For Every Samus

(There is an Equal and Opposite Lara)

"Why aren't there more female gaming bloggers?" asks Kotaku's Brian Crecente. It's a good question and I'm glad somebody has asked it "aloud." Why are they so hard to find? The fact is that we're looking for individuals with three crucial characteristics, each harder to find than the one before.

The community of women is not small; the community of gamers is smaller than that, but still by no means small; finally, the community of writers falls somewhere in between, depending on how you define a "writer." We're looking for a person who is all three of these things in one person, so we have to ask ourselves: "Where is the stumbling block?" I have no doubt that there are plenty of writers who are women. I know that there is no shortage of gamers who are writers. If we accept both of these premises as true, then we must conclude that the choke point is women who are also gamers.

To get to the root cause of this, we must puzzle out why the community of female gamers is not proportionate in size to the community of male gamers. By way of a disclaimer, I don't purport to be an anthropologist, sociologist, psychologist, or ethnographer, so I can't make these claims with any sort of academic authority. All I have is my own perception.

Is it that women as a demographic are ambivalent toward video games in the same way that they are ambivalent toward sports? I think this is a possibility that accounts for some women---it's possible that a greater proportion of women than men just aren't interested in games---but we're comparing apples and oranges. On the one hand, sports and video games are both forms of entertainment, and in that sense it's fair to say that some women in general may simply be uninterested in these forms of entertainment. On the other hand, video games are a type of media. To say that games aren't interesting to women is akin to saying that television, radio, or books aren't of interest to women (or men, or any other demographic).

Is it that there is a stigma attached to playing video games? For an adult woman---in my experience, yes. When I told one colleague at my place of employment that I enjoy playing video games, she responded: "Really? You don't look like that kind of person." Another response I have received from another coworker is: "At your age?" The other day I received a phone call in the evening from a colleague who knows that I work a full-time job, plus a part-time job, on top of caring for a husband, a home, a dog, and this blog. Instead of asking what I was up to that evening, she simply said: "You're probably playing your video games."

The perception that gaming is the province of adolescent boys leads to the assumption among the misinformed that an adult man who is a gamer simply has not grown out of a boyish habit, whereas an adult woman who is a gamer is doing something that is not only age inappropriate, but also gender inappropriate. When pressed, non-gaming colleagues have told me they feel that gaming is a waste of time, or that it is a lot of time to spend on something that has no lasting results and leads to no measurable gain. For some reason, though, these same people don't feel that watching Lost or Ugly Betty on television, browsing YouTube on the computer, or spending an evening at a nightclub are profitless wastes of time.

Is it also possible that there is negativity toward women within the male gaming community? Yes. Although it's much more comfortable to direct the blame outside of the gaming community that I love, the fact is that male gamers engage in hostility toward female gamers, often without even realizing they are doing so.

"It's up to you [women] to help change perceptions, because god knows we've had enough Barbie Adventures for a lifetime," Crecente writes, but there's a major logic flaw in his plea. It won't help for women gamers to come forward and tell the world that we're sick of Barbie Adventures. The perception problem here is that people---even people who are seriously in the know---assume that games like Barbie ____ Adventures are being made for and marketed to women when they are in fact being made for and marketed to children. Nora Helmer, do you hear this? Is it possible that confusing these two demographics might be part of the reason adult women are steering clear?

In high school, I took a co-ed gym class (scandalous!) that did weight training on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and free exercise on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. On the first Monday of class, the coach tossed a basketball into the center of the gym and said: "Today is free exercise. Boys, play basketball. Girls, sit in the bleachers and gossip." (This is absolutely a true account.) I sort of feel the same way about the welcome women gamers receive from gentleman gamers: "Boys, play Halo. Girls, play Barbie's Latest Adventure."