so forth.
Anyway, off the top of my head I can think of several women whom I know play or have played video games heavily. I recall one excoworker being leery to admit to me she played Animal Crossing, presumably because she suspected I might have a negative opinion of that.
In contrast I have had other excoworkers who were loud and proud about their love of Candy Crush, various word games, etc, and one who about charmed me with the way her sky blue eyes lit up while telling me about her Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare feats. (Sounded like she would utterly destroy me in a match, which is another reason these gamer bros get all worked up: Fear a mere “girl” could mop the floor with them in their favorite games.)
A Facebook friend of mine (who is presently worrying me with a recent announcement of coming down with COVID badly enough to go to the hospital) often fills my feed with Call of Duty memes, and it ain’t because of her boyfriend.
Last but not least, several women in my family have been known to play everything from Myst to Skyrim.
So yeah, I know multiple women who play video games. Dunno how the actual stats work out, but that’s why they did a study, no?
I play a variety of games with about as much frequency as a working adult can manage. These dudes will argue you down to a point where the only games that “count” are well known FPS franchises. Maybe a few indie horror games on top for that “true gamer” badge.
I can’t play FPS games due to motion sickness, but I’ve been playing Elite Dangerous for years which has quite a male dominated community, so I wonder if they’d accept me on that basis. Lol who am I kidding, they’d probably say it’s not a real game either. Or that I only play it for the the attention of the men.
Happened to see this today, by a voice actor lol
@Lakitha Tolbert:
Sounds to me like their problem is that they are looking to something outside themselves to give them an identity, rather than to their own selves. You see the same thing in people who entangle their sense of identity so much with their jobs that they have a breakdown or worse if they get fired or suffer a career-ending injury and otherwise have a crisis when retirement starts to loom. Workoholism is likely in the meantime.
There seems to be a widespread belief that “you are what you do”, which seems in the end to do one a disservice. You are what makes your choices, and your job is only one of those (and often not much of one). Your hobbies, gaming potentially included, are also among your choices, but still are not the sum total of them. And even then, you are what makes your choices, rather than the choices themselves, which are also influenced by your environment and the opportunities it both did and didn’t afford you, the information it both did and didn’t offer you.
But then maybe this is less about personal identity than social identity, an area I can’t say I have a great deal of experience with. Social identities for me are ill-fitting suits that impede movement and make me itch and sweat, that seem inherently bound up with hierarchies of privilege and oppression, that everybody else can sense are not genuine anyway, and that I’m glad to doff once I’m back home with the door shut and locked. I get the feeling that that isn’t the experience of most people.
We do know that many women play and do not identify as women online because of the extreme harassment they then receive. What a terrible idea for the ‘only men are true gamers’ crowd – how can they be sure that the player who beat them was really a man?! Too awful to contemplate!
I play MMOs basically every day of the week and I would describe myself as fairly competent. My logs on the inofficial ranking site suggest the same. And only a fraction of all players even appear on that one. Nonetheless, I came to know countless of female players in the same ballpark as me over the years. Every raid static I had, with only one or two exceptions, had at least one other AFAB or trans-woman in it, some even more. And again, that is only the maybe 20% that play the hardest content in the first place. The game also has quite a few female world first race participants. Some of my female friends bothbonline and irl also play anything including shooters. I played almost all major releases this year so far. Heck, on Pentecost I gushed about Final Fantasy games WITH MY AUNT! A woman over 60 has a Switch and plays anything on it from Final Fantasy to Legend of Zelda! Meanwhile, my uncle only ever plays memory and mental training games on it, though the reason for that is somewhat sad. I will also usually outnerd anyone else in the same room with me. Heck, my project manager talked enough about gaming that I’m 100% certain she is a gamer, too.
@freneticferret
They feel threatened by female players because they think getting their asses trounced by them somehow diminishes their standing in the imagined male hierarchy. I have seen a study a while ago that showed that weaker male players react a lot less possitively to female voices over com than they do to male voices. That was 2015 already and a quick search shows that seems to have been confirmed a couple more times over the years. So basically, incel losers mad about AFAB/female people existing.
I think another reason why so many male idiots think gaming is just for them is… there are barely any female protagonists out there. And those who exist are often sexualized. I honestly think it got out of hand by now. Sure, it’s a reaction to the “gaming is male” bullshit identity thing and developed in response. But that is no excuse, and just makes things worse honestly.
I had a coworker years ago who played Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, which meant that on one occasion I got to hear her hiss at her phone during lunch break: “Oh I am going to cross-examine you so hard!!”
“A lot of male Nintendo fans became trans out of nowhere” – And you’re not dropping your own Switch in a panic, terrified that using it will turn you trans as well?
@frenticferrett That type of man is defensive about anything they see as the domain of men. The Nintendo example is an excellent illustration of the fragility of their masculinity as they perceive it. They seem desperate to deny that they’re doing anything “feminine,” as if they would scream in horror if they accidentally put on a pink shirt. They strongly resemble the type of homophobe who is secretly in the closet and denies it, even to himself.
i think it’s deeper than simply defending the domain of masculinity. it’s defending the idea that gaming is a masculine activity in the first place. in white, western culture’s concept of masculinity it doesn’t really fit the bill. it’s sedentary, self-directed, and doesn’t require much in terms of physical strength. i don’t get the impression that the people at the other end of these tweets are very confident or secure in their masculinity, and why would they be? we have a fucked-up society with a narrow view of gender in general.
this isn’t to say that i sympathize in any way with the mindset and belief system they express, only that i am very familiar with being unconfident and insecure about masculinity.
@Ada Christine
I think it comes down to the same thing. Any defense of what is perceived as a masculine domain is driven by insecurity about masculinity. I often say that our society harbors homophobic McCarthyism, meaning effeminate until proven masculine or gay until proven straight.
@Carstonio
i was too busy typing a response to re-read what you wrote and see that i just restated it in a different way. you’re 100% right though, the lavender scare and the red scare are siblings in moral panic
@Ada Christine
I think another factor in their desperately trying to assert that video games are masculine is in the games that they favor as “real games” and those they denigrate as “not real games.”
Real Games: FPS, fighting games, action RPGs like Dark Souls.
Not Real Games: Sim games, puzzle games, menu-based RPGs.
So real games are games where you run around and hit or shoot people until they die.
If you don’t engage in violence as the primary mechanic, or if the violence comes from choosing an option on a menu and watching it be carried out, then the game isn’t Manly and thus Not a Real Game, because gaming must be Manly and Manliness is predicated on violence, even if it is pretend violence.
@Allandrel
it’s all a big bag of cognitive dissonance and upholding the values of patriarchy and toxic masculinity to me. i don’t necessarily believe that violence in video games causes violence in real life, but i do believe that a preference–or in this case a mandate–for violence in video games can be a measurement of somebody’s inner world and desire for license to do violence in real life to assert their masculinity. video games serve as a substitute until that license is found in one form or another. i know these aren’t original thoughts and that i’m armchair psychoanalyzing, but it scares me a lot.
Even when I grew up 30 years ago, all my female friends had handheld game systems. Why is this a surprise? These bros are so weird.
@Dave
these bros live in a fantasy world where man and woman are well-defined concepts with no overlapping attributes.