In the light of the recent owl Ellie scandal and previous Geguri scandal I have been thinking a lot about female gamers and their experiences online and why female gamers are so underrepresented in both professional competitive online games and casual games, especially team based games like Overwatch and league of legends, and treatment of female gamers are so bad and toxic. I thought about this specifically in the light of competitive FPS games.
I thought of two main underlying factors which both stem from societyās gender role pressures on girls. In general terms;
1. When video games started proliferating (PC and console), somehow society considered video games a *boys* thing and would buy video games for boys but buy girls Barbie dolls??? Shout out to my fellow girls who had zero fucking interest dolls but weāre always given them as presents The long term effect of this would be boys having earlier access to video games while girls were never introduced to video games and brought into the fold, and thus would not be predisposed to have an interest in it growing up or exposure to video games.
2. FPS games were mostly to do with guns and warfare, which society would condition boys to like as it is something āmanlyā in terms of male gender roles and reward males for engaging in activities involving guns and war (writing that sentence made me feel gross) and simultaneously punish females for liking the same things, because itās āunladylikeā and females should all beā¦ I dunno, knitting or something. This resulted in whole generations of girls being deprived of building a FPS foundation from an early age - this could be a factor for the lack of female pro players in the competive FPS scene because building a foundational skillset in team based FPS games takes time, you need core muscle memory mouse skills and game sense etc etc, which male gamers could have at least a decade of from playing counter strike / quake etc .
Female players are trying really hard and at every turn they get pushed back by a subgroup of toxic or callous male players unaware of their privilege but also having the gall to feel āthreatenedā because another human being who happens to possess a vagina is better than they are at something, Iām??? This motherfucker guy who was behind the Ellie scandal pretended to be a girl but he had an āoutā , he could just stop being a girl but the rest of us female gamers canāt do this? And his actions I think are very damaging to female gamers online and the lasting repercussions would be that people are even less likely to accept female gamers as just another member of the gaming community, and the assumption that if a female is good then itās probably another āEllieā. So fuck you, dude.
I find it incredible that a subgroup of sad male players have the audacity to insult female players for trying and telling them to āget goodā, when they are unaware of the deadweights society has put on female gamers from the very beginning and the relative privilege they have had (haha how is that different from everything else in life).
(And I know I wrote this in the context of female gamers due to the recent topical scandals but I extend this consideration to all minorities in the gaming community, whichever groups you may fall in, LGBTQ+, poc, gamers with disabilities , gamers with mental health challenges. Hang in there, shitās hard, yo.)
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