Zipa wrote:I used to play a lot of MMOs in my teenage years and every time there was a women in the guild/groups I was playing with you would get the treating them as bumbling morons who couldn't click a mouse to save their lives. (Often they were as good if not better than the people saying this sort of thing). Or you would get the whole she sounds hot act immature to get into her pants routine which surprisingly just drove them away much to my chagrin.
Oh and sometimes you would even get both happen to the same poor sod, awesome. Not.
I've always wanted to conduct a study because there is a theory I had that I've always wanted to explore. If girls are in fact not as good at video games, it is because they are treated as if they are not as good as video games. And not in a people telling them they suck way, the opposite actually.
During Wrath of the Lich King, I was involved pretty heavily in two guilds. The first fell apart so I moved on to the later. In Guild A, there was a woman who played a druid healer. Everyone treated him the same as they did all the guys, albeit with the occasional period or boob joke. If she did good, they said "You're good," and not "You're good for a girl." Whenever she messed up people pointed it out to her, and she improved. She was consistently on the top of the heal charts, my friend who brought me in being the only person who could consistently beat her, but not always.
In guild B, there was a warlock. I only ran with them a few times and you will soon find out why. I only hung out in that guild for the social aspect, but one day I got invited to sub in for someone to do the Lich King raid.. I think this might have been actually during Cataclysm and they were just doing it for achievements/mounts. Either way, I was eager to try my hand so I did. I hadn't done much raiding recently, and as such I was fairly undergeared compared to all of them, especially to the aforementioned Warlock, her gear outranked the next highest by a considerable margin. However, during every boss fight, she was at the bottom of the damage charts and I actually ended up pulling second. Despite the fact that her gear was easily twice as good as mine, she was doing half the damage. But no one else said anything about it, and I didn't want to overstep seeing as how I was basically a guest, so I kept quiet. Then, we came to a boss fight where throughout, you have to tag someone else within a short time span, or else you get mind controlled for the rest of the fight and attack your own party.
Before hand the leader went over the strategy in great detail and implicitly set it up so that the warlocked would get tagged last, so that she wouldn't have to in turn tag anyone. It just so happened that I was the one designated to tag her. Fight gets under way, and when my time comes, I go to tag her and she runs away, so I get mind controlled. We fail, and afterwards, I quickly get blamed for it. They get angry and start in on me, but when I speak up to defend myself and point out that it was her fault, their tone quickly drops. They giv her the verbal equivalent of a pat on the shoulder and say that it's okay, we'll get her next time.
I'm sure if you asked them, they all would have considered themselves feminists, and they were just trying to create an atmosphere where girls could play video games as well. But because they were so gentle with her, she never realized just how inadequate she was. She never felt the pressure to perform better so I'm sure she never did. And it didn't matter because everything was handed to her so that was just what she expected.
I feel like a great deal of feminists think it would be insane to tell a woman she sucks at something because to them it feels like saying all women suck at that thing and are predetermined to suck at that thing. Which obviously isn't the case. BUt no one wants to be the bad guy. I have no qualms about being the bad guy, I give zero fucks.
My sister plays video games. She used to be god-awful at them. She's better now, not amazing, but she is more than capable at LoL and a few others. Before, when she sucked at something, she would justify it by saying it was okay because she was a girl, and I always called her out on her bullshit excuse. Did it help, maybe, maybe not, but she doesn't say it anymore and she is better. Now instead she asks guy what it was like to get beat by a girl, which in and of itself is a whole nother can of worms I don't even know how to address, but at least it's a step in the right direction. I think.