.png)
Gaming has arisen as one of the most popular hobbies for Gen Zs since the COVID-19 pandemic. While gaming has historically been a male-dominated pastime, women have slowly been carving out a space for themselves and are starting to revolutionize the culture.
I started playing video games when I was six years old. The first gaming device I ever had was a pastel pink Gameboy. I don’t even remember the games that I played on that thing, but I loved it. I would go on to play Nintendogs on the Nintendo DS, Diner Dash on a Playstation Portable, and of course Mario Kart & Super Mario Bros on the Wii with my little sister. I even had a brush with some PC games, like Wizard 101, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Virtual Families, and The Sims.
Then once I hit about 12 years old, it all stopped. Beyond the occasional Mario Kart tournament with my little sister and an insomnia-induced stunt of The Sims, I completely stopped playing video games. Not for any particular reason. I think I just invested my time in other pastimes. Video games just became largely unappealing to me. Even though I’d spent a majority of my childhood playing video games, I’d never considered myself a gamer. Gamers were people (usually boys) who spent hours in front of the computer or a gaming console, yelling into mics, playing gritty and bloody video games. Gamers were my best friends’ older brothers, who hid away in the basement on voice comms. I was not a gamer.
But then COVID-19 hit and it changed everything. Suddenly the only real option for hanging out with your friends was finding stuff to do virtually. During COVID, one of my friends bought a Minecraft Realms subscription, which allowed us all to play on a private server together. And we went so hard. For hours every night, we created our Minecraft world while we sat in a Zoom call together. I was hooked. During the day, I craved the feeling of my dark room, with only the light of my Macbook illuminating me, while my friends screeched and hollered in my ear as we tried to knock each other off of cliffs. At night, I lost all track of time in our little world, only noticing the time when the sky started to get light again. I was addicted to the rib-bruising laughter that could only be induced by virtual shenanigans. Little did I know, many Gen Zs (specifically, a lot of Gen Z women) were experiencing a similar thing.
Cozy Gaming:
Cozy gaming is the most common point of entry to the world of video games for women. I would argue it’s because there is the least amount of risk and skill involved in picking up and playing these video games. Since girls aren’t usually encouraged to play “video-gamey games” like Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed, most women aren’t exposed to the mechanics that are employed by FPS (first-person shooter) or action-fighter games and therefore, are drawn to games like cozy games which can be more intuitive and less mechanically demanding. Think: Animal Crossing, The Sims, City Skylines, Minecraft, and Stardew Valley. These games are usually sim (simulation) & management and/or RPGs (role-playing games) types of games, and they are almost always the first games that women pick up. If you remember all the games I listed off as the first games I ever played (Nintendogs, Diner Dash, and the Sims), the trend becomes clear. As the name suggests, “cozy games” can be very relaxing, therapeutic, or even meditative to those who play them. Most importantly, in my opinion, is the fact that cozy gaming doesn’t require you to interact with other random gamers like many action or shooter games do. You don’t have to be on voice comms or collaborating with other players, which gives women the space to make mistakes and learn a game without being criticized by male gamers who have more experience. Cozy gaming rose in popularity during COVID-19, with many women turning to gaming as a cure to boredom, a way to hang out with friends in private servers, and a way to escape the harsh reality of quarantine. With little to no experience in the gaming world, cozy games offered women an entry-level & pleasant experience to the gaming community. I do want to give a quick shout out here to all of the women who have existed in the gaming community since pre-COVID, when there was almost no visibility for women in gaming.
Gaming Gone Viral:
The Gen Z COVID-19 experience is almost inseparable from the rise of TikTok. While TikTok had existed as a platform before COVID, the isolation and boredom that resulted from COVID-19 quarantine allowed for the perfect opportunity for an addicting social media outlet to take over much of our time, resulting in TikTok’s unbeatable success. One of the most revolutionary things TikTok ever did was popularize and normalize previously niche Gen Z interests such as video games and anime. TikTok gave every day people a platform to reach audiences that they would’ve never been able to reach before. It gave the average person the opportunity to go viral. Consequently, internet personalities who would have otherwise been limited to ‘chronically online’ audiences, were now reaching more general populations. This process helped normalize video gaming as a pastime in general, as well as women’s increasing presence in the gaming community as videos of women who played or streamed video games started to surface.
While the virality of gaming did help to legitimize female gamers, it also did some damage to people’s perceptions of what a woman who games looks like. Unfortunately, this damage was done by a lot of other women themselves. Accounts that orbit around dressing up as an “uwu girl” or “e-girl”, like @dessyyc, fetishize and sexualize women who play video games, encourage men to view female gamers as incompetent, and make women feel like this is the way they’re supposed to act if they want to be a woman who is accepted in the gaming community.
Fortunately, there are plenty of videos and accounts that parody this “sexed-up” version of women who play games and drive home the point that most female gamers aren’t actually like that.
A Space for Women in Competitive:
While gaming was rising in popularity and more women were being exposed to video games during COVID, Riot Games released their tactical shooter game, Valorant. Valorant is a first-person, competitive 5 v. 5, tactical shooter and would become one of the most accepting first-person shooter (FPS) in the industry, revolutionizing the competitive gaming scene for women everywhere. Since Valorant came out during COVID while women were starting to play more games, Valorant was flooded by the female community. Everyone was learning how to play the game at the same time, so it allowed women to learn the gameplay mechanics at the same rate as others who had been in the gaming world for a long time. This leveled the playing field a bit and helped women to feel more comfortable in the scene. Though other semi-competitive games like Fortnite and Rocket League have harbored a strong female player-base before Valorant, what made Valorant so revolutionary was that, for what felt like the first time, women could speak in-game on voice comms and not be completely destroyed for being a woman playing a video game. In Fortnite and Rocket League, you can be anonymous. You don’t have voice comms, unless you’re playing with your friends. This is also the case in cozy gaming. Your gamer tag or username doesn’t have to denote your gender, you don’t have to play with other players, and the result of the game is yours, and yours alone to bear. In Valorant, you have to collaborate with the other players to play the game and whether or not you win or lose is the burden of every player on the team. While it’s not required that you speak on voice comms Valorant, the fact of the matter is that if you hop into a Valorant game you have a better chance of hearing a girl over voice comms than in any other competitive game. That’s really comforting as a woman in the gaming scene and it encourages folks who otherwise might not have spoken on voice comms in game, to do so. It gives women a very real presence in the gaming community.
For years prior to Valorant, many women who played video games (especially online competitive video games) largely lived in the shadows, perpetually on mute, and under gamer tags that didn’t denote their gender. The reason for this is largely because men don’t take women who play video games seriously. For many online co-op games, the second you speak into that mic and your voice isn’t that of a baritone 24 year old male, you are belittled, called names, and flooded by misogynistic comments that question your capabilities to play the game. Men have voted to kick women out of a game or intentionally locked women out of playing a game by reporting them. I’ve been in competitive matches where the reason that we lost was attributed to the fact that “there was a woman on the team”. While there is definitely no shortage of toxic male behavior in Valorant, the sheer number of women who play the game make it so that sentiments like “women can’t play video games” or “we’re going to lose because we have a woman on our team” are largely shut down by other players in the scene.
#GGForAll:
ESL (Electronic Sports League), the world’s leading esports platform, created an initiative called #GGForAll (for non-gamers, “gg” means “good game” and is usually sent into chat or spoken over comms after a competitive match) which promotes the female competitive gaming scene. ESL set-up an entire circuit dedicated to female teams in the competitive FPS, Counterstrike: Global Offensive with major cash prizes; a significant step towards legitimizing the strong & capable female presence in video games. ESL includes this quote on their page for #GGForAll:
“We strive to achieve an environment where discrimination and toxicity is removed. We believe in a world where everyone has the right to enjoy the games they love, the right to play, to participate and to progress. From grassroot grinders, casual gamers and elite pro athletes. We believe all players deserve equal respect, support and opportunity.”
-ESL Gaming
ESL has helped promote the success of many female competitive teams as well as paved the way for the gaming industry to become more accepting of female gamers. It is strange to have competitive circuits split between genders, but this is a significant step in creating more opportunities for women to even get to the pro league. Hopefully from there, it will be easier to integrate competitive co-op play.
A Ways to Go:
While the gaming scene has made an incredible transformation in just a few years for women everywhere, there is still a ways to go. The environment that is facilitated by male gamers is still overwhelmingly toxic, misogynistic, sexist, and unaccepting to folks who aren’t straight-passing men. Most notably, the gaming scene has specifically become more accepting for women who are really good at video games. The only women I’ve ever heard on mic in a competitive video game were women who were at the top of the scoreboard. We feel like we have to prove to everyone else in the game that we’re capable of performing at the highest of levels before we feel comfortable revealing that we’re a woman. Men at the bottom or middle of the scoreboard have no problem talking and revealing their gender, despite their quality of play during that game. They don’t feel like they have anything to prove. They’ve already been proven by being a man in a video game, so it doesn’t matter whether you’re particularly good or bad at gaming, there is naturally a seat (and a mic) for you at the table. You can’t be a woman and bad at a video game. That is not acceptable.
COVID-19 helped to create the perfect circumstances for women to participate in video games at the same level and with the same passion as men do. Quarantine made video games more accessible and appealing than ever to a broader variety of people. I truly believe that the majority of women who play video games in their pastimes today, would not be doing so if it weren’t facilitated by COVID-19, the rise of TikTok, and the release of Valorant during 2020.
Gaming for women will be at its best when we can make our gamer tags anything that we want. Gaming for women will become a safe place when we can play whatever video game that we want and go on voice chat if we need to. Gaming for women will reach equality when it’s recognized that women can be good, bad, average, and everything in between at any video game.
.png)
.png)