Girl Gamers

I have been trying to search for articles that wrote about gender in gaming and came across one on boston.com titled, “Girl Gamers want respect in Virtual Man’s world” by Nicholas Groom. Although it was written about a year and a half ago, the contents of the article still apply today. The article talked about how gamers aren’t just “geeky boys in dark basements” anymore. There are a lot of all-women gaming teams that are demanding respect and want the respect of game makers who typically create games geared towards male players. Female gaming teams mentioned in the article is PMS Clan, Frag Doll, and Girlz of Destruction. These teams compete in various tournaments and have placed themselves in the rankings. Frag Dolls, as mentioned in the article, breaks the stereotype that female gamers are “ugly and huge”, since all their members are young and pretty.

At the moment I’ve only really looked into the PMS Clan. Their members range from age 9 to 59 and it doesn’t matter what their skill set is for gaming. The team is more focused on building a community and encourages everyone to play, win or lose. This reminded me a lot of “Stitch’nBitch” and how a community was created connecting women to technology, which is pretty much the same thing as women and gaming since games evolve with technology.

The articles I read also talked about how there isn’t really any representation of strong female characters in games and that’s if the game has any female characters at all. This reminded me Jeff Gomez and what he told our class about refusing to do a project unless a female was introduced as one of the race car drivers. I’m not much of a gamer but I’ve noticed the lack of strong female characters. For those gamers who play frequently, do the games you play have female characters? If so, how are they portrayed?