Women in gaming, from a transwoman

I just wanted to draw attention to a post over at GeekFeminism.org that talks about how yes, there are women in gaming.  And, there are transwomen too!  I thought there were some interesting points in this blog post.

Role-playing games were the best, of course. Back when I was struggling with my identity and wasn’t generally able to be myself an immersive world with only a computer for company and nobody to tell me that I couldn’t be who I wanted to be was ideal. I suspect most people feel the allure of getting to be someone else for a while, but for transfolk such as myself it’s a particularly strong one.

I’ve blogged before about how virtual worlds can mean so much more than slaying monsters and gaining levels.  Here’s another testament to that.

Male characters get tough leather or iron armour whereas female characters wind up in a skimpy piece of cloth that wouldn’t keep you from catching a death of cold, let alone serve as protection against incoming arrows or fireballs.This leads to a lot of male players creating female characters for no reason other than to ogle their pixelated behinds. I’ve even seen guides to in-game trading that explicitly recommend that the player creates a female character to get extra trade, and that they should pretend to be female and helpless to make other players ore willing to trade with them. The author of this particular document didn’t seem to realise either that some of the players might actually be female or the females are not generally helpless and pathetic.

I always hate reading that in guides, for surely.

Tami Baribeau is the Associate Producer for Metaplace, Inc, currently working on Island Life.  She is also the Lead Editor of feminist gaming blog The Border House, and the National Facebook Games Examiner for Examiner.com.  She can be reached on Twitter or by email.

Tagged as: feminism, gamers, gender, transgender