From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel

She got game

Girl gamers blast stereotypes by proving they can kick ass as well as the boys do.

by Colleen Dougher

November 9 2005

Heather Boyd's father taught her to use a computer at 3 years old and encouraged her to play video games at a time when many girls didn't. She remembers playing Adventure on Atari 2600 and thinking the dragons were ducks.

"I was so young," Boyd recalls. "I honestly thought the game was about four rooms and all you could do was run around and kill ducks." Today, the 21-year-old Boyd is a video and PC game addict who goes by the gamer tag Angel.

"If I had every dollar that I ever spent on video games, I can honestly tell you I would be driving a BMW right now," says Boyd, who recently moved to Vero Beach. "Just four or five months ago, I spent $1,500 on a new top-of-the-line PC that can play any game on the market now. … Before I moved, I had two Xboxes, a GameCube, a PlayStation 2, a Sega Saturn, a Genesis, and I still have my Atari, Nintendo and Super Nintendo."

While the media has long portrayed gamers as pasty, out-of-shape young men who get off on playing testosterone-fueled shoot-'em-ups, it's a stereotype that -- let's face it -- is not exactly unfair. Yet Boyd and an increasing number of women are doing their best to shatter that image and shape the way the $13.5 billion-a-year video game industry creates and markets its products. The Entertainment Software Association reports that 43 percent of gamers are women who play everything from cribbage and role-playing games online to first-person shooters such as Halo 2. While many of these women have played video games since childhood, they have only recently begun forming groups such as Frag Dolls, Watch Us Game, Dominating Divas and PMS Clan. They're breaking into tournaments and playing at expos that draw mostly males and feature scantily clad booth babes hawking products.

Last month, Frag Dolls and PMS Clan members spoke at the Austin, Texas-based Women's Game Conference, which also presented discussions on how the video game industry can market to and recruit women. The previous month, both groups had been featured in Newsweek and Entertainment Weekly.

Groups such as these help female gamers connect with one another and create their own rules in a world long dominated by males. "It's not really that I don't like playing with boys," says Boyd, who in June joined both Watch Us Game and PMS Clan. "In fact, most of the female gamers I know only hang out with guys in real life. I don't really have very many female friends, and that's how it is for most of the girls. Before PMS or Watch Us Game, we didn't know other girls who were into the same things we are."

Broadband-enabled consoles and other technological advances have made it easier for gamers worldwide to play one another from the comfort of home. Despite the broader playing field, women still find themselves in a man's world. Some girls use gamer tags online to conceal their gender and avoid harassment.

Schatzi Miranda is one of the few women in the Game Art and Design program at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale. She says male gamers frequently ask her to send them photos of herself or call them. Some men are more aggressive and misogynistic.

Amy Brady, who co-founded PMS Clan with her twin sister, Amber Dalton, complained to Entertainment Weekly about male gamers who, upon learning an opponent is female, will call her a "fat, ugly bitch" who should "get back in the kitchen."

Boyd dislikes how some male gamers treat women like gentle flowers rather than someone out to kick their ass in Halo 2. "I think it's more of an instinctual-type thing," she explains. "Like, 'Oh no, he's going to throw a grenade at Angel. I better kill this guy first and ignore the other guys that I can throw a grenade at over there.' "

At least women can trash-talk back, Boyd says. But big-brother-type gamers who try to protect their female counterparts really bug her. "I'm not the best gamer in the world," she admits, "but I would rather get the score I deserve and be proud of myself because I did my best -- not because somebody else helped me do it."

Is it any wonder girl gamers are uniting to kick gamer-boy ass and create a place for themselves in this world? This past March, the PMS Clan became the first all-female team to enter the Major League Gaming Houston tournament. In July, PMS teams placed sixth and eighth in Halo 2 at the World Cyberathlete Professional Summer Championship in Dallas.

In September, 21-year-old Nicole O'Donnell, whose gamer tag is Nixx86, drove from Maitland with some male friends to Miami, where she became the only female to compete in the Professional Gamers League of America's Elites Halo 2 Tournament. "When it was my turn to compete, there were murmurs in the audience," she recalls. "I heard things like, 'My money's on the chick.' "

Those murmurs can turn into angry shouts online. After visiting Watch Us Game's Web site, a blogger named Mike wrote that he felt such groups were "more a damn advertising stunt than a bunch of chicks who love to game as much as the fellas do." He noted that his gamer friend Crystal "doesn't go around making it sound like she's hot shit 'cause she looks cute in a tank top and can kick most people's ass in Halo."

Frag Dolls, a Ubisoft-sponsored group that formed in 2004, gets similar flak from people who see its members' photos online and assume they're overhyped, corporate-sponsored booth babes. Boyd argues otherwise. "I've watched the Frag Dolls play, and I can tell you right now, those girls are awesome," she says. "Every single one of them can play games very, very well.

"I think people are just jealous," she continues, "because women are a minority in the gaming industry and we are all of a sudden grouping together. It's kind of like the whole burning-our-bras type of thing. We're not striving to piss people off; we're just trying to prove a point. But at the same time, it is happening to piss some people off."

The goal of these groups, Boyd argues, is to increase awareness of female gamers while shaping a community of women with similar interests. They also want women to feel welcomed by the industry.

Marc Mencher, a Fort Lauderdale-based video game industry headhunter, says only 10 to 15 percent of the people he recruits are women. If more women were involved in creating games, he says, their needs might be better-represented.

O'Donnell scoffs at the ridiculously overendowed female characters -- some of whom appeared topless in Playboy last year -- but says male characters are equally exaggerated. "I mean, they all look like Arnold Schwarzenegger with a machine gun coming out their arm. The whole thing about video games is that it's a fantastical realm. It's fantasy," she says. "People aren't going to want to be your average, everyday person, because we're usually that in everyday life. So people want to go [online] and be this hot dude kicking this hot girl's ass."

Boyd, who plans to study game design at Full Sail in Winter Park next year, just wants to see more playable female characters in first-person shooters and multiplayer online games. As an example, she cites Fable, in which players follow a boy from childhood to death, sending the character down either a righteous or an evil path. "I can't honestly relate with a 12-year-old boy," Boyd says. "I would be able to relate to a 12-year-old girl. That's more of what I would like to see, and it is happening in a lot of genres. More developers are noticing that girls really are sitting and playing just as many games as boys."

The truth is that they can't afford not to notice, especially as the male-oriented gaming market becomes saturated. Women already spend more money than men on video games. Imagine the revenue companies could generate if they catered to women a bit more, the way Electronic Arts did when it created The Sims, then marketed it to both genders.

Groups such as PMS Clan create a perfect opportunity for these companies to target this market. O'Donnell, who recently joined Girl Gamers United on MySpace.com, still hasn't paid off her last big game-related purchase. "I put the Xbox on my Target card, so I'm paying that off in installments," she says. "It definitely adds up."

"Every extra penny that I have usually goes toward games," says Boyd, who's saving for an Xbox 360. "I ended up playing this demo last night for Call of Duty 2, and I might have to spend another $200 on RAMs for that one, but it's so worth it. That game looks so beautiful."

She'll also be setting aside money to compete in March at Major League Gaming Orlando. Boyd, who played high-school sports and ran track, loves to compete and doesn't want to pretend she's not a woman while doing it.

O'Donnell feels the same way. "I'll admit that I enjoy letting them know that it's a girl kicking their ass and trash-talking them," she says. "There's definitely a psychological element involved in it just being like, 'I'm a girl and I'm kicking your ass.' "