Today’s article was just a short one, and engaging in what makes everyone roll their eyes: seeing something happen on Reddit and writing an article about it.
To cut it short:
- Billie Eilish (famous singer) uploaded a picture of her old Nintendo DSi in gallery of images, to her Instagram account
- Someone shared that on Reddit
- Half of the comment section slid straight into shitty gamer dude Hell (the other half did not)
- Some man on Mastodon attacked me
- Post removed from Reddit when moderators spotted the comments
…this is a fast-forward of the oddness, but if you want to read over my ramble here, and see some shittiness, the link will help:
https://gardinerbryant.com/you-dont-look-like-a-gamer/
I see this shit all the time, and it is not only exhausting, but something no one should see (no matter their identity) should be subjected to. Anyway, read on if you’d like!
You know, growing up I always thought it was super odd for the ‘gamer guys’ I knew to talk about gaming as a hobby that boys and men are into by default and girls, and especially women, just wouldn’t understand.
They mentioned or assumed it so casually in all kinds of contexts, as if it was just a fact about the world everyone knew or agreed upon.
Meanwhile, most of my girl (and later, women) friends played games. And not just the type of games the guys would look down upon, like mobile games, but established major gaming franchises like Final Fantasy, SimCity or Legend of Zelda. They wrote fan-fiction about Sephiroth, they snuck their little DS lite under the school desk to finish a section of Majora’s Mask, or they spent weeks at a time meticulously crafting a storyboard in Sims 2. I never understood why the cultural image of gaming at the same time only included guys and maaybe one pick-me-esque ‘gamer girl’, when most girls and women around me actually were super into some games.
I eventually realised that these ‘gamer guys’ just never interacted with the girls I knew. Their entire world view came from the internet, from movies and other cultural sources. That was an eye-opener.
It makes me angry and sad to see games with a traditionally female userbase, such as The Sims, to be lumped into ‘casual’ genres, when I never knew a single Sims player who had a casual relationship with that game. They were typically much more intense about these games and fandoms than your average male FIFA/Call of Duty/Battlefield players, but the latter count as ‘real gamers’. It’s really just misogyny.
Growing up, that whole stereotype was actually accurate in my class at least, which of course caused me to also believe it was this way until later in life. Girls here would at most play sims. Most boys would play various iterations of Need for Speed, Runescape and Counter Strike (1.6 of course), with the nerdier ones (me included) playing a bunch of other things too. Pretty much every boy played something.
I’ve since gotten to know several gamer girls, but literally all of them from other towns in my later life, none from my old school days. Which makes me think there was some localized girl gamer shaming going on, but I’m not sure it was from the boys in this case, it always felt like some of the more popular girls in school saw gaming as something infantile and therefore their clique just didn’t do it, or didn’t talk about it. Wouldn’t be surprised if some of the more quiet girls played a bunch of vidya and just never talked about it though.
Perhaps they just did not share their hobbies and interests with you at the time. Were any of them actually close friends with you?
None of the girls and women I know who are into gaming are really ‘obvious’ about it to strangers, partly because of the stigma and the resulting interactions you’d get, and partly because there just isn’t too much to talk about that you can’t already talk about online in your communities. Especially if most reactions to your gaming hobby you’d get from boys would be ridicule, weird creepiness and/or condescension. We usually kept it to ourselves.
Besides, if they played games like The Sims, it’s pretty obvious they were really into gaming. Sims is an incredibly complex and time-consuming hobby for most people – modding, worldbuilding projects, family legacies that take hundreds of hours of playtime. I know not a single Sims-playing woman who is not at least temporarily obsessed with that game, hasn’t modded it to shreds and hasn’t spent a three-digit amount of money on its expansions.
I’d say that the average Need for Speed gamer is a much more casual gamer than a Sims player. But because the latter are mostly women, we were treated with the same condescending “it’s a kid’s toy” type attitude boys actually thought we had toward their games.
Only a few of the more quiet ones, since I was the unpopular nerdy bullied guy the rest of them didn’t really want to be seen talking to. Later on as my bully dropped out in 8th grade, I gained a lot of confidence and got closer to the others too.
I mean yes, that’s all true, stigma and all, I’m just saying that over here in particular, it was mostly the girls who’d ridicule gaming as a childish hobby (especially if you played Runescape which was seen as particularly childish for some reason), which I’ve since found out is not common everywhere (and in fact of the people I know who still play Runescape, half are women. They’re just all from other towns/cities).
I wouldn’t say it’s that obvious. I know plenty who have played it very casually, but not many who have gotten that deep into it. It was like one of the default games everyone dabbled in as a kid. And yes, I know you can spend thousands of hours in it. I’ve got a couple hundred in it myself over the years (have played 1, 3, 4 and Medieval). I would doubt most got that deep into it back then. For one, that would require understanding the language the game was in, which most didn’t. Like 5 kids out of 25 in our class understood the language. I sometimes made money doing important Runescape quests (like Lost City or Monkey Madness to unlock dragon longsword and dragon scimmy) for others because they couldn’t do it themselves.
I on the other hand don’t think I know anyone who’s spent a cent on it. Estonia wasn’t particularly rich in the mid 00s, so we pirated games. If you didn’t know how to, you knew someone else who did. Most kids had older siblings or friends who’d help. This has carried on. I’ve bought many games over the years now, but never The Sims. Always pirated that.
Yeah the Sims is a game that the older I get the more I see it as serious gaming. The people who were into it were so much more into it than the people who played standard fpses were. And people of all genders were playing shit like bioshock and skyrim when I was in high school.
The only reason the Sims isn’t treated as a serious game is because it was significantly more popular with girls than boys.