#SERIOUSLY HOW HAVE YOU NOT HEARD ABOUT ANY OF THIS BEFORE YOU SELF-PROCLAIMED LIFE-LONG GAMERS?!?!

[red-queen-on-the-heathen-throne]

This isn’t new, stop pretending that it is!

So someone recently posted an article in a GW2 Facebook group that discussed the results of a non-representative survey in a female-only gaming group about “what female gamers want from their games”. The results were a pretty average mix of general gaming things like “more impactful choices” and “more split-screen co-op”, and more specific stuff like “fewer damsels in distress” and “women depicted as more than sex symbols”.

No, I am not only going to rant about how both the article and the guy who posted it found those results “surprising”, when there was literally nothing surprising in there for anyone who ever touched an article about women in gaming in the past five or so years.

But that’s in there, too.

One person actually replied expressing how the answers given to the rather open question “What do you want from video games in the future?” were so “normal” it was “weird” - apparently because not every single one of the top ten answers was about sexist behaviour and unrealistic depictions of women, but - shocker, I know - general gaming stuff as well. Which really serves to illustrate how even female gamers themselves (as far as I can tell, the person saying this was a woman) internally divide gamers into “normal gamers” and “female gamers”, which is just so gross and weird and why would female gamers not be interested in general gaming things?

Someone else said the survey was “unscientific nonsense” because... I don’t know, they didn’t give much of a reason other than “it’s unscientific nonsense”, but no-one called it scientifc in the first place (how even, with roughly 650 answers?), and it was pretty obvious that it was mostly done out of curiosity for an article on a website, so... huh?

The most baffling reaction to the article, though?

“This survey is sexist because the question was aseed in a women-only Facebook group!”

Yep. The usual cries of “this thing aimed specifically at women is sexist because it’s not also aimed at men somehow” - coming from, apparently, women as well? Several of them? I don’t... does this make sense to anyone?

I will honestly never understand the thought process behind this because it doesn’t follow a shred of logic. The article said it was about what female gamers want from their games, why would you also ask that question to gamers who don’t identify as female?! oO

(The sad part is that the author also said that they asked a female-only gaming community, and that maybe this could hint at “a certain attitude” those women have. Because nothing screams “quality journalism” like insinuating that any and all women banding together in any way must be up to something, rather than grouping up around a mutual interest like literally any person joining a theme-specific community.)

But then that person also said that they liked the survey but not the answers, because they didn’t like the women in said Facebook group, and apparently, that makes the survey bad somehow?

Which echoed a little the comment the author made that the women he has asked directly in games totally didn’t give those answers, and that he expected something entirely different, and I should probably have told him that many of us tend to give non-confrontational answers when asked directly because we’re sick and tired of arguing about this shit while we’re just trying to have fun in a video game? Because I know from personal experience that when I voice such an “unpopular opinion” in-game or on Teamspeak, I get dismissive comments at best and belittling mansplanations why I’m wrong followed by sexist “jokes” at worst?

...can I also point out how I am not mad at all that the guy (because of course it was a guy) who wrote the article emphasised both right at the beginning and in his conclusion that the answers came from “real gamers” and not “gender institutes” or “feminist think tanks”, so were totally real and authentic? Because there is absolutely zero overlap between feminists, academics and gamers. Absolutely none. At all.

Which is really a roundabout way of me saying that this is why we still fucking need feminism and also why we fucking need to shout even louder to make ourselves heard in the gaming community because how is any of this news to anyone at this point T_T

(Link to the article here; it’s in German, though, so have fun with that.)