Girl gamer or just gamer?

I felt like I wanted to talk about a subject that really matters to me. You know what a game is right? At least I assume you have played some sort of game whether it was candy crush or Monopoly with the family, so you have a somewhat idea. While growing up I took a liking to games. I found games like Diablo, Unreal, Tibia, and I loved playing on our Sega Mega drive that grandpa got us. There was nothing wrong with that and me and my sister played for hours trying to defeat bosses and levels. But all of a sudden things changed and I was on my own when it came to playing games. No girl in my class played  any digital games and it was suddenly just a “guys thing”. So I hung out with the guys and tried to learn Counterstrike and wanted to go to this “Dreamhack” (it is a HUGE lan party with things like live music and game tournaments in Sweden) that I had heard about. But the guys told me that I could not go with them because then I would be considered being a “Lan whore” by people. And I got really confused because I had never dressed in a particularly challenging way that could be considered “whore-ish” or or acted in such a way. I had baggy jeans and t-shirts at the time so I basically dressed like the guys. Why would I get that stamp? And they said that it did not matter because that was just the way it was. So I ended up never going and it felt so unfair. So as the years went by I still never visited a place like Dreamhack or any other lan for that matter.
I started playing online pvp games and rpgs on my own. Living in a fantasy world and doing things I could only dream of in reality was, and still is, so appealing.  Later on I started streaming for fun and to play with other people that I met through the stream and quickly noticed that almost everyone expected me to be some sort of attention seeking shallow person trying to use my looks (by this I simply mean being a girl) to get viewers. So I had to spend a lot of time dealing with trolls and guys asking me why I did not show my cleavage, why was I dressed in this “un-girlie” way and a lot more things about my looks. In some games like “Garry s Mod” players can talk to one another while playing.
I soon learned to not say anything while playing because that made some guys go sort of insane when they heard that I was a girl. One guy started following me around saying how he wanted to lay me down on a table and do sexual things to me and kept harassing me until I had to leave the game because of him. I just wanted to play games and just be considered a fellow gamer. “Girl gamer” suddenly left a bad taste in my mouth. Why not just a gamer like everyone else? What does my gender got to do with me as a player? A gaming world is actually the one mutual place where the physical differences between men and women does not exist.

So I have a question. Why are not more girls playing games? I guess the things I have encountered while playing kind of answerers that question. But how did it become a “guys thing” in the first place? I asked one of my girl friends that I know does not play any games how come. She did not think of it, it was just not a thing she had ever thought about. She told me that her boyfriend only have games like “Fifa” and other sport games which does not seem that appealing since she does not like sports and I get that. But there are a million other genres and different types of games! So why have not she tried any of them? And now it has grown into this thing where girls have become a target in the gaming world. Unless the game is about cooking and cleaning or taking care of babies, because that is exactly what a girl would like to play after a day of taking care of the house and her kids? I am not so convinced. I think everyone deserves to play a hero and save the world. Preferably without remarks like “is your computer in the kitchen? hhehe”.

We are a slowly rising number in the industry and I hope that the mindset from those guys harassing us will change along with it. I would like to be just a gamer. Not a gamer girl.

About Nayomi Arvell

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