Gender and Gaming II

In her blog post about this week’s cases, Stine asks, at some point, if male players don’t meet any barriers when playing games and how do those intersect with age, sexuality, race, etc. 

As we talked about in the last few classes, it is easier for a girl to cross certain gender-borders than it is for boys, specially if they are young. And even, most of the times, sexuality is brought into the table when they do. On the other hand, cultural context, age, class (and, therefore, status) determine the consequences of certain behaviors. My friend who plays farmville because his mother invited him, for example, is constantly giving justifications, even though we (his circle of friends) never said anything or made fun of him. The key explanation here is context. Farmvile has a wide audience and it isn’t necessarily seen as a “pink game”, so he isn’t judged by other people in the same game. Besides, gender-border-crossing is usually policed by those who are closer to the subject - friends and family. In this case, all of us in his group of friends play “pink games”, even the more hardcore players in the group have no prejudice against facebook games, or more embodied games (Wii games, dance dance revolution, etc). We all play sing star and dance dance revolution together when we meet, so we don’t have “the morals” to judge him. In fact, we were more surprised by the fact that his mother, who’s in her 50’s, was playing - both because she’s a woman, and because she’s not exactly young. Considering this is all happening in Portugal, it is very surprising that someone in her generation is playing anything, since she’s part of a generation who had access to card and board games only. Playing in public spaces hasn’t been common in Portugal. Cyber cafés never became popular and arcades were really hard to find some years ago.

Actually, the reason why we all started playing Dance Dance Revolution is also interesting. In my group of closer friends there is a boy who owns a metal pad. He tried to make us all play with him. In the beginning, no one, except for girls, wanted to play. As time went by, because that metal pad would be present in every party, more and more boys joined the group and now that’s one of the group’s favorite games. The guy who introduced the group to DDR is gay, and that’s probably another reason for boys taking so long to give the game a try. But, once they overcame prejudice, no one was judging anymore and we were just having fun together. The fact that we were too old to make fun of each other might have helped the transition. As this example shows, the first and the biggest step is to overcome prejudice - easier said than done. The only real barrier to female or male gamers is the community’s prejudice.

When watching the video Stine and Pernille suggested, I was struck by the fact that I was being exceptionally disturbed by the fact that women were discriminating men and not the other way round. The video shows a series of common behaviors male players show towards female players, as described by Yee, but reverses roles, so women are either underestimating the male player or offering him gear. If the video showed the usual situation, I would think “oh yeah, this is so typical.”, but because it was reversed, I was really disturbed, just because it goes against everything I’m used to.

Another thing I find interesting is that, in MMORPGs, players don’t really have to reveal their gender, age, race, etc, and yet some players are interested in exploring these offline-characteristics in game, even if it doesn’t help the playing at all.