Do you think gamers of the female gender are a new phenomenon? If you said yes you have a lot to learn. Ever since last year when I decided to start gaming online via Xbox LIVE I’ve heard all sorts of things from guys while playing. When I first got my 360 I did a small bit of online gaming but then I stopped because of feeling like an outsider. When the COD4 beta came out I started up again with gaming on the 360 online. While I met about a quarter of the people now on my friend’s list during the beta, I met even more jerks who think gaming is a male only activity and that females shouldn’t be allowed to pick up a controller.
Girls have been gaming since the beginning of the video gaming timeline, but like with comic books before it, boys have felt that video games are only for guys. We are in a time now where hobbies and jobs are not gender specific, and it’s now time that guys realized that. My article is not about revolution, but rather knowledge. Girls are not newcomers to gaming as I have been a gamer since I was two years old and I stole my dad’s original Game Boy, which was back in 1991, you do the math. After that I moved onto consoles, and following that the rest is history.
Females are joining the gaming community more and more, whether it’s as a character or player.
I’m not the only one that has had to put up with guys being jerks about a girl playing games. I’ve read many horror stories from my fellow GamerchiX, both online and surprisingly offline. One instance involved a gaming store. She was often teased and harassed by both employees and other customers for being a girl in a video game store. She eventually had to stop going to that store.
At last count there were 4176 members of GamerchiX. Many more are left unaccounted for on Xbox LIVE, and the numbers on other consoles are unknown to me at the time. I expect that the population of female gamers who are a part of GamerchiX is only a fraction of the total of the multi-million members of Xbox LIVE. Many girls are afraid to use their mic on Xbox LIVE, so it’s hard to pinpoint an exact number of girls who are gaming.
Face it everyone, girls are just as much a part of the gaming community as guys. Yes there are some girls who will flaunt it and do inappropriate things, but the majority of us just want to play the game and have fun. So don’t stereotype girl gamers as being fat, or ugly, no one likes stereotypes. If guy gamers don’t like being stereotyped as fat and greasy, then why stereotype your female gaming counterparts?
