Option One: The FPS
Remember that you are a “gamer girl.” Act accordingly. Choose a handle with the right sound. You may use the feminine “a” but nothing too aggressive or sexy. You want them to imagine you in sweatpants, not leather pants. Try to be one of the guys. Try to be guy-adjacent. Draw just enough attention to have personality, but never too much. Brand yourself. Not that it matters — they know you’re only playing this because your boyfriend does. Say nothing. You’re a girl, after all, not a woman. Your decisions are placid, small things, dependent on the vagaries of others.
Show some skill, but not enough to become a whore threat. Miss your headshots. Listen to them taunt you when the bullet creases a line through the space where they used to be. Say nothing. Let them find your sniper roost. Nearly kill them with your bayonet when you run out of ammo. Don’t. Challenge no one’s masculinity. Stay one step behind.
Listen to him blame lag for the fourth time when your bullet or bayonet or bomb kills him again. Speak. Use your real voice.
Listen to him respond. This is his world. It doesn’t matter that your first memory was the smooth knob of an Atari joystick fitting into the hollow of your soft hand or the rattle of quarters in an arcade. His three years overwrite your thirty. Girls don’t play video games. This club is his legacy and birthright.
Listen to him. Speak.
Be spoken to in words that pass for comfort: Listen, the jokes here are rough, but no one really wants to knife you in the vagina. No one wants to rape you. That’s just how it is here. That’s why we’re laughing. Learn to talk some shit. Why take this so personally?
Listen to his voice warble as it promotes a specificity dripping with viciousness. Wonder how much of your information is online. Wonder if he is fifteen or seventeen or fifty. Wonder if he can find your house. Wonder if he would.
Wonder why you didn’t stay voiceless over voice chat.
Option Two: The Action/Adventure
Play the man when there is no woman to play. Pixellated genitals are no true genitals anyway. A princess needs a paramour. None of them are self-rescuing, not anymore.
Play single-player. Imagine what it feels like to be the chosen one. Imagine what it feels like to be the chosen one and a man. Imagine what it feels like to be the chosen one and a woman. Tell yourself gender doesn’t matter. You’d rescue that princess either way. You feel for her — it’s not so easy to gird your own loins with no one granting you permission. Easier by far to sit in the tower and wait. There but for the grace go you.
Set forth empty handed on your first quest. Look for the magic sword behind eight-bit bushes and underneath flowers and stones and finally inside the hands of the lady who lives half-submerged in the raging river. Consider the tone of her voice, the high trickle of the water, the virgin whiteness of her diaphanous gown. Consider her weary desperation. Wonder if you are imagining the blush on her cheek has meaning when she kisses your man-child avatar on the lips. Does your own blush have meaning? Wonder if you would take the sword if you were given the choice to refuse her. Wonder if she would give you the sword if your body was your own.
Your affections are preset, binary, gender aligned or platonic. You choose to accept this. Games have given you so much, fired the neurons in your brain until they exploded like tiny stars in a universe of unbelievable bounty, coursed down your neural pathways until all things were made electric. Your complaints are ungrateful laments in the light of these priceless gifts. Do you need this to be exactly your way? Your affections would be fictional either way.
Wield the sword. Use it to cut the grass before you go.
Option Three: The RPG
Prepare to make your choices.
Amidst sliding bars for eye size and cheek height you find the disfigured woman, the beautiful woman, the old woman, the young woman. Their pasts hang in their faces: choose what mars the skin, what symbols are painted or sliced or scarred. White haired or childlike, broken or strong, some things remain the same. Their armored chests bear an impossible, bounteous burden. All waists are thin and supple. The hands that are meant to wield a broadsword or fire a blaster are delicate and fragile as mayflies. Your face is your own to manipulate. Your body is subject to male gaze here as everywhere. You may only change it in the ways that please.
It’s okay. Focus on the hair. Honestly, sometimes you like being pretty. Who doesn’t like being pretty? Let’s be pragmatic. Your own physicality isn’t perfect either, even if it’s imperfect in the other direction.
When you’ve flipped through mohawks and pixie cuts and chosen the right elaborate braid to crown your hero’s head, begin. Step forward into a choose-your-own-adventure with all paths leading to an inevitable sacrifice. It’s hard to identify with the peasant women bearing babies on their hips that you are sent to save. You are a soldier and hero. You are covered with steel and a sense of greater purpose.
Still, you woo a lover for your improbable heroine along the way, a troubled man whose past is never far behind him. He will cause you to compromise your convictions. You will spend nights at the campfire asking him to stay. He will leave either way when his part in the story is over: your lover is led to leave you for something greater, a duty or passion you cannot supercede. What other choices might you have made if you knew?
You aren’t supposed to care about happy endings anyway. You have a world to save.
Option Four: The MMO
Tap into your nurturing maternal instincts. Play the healer. Tend the wounded. Keep their health bars green and dying. It’s not the mob you’re interested in, but the aftereffect. If they die before you, blame your inability to fix things, your slowness, your lack of anticipatory foresight. Blame yourself. Do it publicly. Everyone likes you.
Dance on tables in your underwear for gold. This is roleplay. Everyone assumes you are a man because no real woman should enjoy this. You do. You are not sure what that says about your womanhood. Do not turn on global chat.
Tap into your protective maternal instincts. Play the tank. Bark orders. Shield them all with your body. Taunt. Focus the damage. If you die, trust that your sacrifice was necessary. If you die, blame your inability to hit your combo, your weak fortitude, your broken armor. Blame yourself privately. Everyone needs you to be strong.
Pick flowers and shine gems. Give them away for less than market value. Put down your sword. Lean your staff against a convenient tree. Put on a black dress. Flirt in an imaginary garden with a dark, handsome stranger like every other. He has a tortured past, like yours. You are built from the same artifice. You are some kind of soulmates until he stops logging on and leaves your story, interrupted.
Tap into your darkest maternal instincts. Play the vengeful warlock. Throw a curse and let them writhe with the pain of it over time, let it continue to burn them long after you are gone. Apply hellfire with righteous impunity. Channel the inherent rage of your allotted role. Stand in the fire. Let them all burn alongside you. Don’t concern yourself with collateral damage. You are fragile and will die easily. We are all fragile and we are all dying easily. Take them with you.
Do the most damage you can to everyone around you before you go.
Option Five: Choose Your Own Genre
Pay no attention to genre or gender. Gird yourself. Play as well or as terribly as you can. Play as much or as little as you can. Hold your controller or keyboard or touchscreen or handheld gaming device. Play puzzle games and matching games and MOBAs and MMOs and RPGs and FPS and every other acronym. Reject the Myth of the Real Gamer. Rewrite the Myth of the Real Gamer. You are the Real Gamer. Learn to say “fuck you.” Learn that it is okay to feel. Learn to use Report and Mute. Do not allow yourself to be muted before your voice can speak.
Take what is yours to take, your legacy, your birthright. Take no prisoners.
Tags: games, gaming, katrina smith, the butter
This is absolutely, truly fantastic.
Holy shit. This is amazing.
Thank you.
“Learn to say “fuck you.” Learn that it is okay to feel. Learn to use Report and Mute. Do not allow yourself to be muted before your voice can speak.”
Christ. Yes. Jesus fuck, yes.
Also: “Do not turn on global chat.” christ god yes it is the pit where love and joy go to die
“Learn that it is okay to feel.”
I just spent a year in therapy doing this. Separately, I think this essay is wonderful.
This is poetry!
I created an account just to tell you that this is the realest thing on the entire internet.
I loved this too much not to log in and say so.
And screw games that won’t let me play a woman. Fuck you the Witcher 3! I didn’t like the Witcher 2 and I’m sick of games that don’t let me choose.
Right? I refuse to play games that don’t have meaningful female player characters. Fuck that.
I loved this.
I thought I was the only one who did this! Awesome.
I couldn’t be less interested in a game whose writers can’t imagine a woman having agency, as opposed to being objects that the hero manipulates. Why reward lazy misogyny?
<3
I wish I had this article when I was about 13. But at least then I had FFVI, where Celes was a multifacted character who was kickass but also pretty and interesting and brave.
As a long-time WoW veteran… I have no words. Your MMO section made me cry. (In an okay way, not in the Trade Chat why-is-the-world-like-this way.)
Right? Another WoW veteran here, who started as a tank and then played a healer for most of her WoW ‘career’. I feel vindicated in my choices and duped into them all at the same time.
Ooh, girl. Me, too. Roll a pally or druid ONE TIME and you’re screwed forever.
I swapped to hunter main last expansion and it was wildly liberating and weirdly disappointing at the same time. Life should not be that confusing just from the screen where you select which toon to log in on.
Brilliant, sharp and a little too good at hitting me in all the feels. The MMO section was just too real for a longtime WoW raid leader.
Perfect, just perfect.
Pure excellence. Alternate cackling, cheering and wincing here.
My nurturing maternal healing instincts do not extend to he who shall stand in flames, he who shall not use his offheal/cleanse on himself and he who doth draw all off the aggro.
The lock part made me guffaw, so true.
Sometimes a gal just wants to make the pixellated world burn.
This was so good. So, so good.
Years ago when my daughter first started playing MMOs with me, she played a healer because she liked it. At one point I remember coming home from work and finding my 8 year old running a raid in City of Heroes while healing. Nobody ever knew that 30+ people had just been directed for over an hour by a wee kid. I was so proud. She’s still that kind of gamer.
Yes! That’s awesome! I often play healers (except when I am the tank and then I terrify everyone with my insatiable bloodlust) and it’s so fun to have the space to be the tactical commander of a battle. Healers are in the perfect spot to make judgements about when and how to engage because they know just how squishy all the other characters are and are constantly checking in on everyone else’s status. As a tank, I feel like it’s my god-given right to charge into combat, consequences be damned. As a healer, I’m a wee bit more circumspect. Glad to see your daughter is developing her gaming personality so young; it will be a lifelong joy, I hope.
She’s 17 now and wants to design games for a living. So I guess she’s hooked 🙂
My heart grew three sizes!
August never ends, does it?
This was all great, but the MMO section was peeeeerrrfect. Also:
“Still, you woo a lover for your improbable heroine along the way, a troubled man whose past is never far behind him. He will cause you to compromise your convictions. You will spend nights at the campfire asking him to stay. He will leave either way when his part in the story is over: your lover is led to leave you for something greater”
GODDAMNIT, ALASTAIR.
I lol’d. (Choose Leliana. She still loves you all the way through Dragon Age: Inquisition provided you don’t die horribly.)
This also calls to mind Malavai Quinn. Jerkface. I really wanted to be able to just kill him. I mean, I’m a Sith warrior who’s had the opportunity to kill everyone else who had the audacity to so much as have a haircut I dislike, right?
Yes, I got smart and went Bard. 🙂 I can’t remember whether it’s after Awakenings, or in DA2, but there’s a reference to the Warden Commander and Leliana being seen in a market together years later, and <3 <3.
Quinn, Quinn, oh how I LOATHE him. I tell myself that my badass sith warrior is biding her time until she can skewer him with her saber. Since the first Rakghoul plague event back in the way-back, I have had him in his infected skin so he is as ugly without as within. My marauder used him as little as possible.
I was beyond happy when I got Treek, my warrior finally has a happy-making healbot.
i was thinking the exact same thing! frickin’ dragon age origins, right?
Please please tell me that the RPG is Dragon Age: Origins.
Read this. Kick in the teeth everyone who ever told you that it’s just a game, why do you even care. Care.
This times a millionty.
I lol'd. (Choose Leliana. She still loves you all the way through Dragon Age: Inquisition provided you don't die horribly.)
This also calls to mind Malavai Quinn. Jerkface. I really wanted to be able to just kill him. I mean, I'm a Sith warrior who's had the opportunity to kill everyone else who had the audacity to so much as have a haircut I dislike, right?
This times a millionty.
Brilliance. Hell hath no fury like a woman playing a warlock. Also, I still can’t get my hair right on WoW.
Brilliant piece and for a game with women characters that are meaningful try Zombie Army Trilogy
Thank you. The FPS portion of this particularly struck home.
Thank you. The FPS portion of this particularly struck home.