Girl gamers; things just got real.
Girl gamers are rare and few on the internet and in real life but there are a few particular places where girl gamers gather to meet other girl gamers, on the internet of course, on websites dedicated to girl gamers and girls and gaming, redundancy makes my point come across louder.
Websites for girl gamers are not so different from ordinary gaming websites, the only thing different is that those websites have an abundance of X chromosome when compared to the other run of the mill game websites. When I looked at the three websites that Rob gave us to look at there really was nothing different in terms of conten, I was really surprised at first for some reason, I mean; this isn't a sexist thing or anything, I just didn't expect the websites to have such similarities in content. But it ends at similarities.
Though the content of each of the websites is similar the opinions are completely different of the reviewers. For example; one of the girl gamer websites I visited hosted a review of the newly released game “Crysis 2”, now I can say for a fact that all the reviews for this game I have seen for this game have been written by males and each one of them seemed to be bumming the shit out of this game, pardon my French. The reviewer for this game on www.girlgamer.com has given it a reasonably low mark praising mostly it's graphics and saying that in most other area's that it's lacking.
Well this surprised me, well it didn't because I have the same opinion, however I didn't think that the first girl gamer review I saw for this game would be a relatively negative one. Especially since every other review was praising nearly every aspect of this game. That was a little weird, almost as weird when I clicked on the websites community page and I saw that a member was featured and that member was male...
I think that was as far as I got with that though, eventually I went off to look at some of the other reviews on the site and there were some other particular things, for example; there were a lot of reviews for iPhone games, a facebook game and even flash games. I don't want to admit it but this is the first time I have seen some reviews for games like these; it makes me feel as if our sisters are more well versed in the gaming world than we men are which makes me feel like they could be good games designers, better than men maybe. It's just a shame that fewer girls work in the game industry I suppose.
This made me think back to the Vidiot article by Costikyan that I read earlier in the year. Costikyan referred to people who played Video games only to be Vidiots, he himself got this from some literacy professor or writer who said a similar thing about people who only get their writing knowledge from reading sci-fi novels as well as writing only sci-fi.
If I'm being honest flash games, iPhone games and Facebook games would not keep my attention enough to warrant me reading a review for the latest flash game, and honestly other male gamers probably wouldn't either. We're all too busy playing Call of Duty or some other triple A game released recently, and even if we do play iPhone games, flash games or Facebook games; we don't dwell on the too much. I guess you could say that we are Vidiots(Constupid?(Console + Stupid?)) in some way or another?
That's the thing I seem to admire about girl gamers, in a way they are a lot more committed to gaming than I am, or so it seems.
As for the website, www.girlgamers.com, it is almost the run of the mill website for gamers, the only difference is that the community is mostly female and the content in games varies across a range of different types of games for different platforms rather than only the “Hardcore” gaming platforms such as the Xbox 360, PS3, DS and PSP the two handheld consoles being the black sheep and questionable about whether they are hardcore or not.
This is part 1 of 2. I'll be uploading the second part after I finish it.
http://www.girlgamer.com/games/article/1264/ (not sure if I should put this in the bibliography or not, I'll just put it ABOVE it just in case)
Bibliography;
-Greg Costikyan, “Don’t Be a Vidiot”, 1998, http://www.costik.com/vidiot.html.
