I’m a woman and a gamer. To be more specific, I am a woman who is a mother and a Christian, who is also a gamer and who currently works for a game. Hah! Beat that, Ms. Pettigrew! =)
In podcast 30 for my company, Sony Online Entertainment, our Director of Global Community Relations Alan Crosby asked what my thoughts were on women in games and in the gaming industry. SOE is making women in games a top priority these days, both in initiating dialog with media about the importance of their contributions and in offering scholarships to students who believe they’ve got something to offer. There wasn’t enough time to delve deeply into my stream of consciousness on those topics, so here’s the version that went through my head as I was gleaning snippets to answer his queries.
On the games that I play or have played:
I am an MMO junkie. To date the list includes:
- EverQuest
- EverQuest II
- World of Warcraft
- Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided (pre- and post-NGE)
- City of Heroes
- City of Villians
- Dungeons & Dragons Online
- Horizons
- Eve Online
- Lord of the Rings Online: The Shadow of Angmar
- Dark Age of Camelot
- Earth and Beyond
- Guild Wars
- Lineage II
- Second Life
- GemStone III/IV
- DragonRealms
- Hundred Years War
- Pirates of the Burning Sea
- Ultima Online
It’s not uncommon for me to have 5-6 open subs in any given month. Variety is a very good thing! But don’t expect most of my characters to be high level or systems-knowledgeable. I play at a very relaxed pace and only when there’s nothing better to do with my time.
Many people have asked why I prefer MMOs to console games. The answer is extremely simple: games provide an interesting cross section of people to study in a controlled setting. It’s social voyeurism that can be had in the comfort of your own home and it actually serves a purpose from a development standpoint. So when you’re saying stupid things in general chat or basically making an asz of yourself in any way, shape, or form, just know that someone like me is taking notes. You are, after all, a part of the target demographic…and I’m targeting you, lab rat! =)
My gaming roots go all the way back to 1976, the year my uncle brought home a machine with a game on it called Pong. As for online games, I’ve been in or around the industry for the past 16 years. While I’m a die hard roleplayer I do recognize that roleplaying has changed quite a bit since those very early days of pay-per-hour bulletin boards and baud rates lower than your shoe size. For one thing, MORPGs became MMORPGs. Vastly different interpretations of roleplay converged on the scene at the same time that non-roleplayers began to make up a goodly amount of the audience. Games went from per-hour fees to flat monthly subs that attracted much younger players who could suddenly afford to indulge every spare moment, and player versus player evolved into an acceptable form of relaxation. Finally, the hardware became more sophisticated, allowing a massive pipeline of data that included graphics and music to pass from a server to your personal computer at lightning (sorta) speed.
Before this, I had been a fan of arcade games for over a decade. I owned the first Nintendo home system in my neighborhood. When I wasn’t haunting a software shop looking for the perfect VGA cards (that bundled themselves with cool games like Wolfenstein and Warcraft), I was in neighborhood arcades trying to beat the best scores at Galaga and Joust. How many paychecks did I squander? Let’s not go there…
On being a woman who plays games:
I’m extremely gratified that women openly admit to playing MMOs. There’s always been quite a few of us but we cowered behind the anonymity of the internet, loving the games but not wanting to be anyone’s femme fatale…or worse, the guild seamstress. It just made things much less complicated if we were considered one of the guys. As Ventrilo and Teamspeak grew in popularity there wasn’t much we could do to keep to the corners. We sound like women. And each year, as we fearlessly don headsets with mics, we become less “oh, wow, you really are a chick,” and more “hey, wanna log your assassin in for the raid?”
All of this leads to a point I didn’t make in the podcast, which is that women are not an aberration in online games – we never have been! Some of us are guild leaders, some of us are deadly PvPers, some of us are explorers, some of us are tradeskillers…or all of these things…but we are and always have been legion, and we’re in ur gamz, wtfkthxbbqing ur butts.
One angle that I think about often is my own daughter’s forays into the online universe. She’s at the age now where MMOs are more appealing than text-based sites, where LOTRO is just as viable a pastime as Club Penguin. She’s played WoW with me, dabbled in SWG, had some fun in EQII. Her socialization as a tweenager in online games is wildly different than a male of the same age, so where a boy’s parents may not feel the need to ride shotgun during every login, I think a girl’s parents are as protective as I am, making sure the profanity filter is on and the /tells are strictly PG. It’s a little bit of a double standard. I’m fine as an adult woman playing in the online world but I’m not as sure that my kid is fine. Her place isn’t etched as clearly and it can lead to some alien encounters. For instance, I had to ban us both from playing one game after she called me a “freekin’ haxor,” which is the same thing a guildmate had called me in his drunken stupor the week before. If she were my son I might not have reacted as badly. But she’s my daughter, so…by my calculations her time out should end on the date of her twenty-first birthday.
On women in the gaming industry:
The industry is just that – an industry. Beyond development teams there are scores of positions to be filled. We’ve got female attorneys, accountants, human resource managers and agents, facilities coordinators, platform and cross-platform technicians, marketing and public relations gurus, event planners, and even security personnel. Working in games isn’t necessarily working on games; the business side of the industry is a very suitable place to settle in. So don’t think that you need to know how to put sparkles on a shield or how to calibrate a year’s worth of new weapons and armor. Take what you already know and fill the need at a gaming company! All the perks, very little mandatory crunch time =)
Now here’s the tricky part: I cannot promise that it will be without pitfalls. Games are, by and large, run by men. Changing that culture is a challenge but by no means a unique one. Women have been fighting glass ceilings in every industry for decades. This one will take a little more time, that’s all. Bwahaha. Haha. Hah!
Ok, I’m having too much fun. But I think that about wraps things up, don’t you? If you’ve stopped by and have something to add, feel free to do so! I’m off to grab a cup of tea before heading into EverQuest II. See you in V.P.!!1!
