Katsuni
Priestess Of Syrinx
- Joined
- Aug 22, 2009
- Messages
- 1,238
- MBTI Type
- ENTP
- Enneagram
- 3w4?
Alright, I got into a conversation on vent earlier, and it got me thinking about this annoying concept that's been bothering me for ages.
Gamer girls.
No, not that they exist, but rather, that people don't seem to REALIZE they exist.
I mean yeah, 10-15 years ago they were pretty rare, but this's not 10-15 years ago any longer... 10-15 years ago ANYONE who played games was pretty rare... it was like 10% of the population tops?
These days, it's obviously way higher. The whole WoW thing's probably partly to blame for dragging alot of females into the gaming world, or at least admitting that the concept isn't completely worthless. Shoes in a game are just as real as shoes in the 'real world' if yeu get to show them off to yeur friends and they still have the same level of envy. But anyways.
The fact is, that it's hardly a rarity these days. Even during the 'dork ages' (yes, a bad pun on dark ages, and yes, yeu're free to send me hatemail. Please do, I get bored without it, and I could use some kindling for the fireplace this winter) it's not like they didn't exist. They just... didn't exist VISABLY very well.
Like, back when internet gaming was just becomming fairly new, a study actually found that slightly over 50% of the purchases of strategy games were by... females. And yet... yeu didn't see alot playing starcraft and such oddly, so where were they?
There's a few factors here, which affect the 'percieved' number, as opposed to the 'real' number.
First off, female gamers rarely care for direct PvP (player versus player, directly challanging another person). It's a 'typically' male preferance, though there's always exceptions. In general though, this means that in many cases, a girl gamer simply wouldn't even show up in the online population since they'd content themselves to sticking to the single player.
Of course, social behaviour is fairly normal for females, (if not so much for nt's in some ways, who were probably the largest population here at this time) so going online was sometimes a craving that had to be sated anyway. But here we ran into the issue that well... there's ALOT of guys... and most of them at the time really WERE the stereotypical "doesn't ever get any" type, and with the percieved "no gamer girls" around, the second they see one it's like ZOMG MARRY MEEEEEE. At this time, the ones who did play, many of them refused to admit to being female at all to save themselves the headache. I did actually find a fair number over the years of playing back then, though they were admittedly alot more rare than the guys. Myself, I personally realized through trial and error testing, that admitting to being female wasn't whot caused this reaction... it was the admission that the guys THOUGHT yeu were a viable mate... as soon as yeu refused to give yeur age (a/s/l ugh hate that so glad that term's dead *stomps it good*), they gave up because they automatically assumed yeu were too old or too young for them. But regardless, there weren't many of the ones that DID go online who admitted it.
And of course the TYPE of games were preferential as well. Some genres just don't interest most female gamers in general, the typical FPS (first person shooter) is a great example of this. It's twitch reflex based, often insists on PvP mentioned above, and is graphically violent and annoyingly LOVES to toss naked women on the screen for some reason. In short, most girls really didn't (and still don't) care for this genre too much, with some exceptions. (I loved Deus EX, though I hated the controls. And ladders. I think I died more to ladders than enemies. Doom3 was scarry, other titles exist as well but there's not a ton) As such, many of the gamer girls just didn't play the same games the majority of the guys did, so never ran into one another.
So yeah, even back then, when it was obvious gamer girls were rare to begin with, there were alot of contributing factors to make it seem even MORE rare than really was the case.
Why not today though? Obviously there's ALOT more people playing games in general, now that the concept that games are actually a viable source of entertainment, the bias against them is mostly gone, and that people have realized how CHEAP they are, especially with the economic recession when they realized they could buy a game to keep them entertained all month for the price of seeing a single movie in the theater with those scary inflated prices.
And not just gamers in general have gone up, but so too have female gamers, the concept of a fantasy world has actually caught on quite well, and many are finally actually accepting that yeu can have fun in fiction as well as reality.
And yet... "zomg no wai u r not a gurl they dont play gamez lololol".
Sigh.
Yes, we've learned NOTHING it seems...
Swear I'd just love to beat my head against a wall some days, but really, walls are hard and they hurt so Imma not do that anymore >.>;;
In any case, I imagine that at one time, the NT population of girls were probably by far the most likely to play games, though I didn't know of the whole psychological profiling thing back then, so really, I can't say for certain as it'd be from a tainted memory.
As we can't test BACK THEN though, we can at least TEST NOW =3
So because of that, POLL TIME! Oh wait yeu saw that when yeu first clickied on this post... well... uhm... whotever.
Still, we'll assume yeu answered the poll (and send ninjas to kill yeu if yeu didn't >=O ), so let's go from there.
Why do yeu, or don't yeu believe in the validity of gaming as a form of entertainment as a whole, or why do yeu just not like it, or do like about it?
And for the guys, due to the difficulty of being a gamer girl from definition... how many do yeu know? Do yeu think they're fairly common these days? Does it make yeu happy to know one, or do they annoy yeu? Does it turn yeu on that yeu can enjoy yeurself playing a game with yeur girl, or does it piss yeu off that she's not following the standard contrived gender roles?
Alright, everyone go discuss!
No really.
Stop reading! DISCUSS!
Gah!
I'm ending this post now, I swear >.<
Really.
I am.
Ending it right now.
*Click*