My breath catches and my lungs squeeze as my mouse hovers over the voice comms button. It was the first multiplayer video game I had ever played. I was good at it, so why did I feel so nervous about talking to other players? That feeling and that question for something I enjoyed so much was exactly what drove me into the experiment you’ve just seen.

But, to take a step back and truly understand why I did what I did for my projects, you have to understand that video games have been a part of my life for a very long time. My parents were the ones who introduced me to video games by gifting me a GameBoy on my (age) birthday. Since then, I have, albeit a little embarrassed to say so, been an avid gamer. From Super Mario and Kirby’s Epic Yarn to Super Smash Bros and The Witcher, PBS kid’s Martha speaks browser games to Overwatch and Divinity Original Sin 2, I played and played and enjoyed every second of it. To me, video games aren’t just an escape from my daily stressors, they have been fuel for so much of my creativity and imagination. I love to spend time dreaming about fantasy worlds, creating stories in my mind and characters to draw. Video games offered me these fantastical worlds, emotionally taxing stories, and lovable characters. I experienced everything I loved in books in a visual and immersive aspect.

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Yet, as I grew older, I felt a separation from video games. I felt like, as sappy as it is to say, I didn’t belong. These emotions began internally and it took a long time for me to actively acknowledge what I was feeling.

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What I, and many other female gamers have felt, is the prevalent sexism in the gaming community and industry. We have been excluded from games and other players. If I were to ask you what the first image that comes to mind when I say ‘gamer’, what would it be? Is it, perhaps, a white teenage boy sitting on a couch with a headset on and a controller in his hands? This certainly is the image that comes to the gaming industry’s mind. Have you ever noticed that in most games, the main character is a white male? Have you also, by chance, noticed that most side characters in video games are women? And women with an incredible amount of variation in female character design? For example, they include so many different body types for women, like the hourglass figure, and, uh. That’s about it, right? Who do you think gaming companies are catering towards? It’s heterosexual males, of course. The male gaze is ever so present in their game designs and purpose. I have seen, through my many years of gaming, female characters being used exclusively as eye-candy, brothels for male leads, and damsels in distress for guys to be a hero for. The more I looked for equal representation (and I say equal, so I want sexy guy characters and sexy girl characters), the more I realize it’s not there. 

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I remember just getting angry when I realized this. I loved video games. A lot of women love video games. So why are we never included as the intended audience? Well, these questions actually led me into a research project and essay for a previous class (and laid the groundwork and inspiration for the experiments I will get into in a little bit). The answer I discovered for my questions felt like an ‘ah-ha’ moment– like I was reading something I had always felt but could never put into words. What I found was that the ‘gamer’ stereotype has caused a lot of issues for women, including myself. For example, I didn’t wear my identity as a gamer publicly for a while because of the immense contradictions it had with my identity as a woman. What would they think if they saw I was good at games? Would they assume I just spend the whole day in front of the screen playing video games? Would they lump me in with the notoriously toxic community of first-person shooters if they learned I played them? I couldn’t have any of that! According to society, I must be polite, proper, and dependable as a ‘woman’. Of course, remaining hidden like this does no good, as gaming industry’s continue to cater exclusively to white, heterosexual men when the only voice they hear is theirs.

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But I knew this wasn’t the only reason why I kept this part of my identity hidden. I was scared–scared of all the things I had heard from friends and others online about how men react to hearing a woman’s voice in a game. I‘ve heard stories of women being threatened with rape, being told to die, and have lewd comments spewed their way. I thought I was probably overreacting, but after doing some hard research, I breathed a sigh of relief. I was just glad that I wasn’t the only woman who felt scared to use voice communication in video games, and I definitely wasn’t overreacting. 

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Because, as it turns out, women are three times more likely to be targeted for sexual harassment on games than men after revealing they are a woman and only 28% of women use voice communication compared to 71% of men (cite source). As mentioned before, I wrote a whole essay on all of these issues and the effects the fetishism of the term ‘gamer’ has had on women, and if you would like more information, analysis, and data, you can find the essay in the ‘Fetishizing Gamers’ tab.

Anyway, when it came time to choose a previous work of writing to take to new genres for this class, I knew it had to be my gaming essay. I wanted to do something for an issue I could only talk about. In trying to figure out how I could help the situation, I wondered what guys thought of the issue, since I knew a lot of women felt the same way I did about gaming. Let me tell you, I think the worst part about this project was seeing what guys thought. I read so many social media posts where guys were totally against having male characters sexualized and couldn’t even fathom why women would have a problem with being hypersexualized. Are they blind? I slapped my forehead because of course they are blind. They live in a world where white, heterosexual males are the powerhouse compared to all other types of people. They are the important ones, they are the patriarchy. So when have they ever faced a problem a minority, like women for example, face?

 

These questions were the inspiration for my first experiment where I created an artbook for a non-existent game in a world where white, heterosexual males were the minority and women were the majority. In this artbook,  I applied the ‘female’ treatment to male characters and their designs to communicate the sexism/misogyny in video games and their designs. The artbook is completely fake, but I try to make it look like a believable artbook for some game out there. I wanted to try and create an entire game and its world where I can mirror the many issues women face in today's world. Basically, I was hoping to create a matriarchal society that would mirror the world where my artbook comes from, much like how video games today mirror many aspects of our society. In the end, I really wanted to find a way to raise consciousness of issues like women in gaming to all communities, especially the ones perpetuating the harmful behavior. By disguising the book as a ‘regular’ artbook, there is a chance my intended audience will view the book, perhaps originally looking for nice art, only to read a message they have either ignored, not acknowledged, or failed to properly understand.

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After my first experiment, I still felt like I wanted to see how many ways a gender-reversal could portray an issue to a privileged group. So, for my second experiment, I wrote a gender-reversal short story about the sexual harassment women face everyday when they use voice communications in video games. Why voice-comms, you ask? Because experiences of women using voice-comms in games are absolutely horrendous and sexist, as you saw in the statistics before. I thought that when you read a story, you are actually put into someone else's shoes–you experience an event though their eyes exclusively, so perhaps if men were put in a situation where the main character they were following (who was relatable in that he was a man) was experiencing sexual harassment on accounts that they were male, the reader might have an eye-opening moment where they can learn to empathize with the female gaming community. I mean, my motto is that books and stories are the best teachers of empathy, so I thought they could raise awareness in the male gaming community. 

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In the end, my greatest hope from these experiments was to convey information, statistics, and emotions in a manner that could change the way people think and see issues they are not the victims of.