I’m a gamer first and a girl second

In case anyone is unaware, I am a gamer, I have been gaming since I was a child. Gaming has practically taken over my life. I game in every genre from RPGs to Sports Games, from First Person Shooters to the Party Plays and I do it on every console I can get my hands on. Yet, every time I get on Black Ops there’s always one person who is shocked to find out that they are playing with girls, see I play with my two best female friends and we’ve had people back out because of it. Fortunately I haven’t had much issues in real life when I’m nerding out.

See despite that fact that it’s 2014 and more and more studies are showing a huge increase in the number of female gamers in society,(http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2014.pdf)  the nerd culture is still hard pressed to accept us. At cons, females can be harassed about the knowledge in geekdom or harassed about their attire. No one comes down on a guy for wearing a DC shirt and no googly eyes and judgment is passed on a dude who isn’t wearing a shirt and it’s not just the fans. It’s companies too. How often do you see commercials for action figures or shooter games with a female in it? Cartoon Network canceled ‘Young Justice’ because most of it’s viewers were female and “females don’t buy action figures”, well because you don’t sell to them. Ubisoft claimed it was too hard to include female characters in the multiplayer mode in Assassin’s Creed Unity, but they’ve shown that they’ve had plenty of models to choose from.

Media representation is important, I know some people don’t think so or don’t care, but there are people out who do, it’s nice to be able to see yourself in what you play and what you watch and with the massive diversity in the world, shouldn’t our art reflect that?

We leave you with this, from a comic book perspective. Think before you speak, this goes for gamer and geek guys.