The Gaming Sisterhood

Serious attempts will be made to not write another version of “women are just as good at gaming as any man”! These versions often seem to be supported by examples of unpleasant behaviour or generic sexism on the part of men. It struck me that I’ve not read many which highlight the less pleasant characteristics I know us lovely ladies can manage.

Now I genuinely don’t believe that on average women are as good at most games as men. Please note the use of the word “average”, it would take forever to go through every single game and try and statistically work out who is better at what. Firstly the results are biased from the off – games are going to be tailored for the biggest market sector. This means designing levels or game mechanics for the gender which loves: hunting, challenge, winning, big guns, bigger guns, danger and stats. Secondly, due to this having been the case for many years it’s only recently become normal for a woman not to be gawped at when she confesses to enjoying a few rounds of Left4Dead of an evening.

It’s hard to play these games as well as the menfolk. I played Eve Online for over a year back in 2005 when the skill trees made some kind of sense and you didn’t need a degree in advanced mathematics to work out which ship would kick which other ships’ arse. I had the T2 Heavy Laser Beam skill at max and pootled about in 0.0 hoping no one would kill me. Going back earlier than that I completed Wolfenstein 3D but hated it every time I had to kill a guard dog. Nowadays I often sit down with my family and spend a few hours playing Team Fortress 2 or this last week World of Tanks. I enjoy these games, I’m just not as good at them as men.

I have an excuse though and it’s a good one. Those men types have better spatial awareness. Think of a woman trying to read a map, we’re alright at it but it’s not a top skill. I get exceptionally huffy when I can’t do something but will admit defeat nine times out of ten when trying to describe where something is. Watch a woman playing something like WoW for a bit, I can almost guarantee that when she wants to look at something to her right she’ll turn her whole avatar in that direction. Men will just turn the camera. It took me a long time to unlearn that habit, believe me. Even jumping in the right place can be a bit of a struggle. If you’re a little old school you might remember AQ20 and the bit of the raid where you have to jump down in to a small pond with Buru the Gorger. Without fail there’d be a little pile of corpses at the bottom where we’d missed the water. I’m not saying we can’t be good at the more male orientated game genres. Just that it’s likely to be a greater challenge.

Switch genres of game or different roles within a game and it’s another matter. Give me a healing class or some other support role where I can be positioned back from the action and suddenly I’m less full of fail. I sincerely believe this is because women are designed to watch over people, use our superior peripheral vision and all that science stuff. We can multitask far more efficiently. Any healer on a game like WoW who’s experienced the “Whack a Mole” style of Healbot or Grid would hopefully agree you need to be able to watch 5+ health bars for a variety of different problems AND avoid standing in greenpurpleredorange goo AND try not to run out of mana AND try to decide who to let die first in the event of it all going horribly wrong.

It’s not just gaming skills where our differences are marked. MMO’s bought in a whole new set of things to think about when disparaging one gender or the other. Social skills… or the lack of them.

Guilds are usually where it all goes down. Or corporations, kinships and whatevers. A group of people, usually led by one top dog and then several smaller dogs. I’ve almost always played within guilds and have rarely seen one without tears and tantrums for some reason. Women like running things, it’s no secret, we’re generally the more bossy gender. By contrast the men generally seem to be less fussed about being in charge of guilds and prefer to be left to exploring some stupid dwarf airport on the top of a mountain.

This isn’t to say they never want to run guilds. Generally speaking the business world is very much a male led one so it doesn’t seem to follow that they’d shirk this drive for leadership for the sake of a quiet life. My take on this? Games are to experience what you don’t necessarily have in real life. Be that a sparkly flying mount, a myriad of spells to cast or the chance to lead people. I can’t imagine many things worse than getting home from a day of dealing with minions in the office only to log on and have people start immediately complaining about whatever they don’t think is fair.

This balance seems to work out quite nicely at least, until there are several women in charge. My worst experience of the ladycrazy was in a WoW guild with a female GM and then a further three female officers including myself. Nothing could be decided on without an extended and usually snippy discussion on the forum or in /officer and more often than not our partners (also officers) would get dragged into things and have to mediate. This was definitely not a case of sisterhood being about love and support.

I think it’s fair to weigh up the snarkiness of women gamers against the sexism of the male gamers. Neither are attractive qualities in people, neither are prevalent in most games I’ve played as part of a community. Poor attitudes are far more an individual issue and less of a gender issue. Learn to work as a team, it’s much less stressful.

This opinion piece is by our newest contributor, Pippa Hall. Now in her early thirties, Pippa began honing her skills in the mid-eighties, when games were tough and being a frog was likely to end badly. Since then, she’s plinked and blipped through nearly every major gaming platform that’s been along. These days Pippa tends to play MMOs when she’s feeling nurturing, online FPS when she wants to kill somebody and the Wii when she wants to be patronised about her weight. You can find Pippa on Twitter and Raptr.

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