window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);} gtag('js', new Date()); gtag('config', 'G-GEQWY429QJ');

 

ENTITY recognizes the female gamer.

To the outside eye, gaming is a boys club. Within in the gaming world, that common assumption continues. However, the female gamer is just as much a relevant part of the gamer community as the male.

According to statistics in 2014, 44 percent of gamers were female. Looking at the community surrounding at the approximately $22 billion video game industry, you wouldn’t know it.

With online debacles like the anti-feminist #GamerGate, women who are industry professionals and players are often targeted simply due to their gender. Despite the statistics of a close to equal gender distribution in the players, women are subjected to daily harassment on online games. But why do we assume the industry is made for boys?

When games like Pong by Atari were first created, games were entirely unisex. They were marketed as a family activity rather than a boy’s toy. In fact due to the increase of female Arcade-goers, games were actually marketed to women.

However, a 1982 article for Electronic Games Magazine “Women Join the Arcade Revolution” claimed that arcading has typically been a “man’s hobby” and has only recently welcomed women who “are not just there for decoration.”

READ MORE: Top 8 Video Games for “Girls that Game”

However, even the first professional gamers were ladies. In 1977, Gremlin debuted their new game, Hustle. As part of a 12-city publicity tour, Gremlin sent out Sabrina Osment and Lynn Reid, known as the “Gremlin Girls,” to play any challenger. Anyone who beat them two out of three times would win 100 dollars. Out of the 1,233 people to challenge them only seven won.

Despite these events, the Video Game Crash of 1983 spurred a change in marketing strategies. Nintendo began to market exclusively to men; women were considered no longer valuable consumers. Even Howard Phillips, the spokesperson for Nintendo of America in 1990, seemed to think that women and girls playing video games were a brand new phenomena. The video game world became a male space simply due to changes in marketing.

Currently, as in the past, women gamers are typically the outsider. With events like GamerGate, male gamers have attacked female gamers and professionals, stating that the diversifying of the industry has began to push them out. Stating that feminism is trying to bully them out of games, male gamers often harass female gamers online.

READ MORE: 4 Reasons Man-Hating Isn’t Chic

Though the GamerGate movement stated that it was simply about journalist integrity and an inquisition into corrupt practices among gaming journalists, as stated in by article “Feminist Bullies Tearing the Video Game industry Apart” from Breitbart, it resulted in female programmers such as Brianna Wu and Zoe Quinn receiving death threats and having to temporarily go into hiding.

On online games such as World of Warcraft and Call of Duty, female gamers are often subject to vocal harassment from male gamers. You can see this spoofed in a 2010 skit titled “Xbox Girls Get Revenge” and its 2011 sequel “Xbox Girls Strike Back” from online comedy channel College Humor.

However, this perception that women are on the outside of the industry could not be more untrue. According to P.J. McNealy, founder of Digital World Research, (via the Washington Post), “The definition of a gamer is becoming much broader, and it’s happening in front of our eyes.”

In fact, the Washington Post asserts that the discrimination against women evident in GamerGate “will likely prove a small distraction to the fast-growing place of women in gaming — not only because developers are realizing the potential of selling to a broader audience, but because more girls and women are finding it easier to embrace the freedom of digital play.”

Send this to a friend