I haven't touched much on gaming in these blogs, but the time has come.
I play a lot of video games. Living with chronic pain and a body that likes to keel over on a whim, button-pressing became a natural pastime. I've always played something, starting with Quake and Half-Life back in the day, but since my downtime has increased, so has my game time. And for the entirety of that lifetime of gaming, I have found myself asking questions like "Why can't I be a girl in this game?" and "Do I really have to rescue another princess? Ugg*."
There has been a global conversation in the last few years about how fundamentally sily this is. From Anita Sarkeesian's Feminist Frequency videos to the trash fire that was GamerGate, women's fight for some armrest space in the gaming chairs has been getting more aggressive. More power to us, I say.
I have my own little aspect of this mission. It evolved out of years of frustration, and to some, it probably seems like a silly little nothing. But I have a rule now.
If I have to be a dude, I will not buy your game. End of story.
In games where assembling a team is part of the mechanic, I put girls up front. This started around the time that I made Fran the party leader in Final Fantasy XII, even though she's an archer. I play games to live the fantasy. It is not my fantasy to be a dude.
I would love to be a rabbit archer, though.
(Much as I love her, Fran does arguably border on another problem for women in games: The hypersexualization of female characters. But that's a blog for another day.)
In mobile games, I've been trying to make teams of all female characters. In each new world, I start my own guild and call it Sheroes, after the longstanding forums founded by Tamora Pierce.
Go ahead. Cry "reverse sexism." Then let's talk about how it's nearly impossible to make an all-girl team, whereas an all-male team is usually default and I have to fight the game every step of the way to scrape for female characters. I started a new game today. Five levels in, let me show you the team that's available to me.
For those of you keeping score at home, that's two dudes and a dog.
I continue the search for fantasy-based games that let me build teams of kickass ladies who exist as more than teenage boy bait. If you've got any suggestions, please leave them in the comments. In the meantime, I'll keep working on my coding skills so that maybe someday I can make my own.
*Princess Ugg is, incidentally, a pretty great comic. Find it here. In the same vein, I also recommend Princeless.