The Impact Factor

How We Treat Gamer Girls

Special Guest Article

Author: Charles Fliss

Alex’s Introduction

Hey everyone! Welcome to a very special day here on The Impact Factor. My good friend Charles Fliss, whose name you may recognize as my co-host on our video game podcast The Impact Factor, has written an excellent piece discussing girls in gaming. You can find the article as it was originally posted, on his blog Fliss of the North Star. Please give his blog a look for this and other cool posts about pop culture, Japan, and more. Fliss is a great writer and shares his unique perspective on a key issue that we as a community of video game enthusiasts must face. To make sure his writing gets in front of as many eyes as possible, and since it so perfectly fits the theme of my blog, I have posted the article here (with his permission of course). So give it a read and let me know what you think about it, either in the comments here or on Twitter,  @thecfliss and @alexsamocha.

Original Article Below

Every week, Alex compiles a great collection of articles into a "News & Views" post on The Impact Factor. I've been thinking of doing something similar here, so if you'd like to see that please let me know! Two of these articles, both discussing the experiences of women and girls in the gaming community, made a big impact on me, and even though I feel I'm venturing into somewhat dangerous territory, I also feel I need to write something about them. I have self-identified as a nerd, a geek, and a gamer for a long time. The community has been good to me. So these issues are important to me. These communities are important to me.
 
I need to add a disclaimer here, right up front, before we get any further. I know I'm a guy, and I know I'm commenting about women in a group and the problems facing them as part of that group. This means that I can’t have personal, first-hand knowledge of the experience of being a female gamer. But I can work from the accounts written by female gamers and posted online, as well as the experiences recounted to me by my female friends. I think I have something to add to this discussion, and I think that it’s important for male gamers to take a self-reflective look at our attitudes and our actions. The articles I read certainly forced me to do that, and I hope in the course of this article to explain what I came up with as a result. It’s also worth noting that I am working with a small degree of separation from the American gaming community, because I’ve been isolated from directly interacting with it for nearly three years. I've only been able to participate via the internet and, well, games. So I'm trying. I will probably mess up. I'm asking you, my friends, to engage with me and help me get it straight. 

Here are the two articles, both by Maddy Myers:
The Cool Gamer Girlfriend, a.k.a. UNICORNS AREN'T REAL
Myers draws on her own experiences to deconstruct the "cool gamer girlfriend" archetype as presented in T.V., film, and game media. She also shows how the stereotype is seriously harmful to real female gamers, and makes a compelling argument as to how female gamers should be treated - which is to say, like normal people.

The Existential Dread of Fighting Games
This time, Myers again uses a personal narrative to discuss the mental strain of getting good and staying good at fighting games. She also shows how this is made even more difficult for female gamers, to the point where she considers just showing up to a tournament to be a victory.


It sounds almost foolish, but these articles were really eye-opening for me. As much as I enjoy analyzing archetypes and as sensitive as I have become to the way people are represented in media, it never occurred to me to look at the way female gamers were represented. Maybe it's because representations of gamers in popular media are generally so bad that I tend to reject them out of hand. But that doesn't make them unimportant. More pressingly, in reading Myers's description of the "cool gamer girlfriend," I realized it was a stereotype that I had internalized; that is to say that I just accepted that CGGs exist. In my defense, I didn't expect that all girls in gaming would be CGGs. I've known enough gaming girls to know that that would be ridiculous. But realizing that there are guys who expect that all girls in gaming will morph into CGGs, and realizing that might even be the majority of guys in gaming, was pretty horrifying.

I know, Link. I know.

Another of Myers's paragraphs really stood out to me:

I also realized that the deck was stacked against me in competitive gaming environments, too. I would walk into fighting games spaces and immediately be stared at; men would gather around my screen to watch me play, and they'd be disappointed when I didn't blow them away with absurd expertise. I wasn't allowed to be mediocre; I was supposed to be the Unicorn Gamer Girl who appeared out of nowhere to blow everybody away (and then blow everybody).

Yikes. No wonder she considers just showing up to be a big win.

The not being allowed to be mediocre thing strikes a real chord with me. I feel that way whenever I play sports in Japan, because Americans are supposed to be good at sports. But it just piles on for girls in gaming. Immediately being put on trial to prove you're not a "fake geek girl” certainly comes to mind. So there's no in-between. You're amazing or you're a fake. You're there to win or you're there for male attention. Maybe you're there to win and for male attention (as Myers references). But those are the only options. Guys, why aren't we allowing female geeks to show up just because they like games?

I don't think my answer to that is going to be a popular one. But the more I've read about it, and the more I've thought about it, the more I've come to believe that the gaming community is operating from a point of casual and unthinking misogyny. I'm not talking about the crazies sending death threats to female game developers or sexually harassing women online and at conventions. We already know that they are trash. I'm talking about your average male gamer. The guy who invests thousands of hours into games. The guy who shows up to a con or a tournament and maybe wins a match or three but certainly doesn't win it all. Us guys. I'm talking about us.

We have to change our ways brothers!

It's important to acknowledge that gamers view ourselves as an oppressed and counter-cultural community. Until relatively recently, it just wasn't cool to play video games, and it certainly wasn't cool to be really good at or really excited about them. Especially in the U.S., games have often been positioned in opposition to sports. (Geeks vs. Jocks, sound familiar?) In being rejected from, and choosing to reject mainstream society, gamers were making a declaration of what they cared about. That declaration carried a significant social cost. Eliminated from being mainstream cool, gamers set their own standards for what was cool within the community, and members were bound together with a basic experience of shared suffering. This included a retreat from the normal sphere of romantic relations. As men bonded together over games and over their experiences as gamers, part of that experience became a lack of romantic success with women.

Thus the “gamer” experience became viewed as exclusively male. The exile to social margins, devaluation as a romantic partner, and other shared suffering are not only experienced by men. But it can be difficult to see that. A lot of this derives from a common and harmful positioning of women as the gatekeepers of sex. Essentially, the idea is that men always want sex, so no woman is capable of being man-less or sex-less, because there is always an available man for her. Thus ultimate romantic rejection – the inability to find anyone to engage with romantically – is viewed as something only men can experience. But it’s more complex that. A total lack of standards or self-esteem does not guarantee a partner for anyone – man or woman – and can in fact often work against the goal of finding one. And just as most men don't want to "settle," we shouldn't expect girls to. We need to recognize that women, no matter how attractive they are, can and do experience feeling ugly, feeling unwanted, and being rejected. But as long as we gender these feelings masculine we will be forced to masculinize anyone who has experienced them. You have probably heard at least one girl complimented as “one of the guys,” a problematic remark because it recognizes her assimilation into the group by diminishing her femininity. This was, and is, compounded by male geek narratives that absolve us of any wrongdoing or ineptitude in our romantic attempts.

"I'm a great guy, but she's only interested in dating jerks." This is the classic line of geek romantic failure. The problem with it is that it simultaneously exonerates the geek in question from fault and faults the girl for her right to choose whom she dates. But this attitude, perhaps most frequently felt during adolescence (I've been there), can have some really damaging consequences if it develops further. If gamers view ourselves as providing what girls say they want, but still feel that we are passed over time and time again for jocks or other more conventionally attractive guys, then we can begin to see women as stupid or even deliberately dishonest. Certainly, this isn't a view that is unique to gamers, but I do want to suggest that gamers are often susceptible to it. Moreover, it's dangerous. When carried to an extreme it leads to groups like "The Red Pill."

"The Red Pill" is a group that began on Reddit and now counts more than 100,000 subscribers. Essentially, Red Pillers advocate a deeply misogynistic philosophy that states that we now live in a world that is slanted towards women and against men. It argues that women will always be attracted to the most alpha male (because evolution), and that their behavior is entirely predictable and controllable. Check out this recent post if you don't believe me. The poster writes:

Women feel the need to invade male spaces from gentlemans clubs to geek culture, and proclaim their 'right' to be included. Women so desperately want to be a part of great male-only circles and establishments, but when they scream and cry loud enough that they are begrudgingly let in, they ruin what made those things so great in the first place.
The reason for this drive to infiltrate male spaces has been whittled down to 2 main ideas here on TRP:

1. This is a form of social control, because women need to silence these male only spaces because men talk, share ideas leading to the depedestalising of women and the denying them of male attention.
2. That women have a biological drive to infiltrate male spaces, because it is paramount to her survival.

I'm arguing the latter, as men have single-handedly constructed and maintained civilization itself, and women have merely been passive participants in this process, reaping the benefits of male protection and resources.

Note how he explicitly mentions "geek culture" as a male space, before continuing on to state that all of civilization was actively built by men. It's a concept so ludicrous it would be laughable if it weren't taken so seriously by so many people. For an excellent summary of Red Pill theory check out this Business Insider article. For a terrifying look at how harmful Red Pill philosophy can be, and a brilliant breakdown of why it is so flawed and so dangerous, please read this blog post from Dr. Nerdlove. For another Red Pill discussion of gaming check out this thread. The Business Insider article also mentions Men Going Their Own Way. MGTOW shares a certain amount of basic philosophy with the Red Pill, but where the Red Pill proposes manipulating and coercing women, MGTOW advocates a kind of separatist masculinism. Although it's still not a good idea, it represents a very different kind of gender politics. In talking about The Red Pill and MGTOW, I don't mean to imply that all gamers subscribe to these extreme ideas. Rather, I hope to demonstrate exactly how alive and vicious misogyny is today, especially on the internet, and especially on sites like Reddit on which so much game culture also thrives. There are voices - loud voices - telling women they already have it better than men, that they are objects to be used, and that they need to shut up and stay out. We cannot allow these to become the dominant voices in our community.

Red Pill philosophy leads us to another construction that plagues the gaming community:  the narcissistic assertion that women base all their actions off of men. For male gamers this manifests in an inability to accept that girls genuinely like games for all the same reason that we do. With girls largely absent from the community for a long time, it can be difficult to accept that their appearance now is legitimate. We have gendered video games masculine. In popular culture video games are a male space. In many of our own experiences, video games have been a male space. It reinforces our basic assumption that only boys can truly like video games. So if girls don't (can't) like games just because games are cool, then why do they come to gaming events? Why, it must be for the male gamers! As Myers points out, this puts gamer girls into a truly untenable position. Barred from just being "normal" members of the community, they are expected to perform to unreasonable standards of what a "real" gamer girl should be like or be branded as "fakes" and man hounds.

We are pigeonholing female gamers.

Myers talks about the unhelpfulness of friends who encourage her to go to a tournament and "beat all the guys." She writes about the incredible amount of practice it takes to get good at fighting games, and how there will always be someone better. In a weird way, I understand this. It's a common expat fantasy to hear a Japanese person say something racist and be able to snap back in perfect Japanese. But this is a impossible dream. No matter how much I study, no matter how hard I work, someone who grew up speaking Japanese will always be better at the language than I am. There will always be a word, a phrase, or a nuance that will be beyond my grasp. In some ways, I've just been able to make my peace with that. But games are different. Games are changing, evolving , and growing at an unprecedented pace. It's time we let our community do the same.

How do we do this?

The first step is accepting that change is happening. We can fight it, and become recalcitrant, bitter, and no fun, or we can welcome it and enjoy the beauty of a larger and more welcoming community. I know this isn't easy, and it's taken me a long time to come around to this way of thinking. For me, the catalyst came from comics, not games. With the advent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, people who had ridiculed me for my love of comics were beginning to claim characters I had loved since childhood as their own. That sucked. It felt cosmically unfair. Having not paid the social price to love these characters, how could they have any right to them now? They didn’t suffer to enter our community, so how could we let them in? My answer was deceptively simple - we have to let them in with open arms. We have to welcome that they have finally come around to what we like, and we have to welcome this as a chance for forgiveness and new friendship. This means putting ourselves out there, and that's going to be painful. Games are even more complicated than comics, because the game community has been changing for a longer period of time. The game community already suffers from divisions like "hardcore" and "casual," and we need to strive to prevent "female" from becoming one of those divisions.

And ultimately, these divisions are an expression of our fear of being manipulated. It’s a fear that this is a cruel joke, and that someone is going to show up and laugh at us for liking what we like. And this fear is drawn from the experience of being told “Oh, I don’t like it that much.” Because that sucks. That is a rebuke of our enthusiasm – a kind of condescending scolding for being excited. I’ve definitely experienced this, especially with comics, but also with games. It’s a serious problem because it takes gamer spaces that are supposed to be safe and reintroduces the geek-shaming of the spaces we retreated from. So we probe with ridiculous questions to establish the credentials of whomever we are speaking to. We try to gauge whether or not they belong right away, rather than learning about them. I’ve struggled with this a lot, but I believe that at some point we have to learn to lower our shields and put ourselves out there, even if it means getting hurt again and again.

But the bigger problem here is that our already harmful suspicion is redoubled when women are involved. The “fake geek girl” stereotype is born of this insecurity, this fear, that we will be judged, shamed, and laughed at within our own geek spaces. But it starts from the false premise that femininity is antithetical to geekiness. Where we might be willing to give a man the benefit of the doubt – ie. “Real gamer until proven otherwise” – we start with the opposite approach to women. “Prove to me that you are a geek!” “Prove to me that you belong!” “Prove to me that you will not mock and judge me!” These are what our actions and words are saying to female gamers. They have suffered the same mocking and judgment that we fear from them, and our mistrust is making things worse.     

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We male gamers can create a space that is better for female gamers and for ourselves. That starts with giving female gamers the courtesy of assuming they have the same level of base knowledge about games and gaming that we would expect of any given male gamer. We also need to actively strive to make gaming spaces comfortable spaces for women. Want an easy way to accomplish this right off the bat? Stop making rape jokes. In the United States approximately 90% of rape victims are female and 17% of women have been the victim of a completed or attempted rape. So when we make these jokes to women we are making light of a horribly violating act that there is a real chance some of them have experienced. And when we make these jokes towards other men we are casually asserting dominance by feminizing them. It's not enough to just not make these jokes ourselves, we need to police our friends and fellow gamers. It doesn't have to be obvious, and it doesn't have to be flashy. A simple, "dude that's not cool" when brought to bear by enough gamers will have an effect. Tournament organizers, game store owners, and other people of power in the game community have an even bigger responsibility to use their power to show that rape jokes and other remarks degrading to women have no place in the competitive gaming world.

You're going to get a lot of sideways looks, but it's worth it.

And yes, I know that sticking up for girls is going to get you branded a "white knight" or "social justice warrior." Both of those insults are predicated on the idea that you are only defending girls because you are after sex. Don't let that be you. Stick up for what's right because it is right, not because you're out to impress girls. And I know this isn't easy, because girls themselves are suspicious of these actions, and the "Nice Guy" stereotype haunts us. I think a good place to start is believing the girls you game with. Believe them when they tell you that there are things that make them uncomfortable. Believe them when they say that harassment is happening. Believe them when they tell you you're doing something that isn't cool. This isn't just a gamer problem, either. This is a general problem in our society. We need stop treating femininity as a reason for mistrust, and we need to get the gut reaction of “she’s probably overreacting” out of our systems. That’s going to take some time. I know I’m certainly still not there yet either. I only recently realized that I wasn’t trusting women as much as I was trusting men, and that only happened after I read yet another article.

Rock the boat by reevaluating what it means to be a "nice guy."

I want to encourage those women and girls who are fighting the good fight to be members of the game community to keep going. I can only imagine how much it sucks and how much effort it takes to just assert your right to enjoy this form of relaxing! But without you nothing will change. The community is better for your presence, and will be even better if you can stick around. Myers writes, "And the fact I’ll never overcome my obstacles in some movie montage and become a champion of the fighting game community deeply disappoints me. I will never be able to whisper 'I told you so' to the thousands of assholes who've condescended to me over the years." I believe that we can make the gaming community a place that welcomes women and that allows "girl gamers" to just be "gamers." She may never be able to say "I told you so" to those assholes, but I hope that it will be because their bullshit will no longer be tolerated in our community.

So guys, the time has come. We must acknowledge that our community is changing. Not only is that okay, it's good. We need to create a space that is welcoming to female gamers, both long-timers and newcomers. That means working to interact with them on an individual level rather than mediating our interactions through stereotypes like the “cool gamer girlfriend” or “fake geek girl.” In other words, we need to let female gamers show who they are, rather than trying to force them into what we expect them to be. If we can do that we will take a big step towards making gaming a place where everyone is welcome.

I believe we can do it. I know we have to try.

Onwards to a better gaming community!