Seriously, though, my sister is a moderate gamer (I’d like to think because of me). She enjoys the obvious cross-gender appealing games like The Sims, pet games like Nintendogs, and Cooking Mama. She hates games, “Where I have to do stuff,” meaning too action-oriented, including Final Fantasy’s ATB, but she enjoys RPGs so she’s mostly stuck with older games. I’m trying to get her to play Final Fantasy X but I use my PS2 so much that I’m reluctant to let her borrow it.
Strangely, I’ve found her with the NES and SNES Zelda games, despite supposedly hating action. She also loves Mario Party and Mario Kart, so it could be that she just doesn’t like ATB-ish battle systems (I’m not a big fan myself, honestly. I like the series despite ATB and absolutely loved FFX’s battles.).
(She also just told me she enjoys Custer’s Revenge for the Atari, but I’m pretty sure she said that for the lulz. At least I hope so. :rolleyes: )
IANAwoman, but my wife is, and since she’s not a doper, I’ll just mention that she’s a gamer too.
I love the fact that she turns the mild-mannered female gamer stereotype on its head. Her past deeds include:
Shooting someone in the face in Halo 2 and yelling “BOOM! Headshot!”
Absolutely DESTROYING me on Star Wars:Battlefront.
Quietly muttering, “fucking noob” while raiding in WoW.
When we first started dating, she took me to a bar where we played pool for hours. Then, as we were leaving, she saw an old Area 51 arcade game against the back wall. She smiled, plugged a quarter in, and BEAT THE FUCKING GAME. On one quarter.
Oh, and she likes watching me play KOTOR and FFX, but doesn’t like playing because, as she says, “Why would I need another job? I already have WoW.”
I’m a female gamer. Never played tabletop D&D, though I wanted to - none of my friends were interested. Played at arcades when I was a kid, played some D&D games on my friend’s Mac Plus, and got a Playstation a couple of years after it came out. Got a PS2 when it came out.
My preferences are fantasy RPGs and platformers. My hand/eye coordination is far too sucky for FPS games. Final Fantasy games, Spyro, Crash Bandicoot, stuff like that. I played Sim City (my citizens loved me) and Civ II on my lovely red iMac. Also a shareware RPG called Realmz.
My current obsession (and has been for years) is Everquest 2. Never thought I’d get sucked into an online game, much less one that you have to pay a monthly fee for, but there you go. Got hooked on EQ, moved to EQ2 when it came out. That’s about 8 or 9 years playing that franchise. It doesn’t leave me much time for any other games, so my poor Playstations are gathering dust.
I think that was the game that my husband got us for the PlayStation, along with two light guns, as a Valentine’s Day present. Best Valentine’s present ever.
Yup, another female gamer here, and in the “older” generation crowd at 46. I’ve been playing since my Tandy. I am the gamer in our house, my husband has no interest.
My favorite has to be WoW, which I play almost everyday. Up next is all things RPG. I used to always choose the male character because of the armour graphics (c’mon, a fur bikini and thong?) I’ve recently started a few female toons and have grown to appreciate their differences.
I own a DS, DSi, PSP (both versions), Wii and Xbox 360. Add to that my iPhone, which is perfect for those just before sleep games. PC games are varied by genre, city building, RPGs, the odd FPS (loved Bioshock and Mass Effect, ME 2 is in the que). Various “dash” games for a quick fix.
My girlfriend’s a gamer. She does tabletop, LARP, and video games. Her family have gotten her both a 360 and PS3 for birthday and Christmas presents in the past. (And saving me from having to buy them.) She’s played Orange Box, FO3, Mass Effect, Little Big Planet, Castle Crashers, and a few others. She also has a PS2 and had a pretty extensive library of those games. She really doesn’t have a particular genre she favors in video games. She’s 27.
She doesn’t have much time to game, though, since she’s in law school and that takes up most of her time.
But then I don’t have my PS2! Quite a dilemma.
I’ve got a backlog of PC games, though, so it wouldn’t be too bad. Besides, its nearly criminal to withhold it.
What kind of treatment do you women get from gaming guys when they find out you’re a girl? Do you they treat you more nicely or condescendingly? Do they give you a hard time in a friendly way (like guys do with other guys) or do they just give you a hard time?
Obviously assuming you’re playing a game that puts you into contact with other people.
My girlfriend’s in the same boat as yours. I made the ghastly mistake of hooking her up on EQ2 when we met, and she hasn’t let it go since. I moved on a few years after launch, even played a few other MMOs ; she’s still there almost every night. She went from total n00b to casual to raider, and now she seems well placed to become guild leader.
I’ve tried, over the years, to point her towards other games, but the ones that get through her thick shell of alt-itis are few and far between : thus far, Vampire:Bloodlines and Dragon Age. She did a stint on Age of Conan, too.
I’m currently in the middle of an underground campaign to get her to try Mass Effect out, but progress is slow. The natives get restless easily. At least she agreed to install it. It won’t be much longer now till she first launches it. Six months tops. Or an abysmal raid. You have to be ever watchful for those precious, precious instants when she’s absolutely fed up with those goddamn amateurs who don’t know how to play their fucking classes. That’s when you have an angle… but it’s a small, all too ephemeral window. The call of reorganizing and re-decorating the entire guildhall is strong in this one.
Covered in Bees usually it’s awe or condescencion and sometimes a combination of them. I do have one mildly funny story. I used to be big into painting figurines. Not playing with them after, just painting. So anyway I went out one day and bought a few paints from the local store, and hey! look! new figurines! So I went up and down and purchased a few. A couple from Warhammer, some D&D type figurines, you know, total mix and match. I don’t care.
One of the guys hanging around there looks at my purchases and goes, “Those don’t go together, you know.” In the snottiest voice imaginable. I wish I had had the quick wit to look down at them, look up at him with big eyes and in a trembling voice, say, “They don’t?” I just laughed and said as a matter of fact, I just liked painting them.
Nava, I could never get that woman in Dragon Age to make a threesome even. Whenever I try to talk to her, no matter what, she only talks about dueling and playing a game. After you play the game (and win) she’s done with me. And I’ve done everything the way it’s supposed to be. On the Xbox.
First, my experience with other gamers online is only from FFXI. It’s the only game I play where I actually interact with other people, otherwise I prefer one-player games.
Honestly, I’ve never had a problem with it. I’ve never “revealed” that I’m female, it would never occur to me to hide it. FFXI has a pretty substantial female membership, (25%?) and tends to skew a bit more mature than WoW (as I understand WoW). Part of that is because there’s no PvP in FFXI, so the people that would be out to boost their ego by demolishing another player (in combat or verbally) tend to stay away - and there’s a big overlap between those folks and those who would make derogatory/assaultive/sexist comments when a player is revealed to be female. Every linkshell (the equivelant of a guild in other games) has several prominent female members, and more than a few major hardcore linkshells are run by women players. So there’s no base expectation that every player will be male - women are not seen as any sort of rare and endangered species.
As far as teasing - my linkshell tease and harass each other in a friendly way, and I can give as well as take (I’m really famous for filthy “your mom” jokes), but it very rarely gets actually mean. I’m a sackholder (translate: officer) and if anyone got actually vicious with another member, or used racist, sexist, or homophobic slurs, they would be out on their ear.
Now, I do understand that this is not typical across the internet, and that’s a good part of the reason why I’ve stuck with FFXI.
I occasionally get an expectation that I won’t know what I am talking about. However, one young man who did have that expectation, and who was quickly disavowed of it, turned out to be a very good friend, and we still get along very well. I remember our first chat was a great chat about minotaurs.
Gamers I find have the same quotient of assholes as the rest of the world. The ones who are assholes to girls are pretty much assholes to everyone.
This reminds me, btw, of a fun little incident my SO had. He was playing one of those online shooting games, Call of Duty or something. That probably wasn’t the one - this was a couple of years ago. Anyway it was some game where all of the players had to agree to switch maps.
So everyone had agreed but one guy who kept on playing. And they kept trying to interact with him but all he would say is
Over and over again, not spamming it, but he wouldn’t respond with anything else. Oh, sometimes he’d say
or
Out of desperation the other players started saying things like
Back in EQ1, I was playing on my game server and was the first time I ever did something in ventrilo and it was a new group I was doing PoSewers with [gah I hate that area] and they heard my girly voice and started accusing me of playing on my boyfriends account before we even started to kill anything [we had just gotten around to that sort of ledge part of the way clockwise of the entrance, cant remember what we were trying to kill offhand] and the obscene comments got really bad. Every single thing got made into an animal house like frat boi juvenile joke. It finally got bad enough I PMd a GM buddy of mine and had him come over and put the call to jesus bug in their ears about how to act towards ladies. [one of the things was a druid constantly changing to wolf form and humping me virtually, complete with vent sound effects and commentary in game] They changed when they found out that not only was it my play character, but I was CS as well…
People in WoW were a lot less juvenile, other than the random chat in Barrens =)
People in EVE are amazed, because there are so few of us, about 5% or so I have been told. My corp is very protective of me … it is like having a dozen or so hulking big [european] brothers watching over me =) My corp is mostly euros, and I love the accents on teamspeak =) I don’t have any problem understanding most of them, the geordie is the only one I have to ask to repeat himself =)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Covered_In_Bees!
Gaming male here with an inquiry.
What kind of treatment do you women get from gaming guys when they find out you’re a girl? Do you they treat you more nicely or condescendingly? Do they give you a hard time in a friendly way (like guys do with other guys) or do they just give you a hard time?
Obviously assuming you’re playing a game that puts you into contact with other people.
EDIT: Or doing something directly related to gaming as Anaamika was in her last post.
Quoting it so people may actually read it.
Anaamika: What did you say?
Last edited by Covered_In_Bees!; Today at 02:59 PM.
Everything from insulting condescension to outright hostility. This is the first board I have ever been to where I did not get crucified for being a female gamer. It’s a nice change of pace,actually.
Anaamika: Outright assholishness is different from a “casual sexism” type POV from male players or other such related things.
Have you (the general you, not specifically Mika anymore) experienced what you’d call more frequent negativity when playing with a bunch of males that know you’re a female compared to out in “real life”?
I haven’t received much harassment or any condescension because I’m a real woman. I’ve met a lot of real female players in WoW, and I certainly haven’t heard anyone express issues with having a real woman player in a group or raid.
Occasional oogy stuff does happen, though. There was this guy in my EQ guild who, it turns out, was making juuuuuuust barely acceptable comments in private messages to all the female players, enough to raise questions but usually nothing concrete to pin on him. He had this “oh I’m just a big affectionate jokey guy” persona so he’d brush everything off as not meaning it like that. And in WoW, a male guildie would send me tells (private in-game chat) that would get on my nerves, like “hey cutie,” “how ya doing, sexy” etc. Same sort of thing but milder than the other guy, and I would bet money that he was really just one of those guys who was just jokey and didn’t have much of a filter. It still bothered me, and when he wouldn’t stop when I said I didn’t like it, my husband - a guild officer then - heard my “he won’t stop even though I told him I don’t like that” complaint and just went off on the guy. I got an extremely contrite apology.
