Online Gaming and Gendering Invisible Bodies

Anyone who frequents or even casually plays online games are likely to be familiar with the stereotypes and vitriol surrounding the “girl gamer.” If she exists at all, which very often she does not, she is in your games and responsible for your team’s loss. She’s probably just a “casual” gamer who should stay out of the “big leagues.” She probably isn’t a real gamer at all.

Am I doing it right?

Of course, on the internet, and in particular in the forum of a game where you have maybe an hour to construct your gender to a group of strangers who will likely never know your face or body or even name, being a “girl gamer” is less about bodies and more about gendered expectations. Bodies certainly are involved with those expectations, though.

TW for slurs, mentions of casual binarism, mentions of homophobia

Being a female gamer is sort of like traversing a minefield in the middle of a war zone. If you go slow and try to be careful and sneaky, maybe you won’t get pinned as the woman you are. This could be fatal to your relationship with your team; once you step on a mine and they discover your gender, the inevitable explosion of insults, questions, and flirtatious advances may ruin the entire experience for you, or significantly impact how your team plays alongside you. Your team may throw you under the bus and blame every loss on you, or they may be dismissive, determining that of course the girl isn’t any good at this. Plus, once they discover the truth, they’re likely to bring your body into it. If you’re a girl gamer, you must be fat, or you’re “hot” and that makes it all okay that you’ve dared to appear online, as long as you’re willing to send pics of yourself to the men who demand it.

Boy gamers, shouldn’t you be repairing a car somewhere, not playing video games?

But then, let’s assume you successfully traverse the minefield. You didn’t drop any hints about your gender, and you avoided voice chat, knowing it would give you away. You did it! You are, as far as anyone else is concerned, anonymous and “male.” Be warned, though; you may still get sniped down by some trigger-happy soldier on the sidelines, determined to see femininity and homosexuality wherever they go. They may call you a bitch, a cunt, a whore, a fag, and all without ever knowing what your gender and sexuality are. These are the insults that prevail in the online gaming scene. If you’re defeated, then the enemy will taunt that they “raped” you. They may not know you, or your identifying gender, but they know how they see you, and it hits too close to home. The game ceases to be fun the more the taunting continues, and though this would apply to anyone who is frustrated by being misgendered and insulted, the knowledge that they are using your identity as an insult makes it all the worse.

Many games, particularly first person shooters where gendered rage and hate is so prevalant, do not offer a choice of whether your avatar within the game is male or female. They are male, no ifs, ands, or buts; they are rugged, uniform-clad, and oozing with testosterone. As a result, players are free to overlook the placeholder characters’ genders and see the gender of the player behind the mask. However, what happens when a game features a choice between male and female characters that act as avatars for players? In League of Legends, a team-based strategy game, the “champions” you can play as are characters within themselves, and you pick a champion based not on their gender but on their individual abilities. In World of Warcraft, the gender of your character can be picked at character creation, as is the case in most MMOs (massively multiplayer online games), and the difference is purely cosmetic. Interestingly enough, in these cases, the body behind the avatar is usually assumed to be male unless stated otherwise — or, if the avatar is female, then she will be called a she when the player begins to play poorly, regardless of the gender of the player.

Male until proven female or incapable.

In short, it’s almost impossible to escape the prejudice against female gamers. It’s little wonder that women and feminine-presenting individuals are rarely seen in competitive gaming scenes; they face such scrutiny that they may not stick with the game long enough to get deeply entrenched, and if they do, they are not likely to be recognized except as announcers and cosplayers, at which point they are still presumed to be posers or not very good at the game they are so involved with. There have been recent endeavors to reclaim the title of “gamer girl,” but it is met by considerable resistance and mockery from the (cis) male gaming community, and even from other women who have learned to distinguish themselves as “not like the other girls.” The only way to survive this boy’s club, after all, is to do as the men do.