Video games are a boy thing, my sister explains to me. I feel like its a known fact. GameStop is a boy store. The commercials are for boys. Its just something everyone knows.
My sister is 17. She runs a One Direction fan Twitter with 10,000 followers. She plans to major in fashion marketing. Shes a cheerleader. She is as close as anyone can get to what gamings sweaty fever dreams envision, desire, and shame as "Girl."
Like me, she knows from personal experience that girls play video games, and would hotly defend it if challenged. But a second tenet holds sway, as contrary as it is simultaneous: video games are for boys. The video games weve played dont count. Theyre concessions, scraps, snatches at the lucrative attention of little girls. It's not that my sister and I dont like real games; it's that the games we like arent real.
I ask about Style Savvy, Cooking Mama, Super Princess Peachgames she played without fanfare, without self-doubt, surrounded by torn-out Tiger Beat posters. Werent those fun? Didnt she spend hours with friends, swapping Nintendogs? Doesnt she remember the giggly hours she devoted to Club Penguin?
Oh yeah, those were fun, she says. I dont know. Maybe I didnt grow out of video games. Maybe video games just didnt grow up with me.
It would be easy to cast my sister and I as opposites. I received a book of essays on The Scarlet Letter for my 16th birthday. She received Our Moment, the One Direction branded fragrance. I went to a college where I devoted myself to post-war politics and anime screenings. She dreams of a higher education experience full of tailgating and adorably slouched cardigans. A teen movie would have a field day: she, the blue-eyed beauty in a LOVE PINK hoodie, blinking blankly as she holds an Xbox controller upside down. I, the frizz-headed harpy, explaining that my half-elf duchess of darkness uses water spells, not fire.
But I nod in agreement. Yeah. Same.
I have a Steam account. I have a favorite Soul Calibur title. But fundamentally, we feel the same: not gamers, not welcome, and not interested in most of what we see at GameStop. Those years we spent swapping DS cartridges were, for the both of us, our only experience of games as uncomplicated fun. Then we grew up, and an avalanche of qualifiers buried us.
Were not gamers. We dont play real games. We should stay out. My proximity to nerdhood, her proximity to the mainstreamneither matters. Video games did not grow up with us; video games did not grow up for us.
http://boingboing.net/2015/08/08/no-girl-wins-three-ways-women.html
For me, I first noticed this phenomenon first with my little cousin, who is about ten years younger than me and thus fairly easy to keep track of her gaming habits, which have begun to change as she reaches adolescence - not because she doesn't enjoy games anymore, but because she feels like she shouldn't. I've also noticed this with an Australian publicly-funded videogame show, Good Game, which has a Kids event called Spawn Point. Spawn Point audiences are regularly about 50/50 in terms of gender. Good Game audiences are, well, not.
Is there a solution? Is this an ouroboros situation of marketing selling to audiences who buy who inspire more marketing to those audiences?
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