Loud And Proud: Why You Should Talk About Gaming
Today is Video Game Day! WHAT! WHAT!
(Ok, soz. That was a little violent)
What with today being Video Game Day, and being both a passionate gamer and female myself, I wanted to talk a little about why it’s important for ALL types of gamers to be more vocal about their love of gaming. Why you might ask? WELL LET ME TELL YOU!
This is Anita Sarkeesian. She’s ridiculously smart and keeps a brilliant blog you should check out called Feminist Frequency.
Anita launched a Kickstarter campaign back in May to raise funds to produce a web documentary series looking at female stereotypes in video games. So far so good, right? Wrong. Immediately after the launch of her kickstarter, Anita was attacked by a crazy horde of trolls – she was threatened, harrassed, bullied and her wiki page was hacked because a few dimwitted humans were threatened by a female committing to do research on harmfull themes in gaming. All she was trying to do was bring awareness to make the space more inclusive!
For a more civilized retelling of the incident let’s watch ILL DOCTRINE:
All of this brings me to my point, which you can probably guess from the headline is about TALKING. Not the sort of talking internet trolls like to do, but the infinitely more valuable kind: the-sharing-the-things-you-LOVE kind of talking. The more we – not just girls, but EVERYONE who likes to play video games – talk about the games we love and the ones we don’t, the more games will evolve to better represent ALL OF US! Why would fat-cat gaming companies even WANT to better represent us you ask? Because we give them our $$DOLLAH DOLLAH BILLZ$$ – and the more vocal we are as a consumer group – the more diverse game characters and narratives become.
OK, before I go, and in keeping with the theme of talking and sharing, I’m going to tell you about two of my favorite games.
MY FIRST LOVE: STREET FIGHTER II (you can play Street Fighter IV on your iPhone, it’s ay-may-zing). This was the first game I remember a female being someone you could actually play, not someone you were just meant to rescue. CHUN LI FOREVER!
MY CURRENT LOVE: MASS EFFECT (this is a trilogy and each one is worth playing!). I love that you can not just play as either gender, you can also choose every minute detail of your appearance right down to the width of your nose! This game is A MEGA SPACE ODDESSY, so if you like space (who doesn’t), fighting evil aliens, falling in love with awesome aliens, and driving across planets in search of monkey colonies – HIT THIS UP.
So don’t be shy – tell a pal about Nyan.Cat or WoW (like our pal LIGHTS did!) – more importantly tell US WHAT GAMES YOU LOVE!
