Women Gamers

When Shiny writer Star isn't online digging up news about sparkly cockroaches and soft-furnishings for the gassy, she's usually online reading the latest tech news. And sometimes, she goes off half-cock about something she reads and feels inclined to write about it. This is one of those times.  Star's not as together as the Inky Circus gals, so you needn't panic - this isn't likely to be a weekly occurrence.  Just every so often.  Or perhaps never again. Who can tell?

I'm a gaming dilettante.  Whole months go by when all I don't pick up a controller at all, while my memories of  other months are a hazy blur because I've lost hours of sleep trying desperately to "just get to a save point."   I had to quit playing MMorPGs because I had begun scheduling my real life around my clan activity, but I've never mastered the fine art of strafing and firing.  I'm a miserable mess at "Guitar Hero," but once insisted on playing through a Boss Battle despite a finger-curling hand cramp (hmm...perhaps those last two are related.) Still despite my lack of full-time gaming dedication, I'm consistently amazed that the fact women play video games is so shocking to the world at large so as to be deemed newsworthy every now and again.

I've been playing video games pretty much my whole  life, and I've met plenty of other women who have too; and I'm talking real women - not just people who play women online.  Still, if having girl gamers in the news every so often means game designers might be inclined to present future titles in which women warriors are not expected to engage in melee battle wearing naught but a chain mail bikini, I'm all for it.   (Not only is forcing women who want to play their own gender in game to play hyper-sexualized versions of themselves degrading - but chain mail bikins offer no practical protection from weapons - and you just know they would chafe and ride up in a most spectacularly uncomfortable fashion.  No one should be expected to defeat a Kobold Warrior when doing simultaneous battle with a scale mail wedgie.)

Current women gamers in the news are the PMS clan (ahem - it's Pandora's Mighty Soldiers, thankyouverymuch) - an international community of women gamers who play video games competitively - against one another and in pro-tourneys.  The clan has been recruited by Microsoft to demonstrate Xbox Live at E3.  And on the one hand - I say "Take that, Booth Babes!" But on the other, I'm a little saddened that the fact that these women voluntarily  play "Halo 2" is considered enough of a novelty to make them an attraction.  I respect PMS for becoming a force in the gaming community, but I can't help but wish they hadn't needed to.  How many folks do we have to frag before we get to stop being "girl gamers" and get to just be "gamers?"

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