An Essay by Charles Moffat - October 2014
Disclaimer: I want to note here that I did not hire an essay writing service, a proofreader or editor or anything like that while writing this essay. Truth be told I enjoy writing essays, editorials, and sometimes even just old fashioned angry rants. I am going to try and keep this essay in line with a true essay in its form and nature, but if I accidentally delve into editorial or even rant then I apologize for my liberal use of the word "essay".
The purpose of this essay is to push my idea that GamerGirls should be recognized solely as
Gamers and that we should not be adding the Girls part to the end. (After all, are we calling male gamers 'GamerBoys'? Nope. We most certainly are not.) This denial of equal status for both male and female Gamers is contradictory is the establishment which is the gaming industry and gaming culture, in which all gamers are created equal, obey the rules of fair play and stand on equal footing.
That being said let us first define
Gamers - a person plays games, whether they be board games, video games, roleplaying games or even card games. If there is a game involved, the person doing it is a gamer. This is not to be confused with a Sport - a physical activity that is often a contest of skill, endurance, strength and even strategy. eg. Wrestling is a sport that combines all 4 of those things.
A gamer therefore does not have a gender necessarily. And indeed if you've ever played
MMORPGs online then you know many people (of both sexes) are gender bending and playing characters of their opposite sex on a regular basis (sometimes more often than they play their own gender). Thus unless you hear the voice of the gamer on the other side you would never know that "Konan the Krazy Axemurderer" is actually a female gamer from Oregon, or that "Miss Tique" is actually an overweight man in his 40s from Texas.
In the world of anonymous online gaming does it really matter what sex the person playing online is? No. It doesn't. And even if you think it does, if you never meet the person in real life what difference would it make? Nothing. Nada.
Next let us take the example of
Magic the Gathering, a collectable card game. If the girl sitting across from you kicks your cherry red behind with her cards, are you going to whine and complain that she was cheating, that it was beginners lucks, that she must have had help from a man constructing her deck of cards, that you were distracted by her breasts and you failed to pay attention to the fact she was whupping your donkey? Logically those are all just excuses - sexist excuses. If you were any sort of gentleman with brains and humility, you would give credit where credit is due. She played an awesome game. She really knows her cards. She constructed a deck of cards that blew your socks off and whupped your donkey so hard its ears hurt. (And no, that was not a sexual pun. I am just trying to avoid using the A-word.)
Next let us pretend you are playing a classic board game like
RISK - a game that is one part chance (because it is based on the randomness of dice), one part strategy, and one part interpersonal social skills. Honestly, I think women might actually have an advantage when playing this game because their social skills are often more highly developed than men's are. Also men might like to claim they have stronger strategy skills - but that is male ego talking, and therefore I would argue it that it has no basis in reality.
Next, to illustrate the roleplaying games example I am going to show you two films available on YouTube. The first is "
The Gamers 2: Dorkness Rising", in which one of the main characters is a female gamer who is introduced to RPGs - and shows she needs to be taken seriously for her ability to both design a character and also her ability to roleplay her character.
And next, the sequel "The Gamers 3: Hands of Fate" which focuses on a card game competition / gaming convention.
Ahem.
As demonstrated, female gamers are equally as agile with both roleplaying games and card games. To say anything less is both ignorant and ignoble.
Which brings me to my final point - at the core of this discussion is the issue of
Gamergate Controversy - which started in August 2014 and involves a small number of male gamers (who apparently are all virgins with no life) who have been harassing, threatening female gamers for no other reason than the fact they are female and are a growing presence in the gaming industry.
The stakes? Well some female gamers (and even male gamers like myself) sometimes like to point out some of the sexism that exists in the gaming industry. This is essentially an uphill battle and the ladies are slowly winning. What they are asking for is equal treatment - and non-sexist treatment.
Which honestly doesn't sound that bad.
But to the virgins with no life (GamerBoys, whatever you want to call them), they think that is the end of sexuality in the gaming industry - that they will somehow become unable to stare at Lara Croft's assets, to oggle the goods on
Heavy Metal Magazines, that women will suddenly control everything in the gaming industry - which is utterly false and shows a great level of ignorance.
Equal treatment does not mean "global dominance of the gaming industry". This is simply a knee jerk reaction by men who are afraid of change, and the result of years of men feeling repressed, unloved, and unsexy by the shortage of female gamers.
Let us talk about that for a bit. Male gamers want to mate with female gamers, but there is a shortage of female gamers. Why is there a shortage? Because male gamers tend to dominate the gaming industry and make women feel unwelcome, thus perpetuating the shortage. Hence why the male gamers who are whining and complaining are all* virgins.
* And by all, I mean they are either all virgins, mostly virgins, or maybe had sex like "1 time" - which amounts to basically the same idea. A bunch of losers who cannot get laid. (Although it is possibly some of them resort to call girls, in which case I still argue that they are essentially virgins because no woman under normal circumstances would choose to have sex with creepy losers.)
I will give you an example. Back in university I knew a creepy guy who was always complaining about how we was never going to find a nice woman who was into the same things he was (and it was pretty obvious this guy was a virgin), and then when you actually saw him around women he behaved like a bossy jerk. He did apparently manage to meet women online and meet up for blind dates, but the dates never lasted longer than an hour and I am guessing he creep-ed the bejeezus out of them. So small wonder he was so lonely when he behaved like a creepy jerk.
When I first heard about Gamergate and the harassment that women were receiving because they were speaking out for the welfare of fellow female gamers, well, honestly, I wanted to bust some heads. I wanted to go to a gaming convention, overhear a GamerBoy complaining about female gamers and bragging about how he harassed one of them - and then I wanted to walk up to the bigot and punch his virgin face and shove his head up his virgin behind.
I say that with the same conviction that I have when I say I would love to punch Neo-Nazis in the face, or punch religious bigots in the face, etc. Basically, I would love to be given the opportunity to punch when of these jerks in the face. I would never regret it either. People who deserve to get punched in the face,
deserve to be punched in the face.
Female gamers standing up for the rights of other female gamers don't deserve to be harassed or threatened for their good deeds. They are fighting for the freedom of others.
Can you imagine if Gamergate boys were also targeting Africans, Asians or other ethnic groups? They would be outed immediately for what they are: Racists, and they would be reviled and booed as such. So why should a bunch of sexist pig virgins who are harassing women be treated any differently? They should be treated as the jerks they are and nobody but themselves will cry when die virgins.
The GamerBoy virgins won't be going away any time soon however. I expect the Gamergate Controversy to last years - and probably will continue up until the point when female gamers make up roughly 40 to 50% of all gamers. By that point all of the silly fears GamerBoys were afraid of will be proved false, women will equally welcome and such fears will eventually be ancient history.
I don't expect this to be the last essay written on this topic (heck I fully expect Women's Studies courses to have so many essays written on this topic that people might even quote this
essay in the future), but I do expect GamerBoys to be revealed for the losers and jerks that they are.
:)
