Aliens in the Desert

“Father, your death is avenged.
Now that I have destroyed Bison,
His empire will surely collapse.
Finally, you can rest in peace…
And I can get back to being a young single girl.”
~Chun-Li

It’s hard being a woman these days. I’m sure its hard being a man too for different reasons, but since I can only speak to my own experience, let’s focus on me.

Each generation faces its own challenges. For the modern female, things are complicated. We have many impulses pulling us in contradictory and confusing directions. Feministic traditions passed down from our mothers clash with more deeply-entrenched social traditions and just plain survival in our very real and contemporary worlds. We are expected to simulataneously not care how people think we look, dress for success, and emulate our favorite magazine ads. We are to be morally above consumerism, make as much money as our male counterparts and be savvy with how we save it, and treat ourselves to whatever nice things we want because we work hard and deserve it. And wait, is it motherhood or career that’s more “in” this year? Speaking of that, which part of cleaning, cooking, raising kids, participating in the community and working are we supposed to be taking care of, what part given to our spouse’s care, and which forgotten all together? It’s enough to make my hip, professional, low matenance and thouroghly conditioned hair cut stand on end.

All these confusing impulses rear their heads when it comes to gaming as well. If you are a female gamer, you are consistently expected to represent your entire gender whenever you speak on the subject of games. It’s not acceptable to simply like or dislike something. You are questioned and challenged, poked and prodded by those who want to call “foul” at any signs of percieved hypocrisy or by those seeking to better dissect and examine the nature of the elusive female market.

Case in point: During summer break from graduate school, a couple of male colleagues and I were waiting for BART (our city to city train system). At the station was a poster for the movie Charlie’s Angels 2. I loved the first movie and was grinning from ear to ear about seeing the up-coming flick. One of the boys turned on me suddenly — a predatory menace in his eyes, his sharp teeth bared in challenge — and demanded to know why the obvious female exploitation in Charlie’s Angels was acceptable to me whereas the obvious female exploitation in the Dead or Alive franchise wasn’t. I found myself startled and confused, frozen like a prey animal that had no place to run and could only sit still and cling to the desperate hope that they hadn’t actually been seen. Here I was, having fun hanging out with a couple of my friends for the day when suddenly I was expected to spontaneously leap up on my pink sequined soap box and defend the rights of women everywhere to enjoy cheesy cinima wherein hot vixens beat up on bad guys.

It’s not that I don’t care about women’s issues when it comes to gaming. I do, deeply and passionately. It’s just that I feel that sometimes we are missing out on the true promise of feminism. The way feminism is applied to society often seems to me to be just changing one set of social expectations, codes and rules for another. But isn’t the true point of feminism the hope that we can defeat all gender bias so we can finally be whatever we really want to be? So we can, in the end, be ourselves?

I recently had the honor to be interviewed by the fabulous gals of Gameinatrix’s Gamer Girl podcast. I had an absolutely terrific time talking with these girls who played and loved games, but at the same time were just chatty and comfortable being themselves. Having always had mostly male friends who played digital gamesin addition to coming from an academic background where games are always serious, I found their attitudes to be surprising and refreshing. Being a part of their podcast brought to my mind visions of playing host to a night of cosmopolitans, Sex in the City and gossip about the latest happenings in our respective Animal Crossing towns. The serious, academic, industry female side of me frowned sternly at these fantasies even while my bubbly girly girl side squealed with joy. And I realized that in certain company, the little girly girl inside me is consistently forced into the nail-lined closet while my dour “responsibility to the female race” side shuts and locks the door. And then I thought: “how lame is that?”

It doesn’t matter what kinds of games I play, that I suck at first person shooters or that I think the sex mini-game in God of War is highly amusing and brilliant. I am not just a “girl gamer”. I am a person with all my own little idiosyncrisies. I will continue to think, talk and write about female gaming issues because they affect me, they affect other women I know, and I care. But don’t ever mistake me for a multitude, or judge me for not living up to some manufactured standard of female solidarity. If you want to know how “the female market” thinks, you’d better damn well be prepared to ask more than one of us, and you’d better be resigned to the fact that you will never make every one of us happy. As the saying goes “you will never please all of the people all of the time”. And deep down, underneath our lovely female exteriors, we’re really all just people.

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