Girl Gamers and You

There are no girls on the internet. This, I have been assured by the denizens of the web, is true. Obviously, it's not, but where are female gamers?

All around you, actually. That guy that just killed you in Call of Duty with a shot to the head? Girl gamer. Team slaughtered in League of Legends? Might've been a lady with mad rushing skills. Just resurrected in World of Warcraft? Yep, your healer could be a lady.

So just how wrong is the "no girls on the internet" statement? Well, according to CNET, a survey showed that 64 percent of online gamers are female. You read that right, over half of online gamers are female.

But how is that possible? It seems that the aforementioned Call of Duty is populated by 12-year-olds who are just waiting to insult your mother. Yes, there are a few female gamers - one of my friend's fiance loves to play Call of Duty, and my guild leader in Guild Wars is a middle-aged woman from New York - but you find most of them playing casual games. Ever hear of Farmville?

Brittany Bradley, the online photo editor at the State Hornet, Sacramento State's newspaper, said that she doesn't play online games like Halo because she has trouble manipulating the controller, which has dual joysticks.

"I have trouble running and shooting at the same time," she said. "I have trouble identifying which players are on my team. In a split second, from 20 feet away, you can't tell which is blue team and which is green team, and then your best friend gets angry for killing them."

Even more than that, though, Bradley thinks video games are simply not productive.

"It's a waste of time," she said. "I could be doing other things."

While the female population of shooter games like Call of Duty and Battlefield may be low, offline games like Angry Birds and The Sims 3 have found a large female consumer base.

My girlfriend, Alex, spends much of her free time playing the Sims, for instance. This is how I know the new expansion for the game, which introduces pets, came out last week. She spends just as much time on the fashion of her characters and the designs of their houses as I do shooting people online. To be fair, though, she also plays Guild Wars, which brings me to my last point.

The Massively Multiplayer Online world has sucked in females far more than other types of online games, save for casual. The role-playing games, or RPGs, like World of Warcraft, Aion, and Guild Wars see many women playing. It can be much slower-paced than shooters, and there is a certain sense of camaraderie between players. Alex logs on to Guild Wars sometimes to just chat with other guild members, and not to do any actual playing.

So to refute the claim that there are no women playing video games, they are actually all around you. They may be killing you but not announcing it over chat, or they could be shooting birds at pigs, or they could be healing you; they are just not as loud and obnoxious as the prepubescent name-caller.