hardcore gaming

[piranha]

expanded comment to this post at the geekfeminism blog:

to me a hardcore gamer is somebody who is intensely into gaming — not just into one game, but into games, plural, and into the mechanics of them, into conquering them, playing and knowing them through-and-through, and when not playing them, then discussing them with other hardcore gamers. also, games are usually a hardcore gamer’s life; their free time, their social interactions revolve around gaming. with every single one i know i cannot imagine them not gaming; it’s an intrinsic part of their existence -- at least at the time.

i see no reason why this should be limited to men, and i know a few female hardcore gamers, but very few, really. women in general don’t seem to be quite as monomaniacally into gaming, though they might be hardcore into something else, like anime, or SF, or fanfiction. or they grow out of it. so do many male gamers, but i know some who’re nearing their forties and are still at it. for the women i know it's more likely a phase.

but i've got a small sample size, and i've lost track of a lot of gamers i knew 20 years ago, and have no idea whether they are still as hardcore as ever. i certainly am not anymore, and i knew at the time that it wasn't what i was gonna do for the rest of my life.

Comments

[ceri]

Hard-core gaming women are out there. My friend Lisa Harney comes to mind as one such. But, well, see comments on this various subject in this post by Auntysarah.

Re: hardcore gaming

[eagle]

I suspect the massively prevalent sexism in most video games adds to the standard gender-based social conditioning to make it less likely that women will be part of the gaming culture to enough of a degree to be considered "hardcore." The primary target audience for video game manufacturers is still (despite the success of the Wii and some previous breakthroughs like the Sims) the 16-18-year-old teenage male, and the game design reflects that very heavily. Also, these days, hardcore gaming is mostly about multiplayer, and with multiplayer you get the rampant trash-talking sexism of the other players on top of the more subtle and probably more ignorable sexism of the world setup.

I suspect that this actually got significantly worse when console video games revolutionized the industry and the graphics changed drastically. It's harder to make Angband sexist, or other similar early games. It's a lot easier now that the characters are fully rendered, complete with skimpy clothing on all the women and lots of sexual innuendo. And the typical multiplayer on-line gamer is not drawing from the same social mix as, say, the early MU* culture was, in ways that I suspect make quite a few of those problems worse.

Most of the people I know who play multiplayer play only with close friends and still complain about the nastiness of typical on-line gaming behavior. It's like Usenet or the worst of free software culture, except considerably more virulent. Lots of people who seem to enjoy actively screwing over other people and being confrontational for the hell of it.

Re: hardcore gaming

[dragonwolf]

The severe lack of females is a technology thing, not just a gaming thing. Computer Science and similar majors (software development, game development, e-commerce, IT, networking, electronics, etc) are heavily male on every level. I think the highest female rate is in undergraduate college, where females are outnumbered by males in something like a 10:1 ratio, at best (I went to a technical college and there was a running joke about how women didn't exist in the school, because the male to female ratio was so high).

From what I've gathered, it has a lot to do with women being more apt (either through nature or nurture, or some combination thereof) to go more toward the "soft sciences" (psychology, sociology, etc) or what I'd consider "artistic sciences" (architecture) when in the science fields, as opposed to the heavy math and "hard science" world that is computers and electronics.

The gaming sector does indeed reflect this discrepancy (though one could argue that the entertainment industry as a whole is massively geared toward the 18-24 male demographic), though from what I've seen, the women who are heavy/hardcore gamers are pretty much desensitized to the testosterone fest that is most games that are on platforms other than the Wii. These are the type of women whose husbands only ever get "wife aggro" when he camps her in a game of UT2010 or wipes the raid with 5% to go on a progression boss in WoW. This is especially the case with women whose other hobbies and/or day job is also in male-heavy sectors (such as hard Sci-Fi, or a CompSci field). From what I've seen, it's a personality difference among women.

Therefore, you end up with a small portion of women who are into technology in general and an even smaller subset of female gamers.