SPEAK SOFTLY AND CARRY A BIG GUN

SPEAK SOFTLY AND CARRY A BIG GUN
A CASE STUDY OF PROFESSIONAL DANISH FEMALE
COUNTER-STRIKE PLAYERS
MASTER’S DEGREE THESIS
DESIGN, COMMUNICATION & MEDIA
Tore Vesterby
K-DKM E2002
160875-1943
The IT University of Copenhagen
January 2005
Supervised by TL Taylor
Acknowledgements
My most heartfelt thanks go to Artamis, Muus, NissePigen, Tatiana, Tibi and Vildkatten for
giving me a glimpse into their world; to TL for not only providing great guidance, but also for
her patience and fantastic advice; to Rikke for her sharp mind, love, support and dedication; to
Jytte and Jonas for spending hours finding the little errors; to the readers of my blog whose input
may not be all that obvious, but who made me feel like this was something that interested people.
2
.
3
Abstract................................................................................................... 6
1. Introduction, Research Questions and Methodology ....................... 7
Introduction......................................................................................................................7
Research Questions and Methodology ........................................................................... 11
2. Research History of Women and Computer Games ........................17
Constructionism vs. Essentialism. Women and Technology........................................................................ 17
Three Key Research Areas: Game Content, Game Spaces and Gaming Activities.......... 18
Gendered Spaces.............................................................................................................20
The Gendering of Offline Spaces ..................................................................................................................... 21
The Gendering of Online Spaces...................................................................................................................... 22
Gendered Gaming Activities...........................................................................................26
Intel Doesn’t Play With Women ....................................................................................................................... 27
Summary......................................................................................................................... 31
3. Offline Game Spaces and Activities................................................. 32
Cyber Cafés.....................................................................................................................32
Girl Gamers – a Minority in Cyber Cafés ........................................................................................................ 34
The Cyber Café as a Social Space...................................................................................................................... 39
Summary................................................................................................................................................................ 40
LAN Events .................................................................................................................... 41
The LAN As A Gendered Game Space........................................................................................................... 44
Supporters and Socialisation at LANs.............................................................................................................. 47
Professionalism .................................................................................................................................................... 49
Summary................................................................................................................................................................ 50
Domestic Gaming...........................................................................................................50
Owning a Gaming Computer ............................................................................................................................ 50
Non-gaming Women’s Reactions...................................................................................................................... 52
Summary................................................................................................................................................................ 53
4. Online Game Spaces and Activities ................................................. 54
Inside the Game Space ...................................................................................................54
Good Girls Don’t Swear..................................................................................................................................... 58
Summary................................................................................................................................................................ 61
4
IRC Channels and Game Sites........................................................................................ 61
Stars and Starfuckers ........................................................................................................................................... 64
Summary................................................................................................................................................................ 69
5. Conclusions and Future Perspectives.............................................. 70
Bibliography ......................................................................................... 74
Appendixes ........................................................................................... 77
I – My Gaming Bias........................................................................................................77
II – Interview Guide: Group Interview............................................................................78
III – Interview Guide: Individual Interview with Vildkatten...........................................80
IV – Sample Interview Guide: IRC Interviews ................................................................82
V – Summary of the Work Process..................................................................................84
5
A B S TRA C T
When the Entertainment Software Association published numbers in 2003 showing a growth in
the industry by 8% and that 39% of gamers in the US were women their Danish counterpart,
Multimedieforeningen, were quick to attribute these numbers to women playing games where
they were either nurturing virtual families in the Sims or dancing with their friends using the
EyeToy. Yet in July 2004 the Danish female Counter-Strike clan Team All 4 One won the female
division of the Electronic Sports World Cup taking home $10,000. They may be a minority, but
there are women in Denmark who choose to play Counter-Strike on a professional level, who are
making money by shooting virtual people in the head and planting bombs. Looking at these
games on a purely content centred level does not allow us to see why it is that some women
choose to break the social norms of what games they should be playing.
In this thesis I discuss gender and games by moving beyond the mere content of Counter-Strike
in order to take a closer look at the social spaces where these women play the game, and how
gender roles are constructed on the Danish Counter-Strike scene. By doing a case study of Team
All 4 One I document their experiences of the scene through a series of qualitative interviews
and ethnographic observations and I show how carefully these women must tread in order to
gain acceptance by their male peers. Also I make a case for how we may gain a more nuanced
view of female gamers and their motivations for playing games, which has often been branded as
boys’ territories both by research and the industry.
6
1
I N T RO D U C T IO N , R E S E A RC H
Q U E STI O N S A N D
M E T HO D O LO G Y
Introduction
It was 19:30 p.m. on a Tuesday evening in central Copenhagen in the spring of 2004. I’d just
stepped into Boomtown, a cyber café with one hundred pc’s ready for gamers who want to try
out any contemporary computer game from Battlefield 1942 to Diablo II Lord of Destruction.
The room was dark. The only light came from dimmed lamps and the flashing from the 100
monitors. The place was two-thirds full with roughly 50 or 60 people - only about 25 to 30 PC’s
on the top balcony were unoccupied. As I looked closer I noticed something, which struck me as
very lopsided. There were only two women in the room; one of them was checking her Hotmail
account, the other was chatting via MSN Messenger. I thought to myself, “Why aren’t they
playing any of the games offered, and more importantly, why are there so few of them?”
Had I not known better, I would have instantly connected the lack of female gamers in
Boomtown to the violent content of the games being played. However, in November 2003 I had
been lucky enough to hear Aphra Kerr present a paper at the DIGRA Level-Up Conference,
which focused on female console gamers in Ireland. Among other things the paper concluded
that the women played console games that were both violent and non-violent, that the women
were not visible in the traditional public gaming spheres and that there was a lack of female
friends in their social networks whom they talked to about games (Kerr 2003). So although I was
prepared for the lack of female gamers in Boomtown, I was still curious about what and where
the female gamers here in Denmark were playing.
I knew adult women in Denmark were playing games since I had read a press release from
Multimedieforeningen1 where they were using numbers from a survey conducted by the
Entertainment Software Association2 in the United States claiming that “eight percent in 2003 to $7
billion – a more than doubling of industry software sales since 1996 […] the average age of a game player is 29
1
The Danish Association of Multimedia Developers.
2
Numbers such as these should be taken in with caution, because the methodology behind the survey is closed to the
public. See Heide Smith (2001) for a detailed critique of a similar survey.
7
years old [and] thirty-nine percent of game players are women.” (ESA 2003). In the press release Claus
Due, the former president of Multimedieforeningen, ascribed the increased sales in computer
games to the success of marketing games to women:
Some of the best selling computer games target girls and women. E.g. the popular series
The Sims, where you create and develop a virtual family. Also innovative initiatives like the
EyeToy for the PS2 draw the girls in. Here you are yourself a part of the games where you,
among other things, dance and move about in competition with friends.
(Multimedieforeningen 2003).
This view of female gamers seems extremely simplistic since it does not take into account that
you can actually kill your virtual family in the Sims by burning, electrocuting and starvation
(ChocoCat) or cases of child prostitution in The Sims Online (Ludlow 2003) or even that the
EyeToy also includes a Kung-Fu fighting game. With this in mind I found Due’s conclusions to
be very broad and not very focused on the actual games women were playing. The fact that many
women play games which do not have to do with ’virtual families’ or ’dancing and moving’ has
been explored extensively by research in the last couple of years (Cassel & Jenkins (eds.) 1998,
Yates & Littleton 2001, Bryce & Rutter 2002, Taylor 2003, Kerr 2003, Graner Ray 2003,
Krotoski 2004).
One group of women who do play a game which has nothing to do with nurturing or dancing is
the Danish Counter-Strike clan Team All 4 One who I firmly believe represent a different type of
female gamers than the one Claus Due mentions. Team All 4 One are the reigning un-official
World Champions of women’s Counter-Strike, an online multi-player first person shooting game.
They beat teams from all over the world at the Electronic World Sports Cup 2004 (ESWC) in
France back in July 2004 where they won a cash prize of $10.000 – the largest prize ever in
women’s Counter-Strike. The team consists of five female players who in the Counter-Strike
community go by their nicknames: Artamis, Muus, NissePigen, Tatiana and Tibi. When they
played at the ESWC they also had a female coach, Vildkatten, who left the team in August 2004.
The reason I believe they represent a different type of female gamer has to do not only with the
game content, but the context in which the game is played, which I will proceed to describe
below3.
Counter-Strike4 was originally created as a modification, or mod, to the Half-Life engine from
(Sierra 1998), which pits anti-terrorists against terrorists. The game’s graphics are based on
3
If you are already familiar with Counter-Strike and the context the game is played in feel free to skip
ahead to p. 11
4
Counter-Strike version 1.5 was what tournament organisers were using as the basis for all competitive play during the
production of this thesis. In late November 2004 Counter-Strike: Source based on the Half-Life 2 engine was released,
but at the time of writing it had not become the tournament standard.
8
modern day weapons and combat gear. Counter-Strike has been played competitively in Europe
for almost six years and a huge community of thousands of players log on to game servers every
day. Several versions of the game have been released with different tweaks and changes made to
the game to balance gameplay, to facilitate server rules or to prevent cheating in competitive
games. Whereas casual play in Counter-Strike, or CS, is based on you logging onto an open FreeFor-All-server (FFA) where you can be assigned a random team and play infinite rounds on one
of the many maps available for the game, competitive play is a much more structured affair
played on password protected Clan War-servers (CW).
Competitive Counter-Strike is centred round specific clans that compete against each other in socalled 5on5 games. A clan is a team that typically has five players and a coach. The players have
very specific roles during the games. In competitive games thirty 2.5-minute rounds are played
out where one clan is the terrorist team for 15 rounds and the other the anti-terrorist. In
competitive play you win as the terrorist team by either planting a bomb in one of two bombsites
and prevent the anti-terrorists from disarming it, which they have 35 seconds to accomplish after
it has been planted. Or you can eliminate all the anti-terrorists. As the anti-terrorists you win by
either preventing the bomb from being planted and going off or you can eliminate all the
terrorists. In addition you ’earn’ money by performing certain tasks in the game such as
eliminating an opponent. At the beginning of each round both sides can purchase weapons and
grenades that make eliminating opponents easier. While there is quite a large array of weapons to
choose from, competitive gamers will often only choose from a very small selection of these
based on the amount of money they have. The games are often broadcast live via a program
called HLTV or the games can be downloaded from one of the many community sites around
the world that serve as virtual clubs for the CS-players.
The best competitive clans are often sponsored by companies which give them free gaming
products – computers, mice, mice pads etc. – or provide free hosting for the clans’ private
servers where they take on challengers. They have a coach whose role is to oversee the tactical
aspects of the game, to create strategies that will foil their opponents. These clans compete in
tournaments around the globe, which are played via Local Area Networks (LAN), rather than
over the internet. This means that the players have to physically be in the same space in order to
compete. The tournaments have cash prizes that have pots as high as $100.000, which is split by
the top four teams. The gamers that participate in this type of tournaments are often referred to
as “pros”. They may or may not be professionals in the sense that they can live off playing the
game, although some do, but it is more a symbol of the clan’s ability to win games in these
tournaments. Also being a pro-clan often means that hardware manufacturers or other
companies wanting to get exposed through your clan will sponsor you. Getting to the
9
professional level of gaming requires hours and hours of training. Many play 4 hours or more
every night. Before going to tournaments the pro clans meet in cyber cafés to ’Boot Camp’ which
means playing long stretches of Clan War games in order to polish their tactics.
Team All 4 One, or just A4O, fit the bill on all of the above. They practice four to five hours
four days a week, they are reported on by Danish gaming community sites, they have also done
interviews in major Danish newspapers and the radio, and national TV has interviewed one of
the clan members too. In addition to this the clan have their own website and IRC-channel5.
During my research I was able to observe the clan play on several occasions and they play in
exactly the same manner as the professional male clans do: they are extremely concentrated, their
eyes never stray off the screen, the communication between them is purely tactical and focused
on what happens in the game. In other words the only immediate difference between them and
other professional Counter-Strike clans is their gender6.
Counter-Strike at this level is not child’s play. The players in the clan, Artamis, Muus, NissePigen,
Tatiana, Tibi and their former coach Vildkatten are all adult women aged 19-29. They hail from
different backgrounds. Artamis is a multimedia designer, but currently works at a cyber café.
Muus has finished studying engineering and is looking for work. NissePigen has almost
completed her Master’s Degree from business school. Tatiana is taking courses to qualify for an
education in engineering. Tibi has almost completed her Bachelor’s Degree as a nurse. And
Vildkatten has just begun university studies in Nordic Languages and is further more a single
mother. In other words, these are not young girls with time to kill.
I believe that Team-A4O go against the perceptions of female gamers, I mentioned earlier, on
several levels. While they’re supposed to be dancing and nurturing virtual families, they’re firing
virtual guns and planting bombs. They not only practice from their home computers, but they
Boot Camp in cyber cafés. Also they participate in LAN-tournaments playing against male clans
to practice for the few international events available to female Counter-Strike clans. However
they are the only professional female clan in Denmark7, which makes them a very rare and
exceptional group. I believe that by doing a case study on Team All 4 One, which examines their
experiences on the competitive Counter-Strike scene I can provide a better understanding of how
5
IRC or Internet Relay Chat is a text messaging protocol.
6
There may be subtle differences in gameplay, but my expertise in Counter-Strike is too limited to judge this on an
empirical level (see Appendix I).
7
There are a two other Danish female players who play competitively in the Danish-Swedish female clan Les Seules at
the time of writing.
10
some female gamers do not fit the stereotypical expectations of being nursing and social
creatures, but rather fit the mould of professional Counter-Strike players.
Research Questions and Methodology
I have been exploring five key research questions for the case study of Team All 4 One:
1. How do adult female gamers get drawn to Counter Strike so much that they
decide to play it on a professional level?
2. What social structures embody the spaces they play Counter-Strike in?
3. How do their male counterparts regard these female gamers?
4. How do these gamers view femininity in regard to playing Counter-Strike?
5. What challenges lie ahead in getting more women interested in competitive
Counter-Strike?
In order to explore why the women choose to play CS professionally and the context around
them I conducted a qualitative semi-structured group interview with five of the players - Artamis,
Muus, NissePigen, Tatiana and Tibi - at of one of the clan member’s residence in Copenhagen.
This was followed by an in-depth semi-structured qualitative interview with Vildkatten, the clan’s
former coach, in her apartment in Århus. Additionally I was able to conduct two sessions of
participant observation. One at a Boot Camp session the clan had in PlayTown, a cyber café
north of Copenhagen and one at Played LAN – a Counter-Strike LAN competition held in a run
down factory in Albertslund west of Copenhagen. The observations were followed up by five
semi-structured qualitative text based IRC-interviews with the players.
I contacted Team All 4 One by sending Vildkatten a message by joining the forum which was on
the clan’s website. She sent my request to Artamis, who contacted me after about two weeks, and
who then helped set up the group interview in her flat with the other players.
For the group interview I prepared a semi-structured interview guide, which thematically
explored the questions I was exploring at the time (see Appendix II), but which also gave the
interview a less formal form more akin to a conversation, because the questions can flow more
freely in the interview context, as pointed out by Kvale (1997:131) and Mishler (1996:117). This
would allow me to explore their responses as they popped up during the interview session and let
them have a say in what was relevant to their experiences rather than me using a closed interview
guide to make Team-A4O’s answers fit into my predetermined view of female gamers and the
problems they face.
11
Aside from gathering data I hoped the group interview could serve as a stepping-stone for
further interviews and the possibility of seeing them either practice or compete. Since this was
my first meeting with them I wanted to come off as being easy going and not be a burden on
them. Additionally I thought a group interview would be a good way to start because they might
feel intimidated by inviting an unknown man into their homes if they had not established a better
idea of what his intentions and motives were. Also a group interview would give me a good idea
of the dynamics within the group in order to see if I would need to take special considerations
when conducting individual interviews. As a show of good faith I went to a good bakery and
brought some brownies along too.
Before going there I also wanted to figure out what level of confidentiality would be appropriate
for this interview, since I would be quoting the women in this thesis, which made their utterances
public rather than private and hence their statements could potentially be used against them by
third party readers. I made a few lists of gains and losses of three confidentiality levels in order to
figure out what would be the most suitable for the interview:
High confidentiality:
• Use of pseudonyms for the clan members
• Use of a pseudonym for the clan name
• No use of graphics from the clan’s site
• No mention of articles that refer directly to the clan
Gains
Losses
1. The informants may feel that they can
speak completely openly and not feel
restrained to only speak positively
about a hobby, which they really like
and do not want to see put in a
negative light.
2. I can be critical of the informants’
statements without risking that I
inadvertently offend them or give them
a feeling that I’m exploiting their
statements.
3. The case-study might seem more
exemplary if similar studies are done in
other countries.
12
1.
I won’t be able to show graphics from
their website or use quotes from news
articles, where the informants have
voiced their opinions before.
2.
The informants may think that I’m
trying to hide something by not
allowing them to use either their own
names or their gaming aliases.
3.
I will not be able to use photographs
of the informants.
4.
I will not be able to mention specific
tournaments that the team have won
or participated in.
Medium confidentiality:
• Use of pseudonyms for the clan members and/or the clan name
Gains
Losses
1. I can be critical of their statements
without exposing them personally.
Internally they will know who said
what, but it won’t be public
knowledge. This may save them from
potential personal attacks from the
community about what they say during
in the interview(s).
1. The informants may feel that they
cannot speak completely openly and
may feel restrained to only speak
positively about a hobby, which they
really like and do not want to see put in
a negative light.
2. The informants may think that I’m
trying to hide something by not
allowing them to use either their own
names or their gaming aliases.
2. I can show graphics from their website
or use quotes from news articles,
where the informants have voiced their
opinions before, which can then be
analysed.
3. I will not be able to use photographs
of the informants.
3. I can mention specific tournaments
that the team have won or participated
in.
4. I cannot directly correlate what they’ve
said in other media or (maybe even)
their website without compromising
the confidentiality level.
5. The informants may think that I’m
trying to hide something by not
allowing them to use either their own
names or their gaming aliases.
Low confidentiality:
• No use of pseudonyms at all
Gains
Losses
1. I can show graphics from their website
or use quotes from news articles,
where the informants have voiced their
opinions before, which can then be
analysed.
1. I cannot be critical of their statements
without exposing them personally.
2. The informants may feel that they
cannot speak completely openly and
may feel restrained to only speak
positively about a hobby, which they
really like and do not want to see put in
a negative light.
2. I can compare their statements in the
interviews directly to what they’ve said
elsewhere – e.g. in the media or on
their website.
3. I can mention specific tournaments
that the team have won or participated
in.
I had planned on giving them the ‘medium confidentiality’ option, so before we began the
interview I told the women that I would offer them pseudonyms in order to protect them from
13
potentially having their comments made public, which could give backlash. However, they raised
their eyebrows and said that would not be necessary. So the ‘loss’ I had considered when it came
to giving them the option of a ‘low confidentiality’ level did indeed prove to be warranted. This
meant that I have provided the women ‘low confidentiality’ for the purposes of this thesis since
this seemed like the best way to let the informants speak with their own voices rather than them
being part of an anonymous mass (Mishler 1986:125). Also during the introductory briefing I told
the women that the purpose of my study was to examine what it was like to be a female CounterStrike player in Denmark, and that the focus of my study was not to look critically at the violence
of the game and it’s effect on gamers. I hoped this could frame the interview as a discussion of
their experiences and to let them speak about the game without having to guard their statements
about the game, by toning down elements that could potentially be used to demonise the
violence in the game.
For the individual interview with Vildkatten my introduction was similar to the group interview,
but since it took place after the group interview and the others had been given ‘low
confidentiality’ I could not offer her one of the other options because her former clan would
know who she was and anonymity would then be impossible at any level. This did have an effect
during the interview at one point when she stopped and asked who would hear the interview. I
told her that I would transcribe the interview and send it for her to read, and if there was
anything she was not comfortable with being published she was welcome to veto those parts,
which gave her the option of being a collaborator (Mishler 1986:126) on the data from this
interview. This interview was also conducted using a semi-structured interview guide (See
Appendix III). Both the group interview and the interview with Vildkatten were conducted in
Danish, and were recorded on minidisk. I then partially transcribed the interviews, ignoring
pauses in their speech patterns, which made the transcriptions easier to read. Also I left out
passages about specific in-game tactics, which were not relevant to my research questions. I have
only translated the passages I quote into English, as translating the entire transcriptions would
simply have taken up too much time.
My plan of using the first group interview as a stepping-stone paid off and I was allowed to come
along for a ‘Boot Camp’ session at a cyber café and at a LAN, as previously mentioned. For these
observations I adopted a role of observer participant that allowed me to just “hang around”
(Blomberg et. al 1993:131), which meant staying in the background and taking notes in some
situations and asking direct questions to either the women or other people I came into contact
with at the cyber café and the LAN. I had brought along a camera for the LAN, but I refrained
from taking pictures of Team A4O there, mainly because of my own trepidation of appearing too
intrusive or too ‘fan-like’, I think. During the observations I tried to focus on the social
14
interaction of the women both among each other and their interaction with other people there –
either male or female – and the gender roles these took in the space. I have attempted to sketch
out where my presence as an observer came into question in Chapters 3 and 4, where I analyse
the data.
The five IRC-interviews were conducted after the observations in order to further understand
how the women constructed meaning from their experiences there. I ended up using IRC as the
medium for these interviews rather than doing face-to-face interviews because it proved very
difficult to schedule individual two-hour interviews with the women because of their busy
schedules. Instead I decided to attempt to do these via private IRC-interviews. I had to take into
consideration that the instant text-messaging interviews come with some limitations. First of all it
requires that both interviewer and informant are proficient to some level with using an IRC-client
and that the interviewer is aware of some of the conventions that users of these text based
messaging tools use to indicate facial expressions or short hand spellings for commonly used
words. In fact the more I considered the matter, the more it made sense to conduct this type of
interview with the women since the clan have their own IRC-channel where they post news or
chat with friends. This meant that they were very proficient with this form of communication.
My experience with the medium comes from playing an online fantasy football game for about a
year where the central nerve of communication of the league was done in an IRC-channel. I do
want to add that although IRC-interviews have qualities that are reminiscent of conversations
they do not give as detailed descriptions as spoken conversations. This is in part because of the
extra time required to type something rather than say it, but also because the IRC-clients limit
how many characters can actually be typed by one person before it is sent. There is however a
quality of the IRC-interview that I was very happy to be able to use. The client automatically logs
the entire ‘conversation’ in a text file. This meant that I did not have to worry about transcribing
these interviews.
I made appointments with all five members of Team All 4 One, by contacting them individually
in a private channel. This also proved to be a small oversight on my part, because the
appointments were postponed on several occasions, showing a weakness of this method. Namely
that it is not as binding as a face-to-face interview where you are physically in the same room.
Before each interview I had prepared an interview guide that I could copy paste questions from,
which made the whole process of typing much faster for me. Before each interview I warned the
informant of this, so they would not think I was trying to flood them with questions.
Unfortunately the interview with Artamis had to be cut short and we could not reschedule due to
her busy timetable, but the other four women were available for IRC-sessions that took between
one and a half to two hours. During the interview with Tibi I stumbled upon an interesting
15
benefit to this type of interview. While we were doing the interview she had to do laundry, but it
was very easy to stop the conversation and pick it up again because the last sentences and themes
discussed were visible on our respective monitors.
Finally I want to mention that as a parallel to the writing of this thesis I have also made use of a
weblog (http://vesterblog.dk) that I set up in order to have a tool for generating ideas and
getting potential leads to further discussions on topics relating to women and computer games.
The ideas I have posted on the blog throughout the production of this thesis have often been
unfinished thoughts or links to online material that dealt with this theme, and hence there is no
direct textual relation between the blog and this project. The blog is in other words a textual
extension of my thought process rather than an actual complimentary text to be read in
conjunction with the thesis.
16
2
R E S E A RC H H IS TO RY O F
WO M EN AN D CO M P UT ER
GAMES
It seems to me that a shift in the perception of women and their engagement in playing computer
games has occurred over the last seven years or so in research on the subject. We have moved
from the more radical feminist views of games only appealing to macho gamers’ fantasies
(Wajcman 1991: 154) to a more nuanced view of female empowerment through gaming in which
games offer multiple pleasures for women (Taylor 2003). The discussion now seems not to be
concerned with whether women are playing or not, but rather to be focused on what women are
playing. This is where I believe the discussion becomes interesting when looking at Team All 4
One, because they represent female gamers who by many accounts are part of a minority of
women who play first person shooter games (Yates & Littleton 1999, Morris 1999, Schott &
Horrell 2002, Graner Ray 2003, Krotoski 2004).
In this chapter I will be adding my voice to this discussion first by looking at how gender is
socially constructed with regards to computer games rather than being a biologically determined
barrier. I shall then be exploring the position that since games are social activities being
performed in social spaces there is a need for research to focus on these elements (Bryce &
Rutter 2002), which may play an important part in why women are such a small part of the
gaming population of first person shooters. My own findings also point towards a context
oriented explanation for why the women are playing Counter-Strike (see Chapter 3 & 4). But
before I present the theoretical discussion that serves as the foundation of my analysis of the
empirical data I want to clarify how I view gender and its relation to games.
Constructionism vs. Essentialism. Women and Technology
In order for us to have a more nuanced look at why women such as A4O play first person
shooters it is important to understand the limits of the essentialist view of gender which leads to:
the assertion of fixed, unified and opposed female and male natures […] The belief in the
unchanging nature of women and their association with procreation, nurturance, warmth
and creativity, lies at the very heart at the very traditional and oppressive conceptions of
womanhood. Rather than asserting some inner essence of womanhood as an ahistorical
category, we need to recognize the ways in which both ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are
socially constructed and are in fact under constant reconstruction (Wajcman 1991:9).
17
My view on gender in this thesis is based on a constructionist view of gender, since I believe that
this view gives me a more open approach to how we view male and female gamers and their
preferences in games. The essentialist view is an oversimplification that on the surface level
creates an illusion of being able to explain the divides between men and women and their
approach to gaming, since warm and creative women simply should not blow up people
intentionally. Instead of being an inclusive model essentialism becomes an exclusive model. The
constructionist view on the other hand allows us to see a particular social act or activity as being
gendered, but does not exclude people from either gender in taking part in that activity.
In addition when looking at games I think it is important to remember that “[t]echnology is more
than a set of physical objects or artefacts. It also fundamentally embodies a culture or a set of social relations made
up of beliefs, desires and practices” (Wajcman, 1991:149). These social relations Wajcman claims are
dominated by masculine values, which are rooted in an essentialist view of gender and women’s
relation to technology. When we go beyond the artefact of the computer game – the code that
makes playing a game on a computer possible, the graphics on the screen or the rules that govern
it, we can also see a it as embodying a set of social relations made up of the beliefs, designs and
practices of not only the game’s designers, but perhaps more importantly the people who actually
play the game.
Three Key Research Areas: Game Content, Game Spaces
and Gaming Activities
In my analysis of how these social relations have an impact on Team All 4 One and how they are
perceived in the Danish Counter-Strike community. I want to present a theoretical framework
established by Bryce and Rutter (2002) on gender and gaming, which I find particularly appealing,
since it actually takes context into consideration on a large scale. Looking at numbers from the
ISDA from 2001, which makes the claim that 43% of female gamers in the US are female8 they
claim that:
Given such figures, why do social attitudes and academic research on computer gaming
continue to align the leisure pastime with boys, violence and a masculine culture? Why are
females assumed not to play with the “boy’s toys” and female participation in and
consumption of gaming marginalized? Why are we still having problems locating the
invisible girl gamers? (Bryce & Rutter 2002:244)
I find the above questions very appealing when it comes to studying women who play CounterStrike. Here we have a group of women who have embraced the “boy’s toys” and are playing at a
level where they begin to profit financially from their gaming skills, and since they’re
8
Bryce and Rutter note that the methodologies of these market studies are questionable, as mentioned in the
Introduction in Chapter 1.
18
professionals they appear in the media, which makes them visible to the public, and yet they’re
marginalised in the gaming scene and by developers as seen above.
Bryce and Rutter argue that women have been marginalised in previous game studies because
there has been a heavy focus on looking at the games as media texts on a content level and that
focus often comes up with results that point towards a male bias as the intended user of
computer games (2002:246). An example of such a content based argument is in fact one that
Wajcman used to described the lack of women playing games:
Given that is men (often computer hackers) who design video games and software, it is
hardly surprising that their designs typically appeal to male fantasies [...] Many of the most
popular games today are simply programmed versions of traditionally male non-computergames, involving shooting, blowing up speeding or zapping in some way or another [...] No
wonder then that these games often frustrate or bore the non-macho players exposed to
them(1991:154).
The first impulse of an aspiring game designer should then be to attempt to break this
stereotypical male fantasy universe, which is exactly what the so-called Girl’s Games Movement
attempted to do by creating games which were aiming to create games with content more in tune
with what girls seemed to want (Cassell & Jenkins 1998, Laurel 2001). Purple Moon for instance
produced the Rockett series of games where the content focused on issues which girls were
dealing with in their everyday lives such as popularity, making friends etc.9 However, in
opposition to the Girl’s Games Movement were the Grrl Gamerz who brought in a very vocal
opposition to the view that girls did not want violence in their games (Cassell & Jenkins 1998,
Morris 2001, Krotoski 2004).
Yates & Littleton have shown how these colliding views of what women and girls wanted from
games was to be found in how the Girls’ Game Movement and the Grrl Gamerz were in fact
discussing the differences between the “structural elements (problem solving and strategy) [and] the
representational elements (for example characters and graphics)” of the games (1999:115). A reading of the
representational elements in Counter-Strike would say that the game engine had a male bias
because of several of these. The game engine (Half-Life) was designed mostly by Sierra and the
modification into Counter-Strike was created by Mingh Lee a.k.a. Gooseman (Wright et. al 2002).
You cannot choose a female avatar in the game. The ‘male fantasies’ that the game explores
include planting bombs, causing explosions and killing of opponents with modern weapons (see
a screenshot on p. 20). However this reading says nothing about the structural elements of 5on5
competitive Counter-Strike, which involves team play, communication and carefully planned
9
Purple Moon did sell a lot of games, but their investors ended up pulling the plug (Laurel 2001/2?, which both the
industry and many academics see as the failure of feminist games, however Jenkins (2001) points out that Purple Moon
was in fact up against Barbie “the most successful girl franchise of all time”.
19
strategies. Yet, the only reason I know about the structural elements is because I have seen how
clans play this game together (See chapters 3 &4). In other words the game context is vital to my
understanding of the draw of the game. Other research points towards the structural elements
being a vital factor in the enjoyment of games for adult women too. Taylor (2003) demonstration
of the variety of pleasures women get from playing EverQuest, despite the fact that they still
have to struggle with avatars that are very sexualised, to me indicates that the structural elements
in a game may in some cases be more important to the players than the representational ones.
Kennedy (2002) reaches a similar conclusion when looking at Tomb Raider. I am not stating that
the Girl’s Games Movement did not have merit or that they failed in their attempts to create
engaging games for their target audiences (see Jenkins 2001), but rather that the social and
communicative aspects of multi-player fps games, are qualities that are enjoyed by women too.
A gun fight in Counter-Strike where an avatar has just been shot
(http://lednerg.home.comcast.net/misc/sprite02.jpg).
Gendered Spaces
In order to study the structural elements that gamers enjoy it becomes evident that we need to
explore “the real world context and social environment within which gaming takes place” (Bryce & Rutter
2002:248). In this section I shall examine what characteristics and structures of game spaces are
important to examine. These include both offline and online game spaces, which have qualities
that I will describe below.
20
The Gendering of Offline Spaces
Winner (1999) has explored the values, which certain forms of technology consciously or
unconsciously on the part of the designers, enforce upon the users of that technology. He points
to the overpasses that were built under Robert Moses in New York from the 1920’s to the
1970’s:
The two hundred or so low hanging overpasses on Long Island were deliberately designed
to achieve a particular social effect [...] Automobile-owning whites of ’upper’ and
’comfortable middle’ classes would be free to use the parkways for recreation and
commuting. Poor people and blacks, who normally used public transit, were kept off the
roads because the twelve-foot tall buses could not get through the overpasses. (Winner
1999:30).
I see the above as an example of how the physical shaping of a social space very clearly limits not
only how the space is used – i.e. what vehicles that can go on the road – but much more
profoundly actually limits who can actually use the social space. I believe we can apply a similar
approach to looking at the social structures of game spaces such as cyber cafés and LAN-parties
and the values embedded in these. Bryce and Rutter put it like this
We would argue that in many public gaming spaces it is the environments that are maledominated and this gender asymmetry works towards excluding female gamers at a stage
prior to the gendering of gaming texts. Our view is consistent with the gendering of public
leisure spaces, and their association with masculinity in which women are granted limited
access and assume particular roles (2001: 249).
By looking critically at how exactly these public gaming spaces are male-dominated I believe we
can get a little more insight into the social structures where female gamers play Counter-Strike.
Furthermore I think we may get a clearer understanding of why so few women are playing
Counter-Strike in the cyber cafés in Denmark or at LAN events also known as LAN-parties (see
Chapter 3). In fact when it comes to LAN events Bryce and Rutter have stressed that women
often take part in non-gamer roles at the events taking on roles such as ”mothers who brought their
sons to the competition, [...] girlfriends who [...] were there to provide support and a listening ear” (2001:249). In
fact these gender roles seem to pre-date current social gaming spaces: “Video arcades. Which are
central to the leisure of young male adolescents, are virtually off limits for most girls. They are populated almost
exclusively by males; the few females in evidence are usually spectators” (Wajcman 1991: 154).
The consequence of the male-bias in these spaces is that female gamers and participants are often
marginalised. Female competitors were marginalized regardless of their skills with the computer
(Bryce & Rutter 2002: 250). A contemporary example of this marginalisation is evident in a
blogpost by Katla (2004) where she writes of an experience she had at the Gathering, the biggest
LAN event in Norway with almost 5000 participants:
21
God dam assvipes made a movie , of a closeup of all the girls here, a closeup of their tits
and ass. not tjheir brains. I hate the world they make. And i hate the fact that sex is in the
end all that seams to count.
It was to much to hope for. 5 days running around with fellow geeks, doing geeky stuff. I
sdont think i want to go back here, and now i just want to go home, damb brats. now there
is not female geeks here anymore. but girls, and doubt not for a secound that they are here
for your pleasure only. […] they are still here. they did not get kicked out. and i doubt they
will be. Dam shame, it could have been fun beeing a geek here. but i think ill just stay away.
I think the above shows not only the kind of harassment women may be subjected too at a LANevent, but also how the hopes of the female participant for the event were shattered by the movie
created by a group of male attendees (assvipes). Furthermore she seems to indicate that there
were no sanctions from the event organisers, which seems to further her dismay: Katla could not
just be a geek at the event, as she had hoped for, but instead felt treated as a sexual object.
In fact the harassment of women as a minority is not exclusive to gaming spaces, it has been part
of the male dominance of social spaces of computer culture for a number of years:
“[…]boys actively and aggressively capture computer time where, as is usually the case,
there is insufficient computer supply in schools. This harassment of girls interested in
computing into tertiary education. At this stage the harassment takes the form of obscene
computer mail or print-outs of nude women. Women students at computer science at MIT
found this problem so pervasive that they organized a special committee to deal with it”
(Wajcman, 1991:152-153).
This shows that the harassment was not exclusive to the behaviour of young adolescents males,
but that it went all the way into institutions of higher learning, such as MIT. My point is that if
women have been consistently mistreated in the social spaces of both computing and gaming, a
critical look at how the offline spaces where Counter-Strike is played may help us to get a better
understanding of the experiences of how women who play are treated by male players.
Bryce and Rutter seem to think that many of the women may find solace in gaming online due to
the bias of these offline game spaces (2002:250). However, they also point out that home is not
always a safe haven for girl gamers, since they may have to negotiate with male relatives, fathers
or brothers over the control of the gaming systems at home as documented in other studies
(Schott & Horrell 2001, Kerr 2003). Since the fathers and brothers own these consoles it may not
be easy for girls to be allowed to play when they want to.
The Gendering of Online Spaces
Instead of having to deal with gender bias in offline spaces, female gamers have the option of
going online to avoid marginalisation since:
“[f]or female gamers, the anonymity of online communities around game skills provides
the opportunity of competing against male opponents free from the markers of gender,
reducing stereotypical behaviour towards female gamers. Participation in these spaces may
22
consequently lead to greater female participation in public competitive game spaces by
building confidence in gaming skills and abilities which enable females to feel that they can
compete on a socially equal basis with male gamers. (Bryce & Rutter 2002: 250).
From the above I take it that Bryce & Rutter envision that the possibility of anonymity in online
communities give women the possibility to hide their gender and they can thus play the game on
an equal level without the gender-bias they experience in offline spaces. But what properties of
online structures actually influence this? And are the online game spaces free from gender bias?
Winner has stressed that certain artefacts may have inherent political values: “the intractable
properties of certain kinds of technology are strongly, perhaps unavoidably, linked to particular institutionalized
patterns of power and authority.” (1999: 38). The power and authority when it comes to the
overpasses mentioned earlier reflects a conscious political motivation to keep poor people and
blacks away from certain spaces, but as Winner also stresses these motivations are not always
immediately obvious to the casual user of a piece of technology – although he does seem to
indicate that these may be unavoidable. I believe that by taking a critical look at what values and
patterns of power that exist within the social spaces that revolve around Counter-Strike we will
begin to see a pattern that does not consciously exclude women from participating, but support
structures which gives the spaces a male ’markedness’ - defined by Cassell and Jenkins as: ”a
concept taken from linguistics to express the nature of relationships between members of a binary opposition where
one member is more regular or simple than the other, more frequently found, more neutral in meaning, and more
generic” (1998:35).
It is not only artefacts that inhabit spaces but the actual “[s]paces have values. They express these values
through the practices or lives they enable or disable. Differently constituted spaces enable and disable differently.”
(Lessig 1999:64). Lessig also makes a distinction between cyberspace in general, basically all of
online space, and cyber-places, which are communities in cyberspace that have their own values and
regulations, enabled by both the code in the space and the people who occupy it (1999:63ff).
Simply put a cyberspace is occupied by many cyber-places, or online spaces as I call them, which
allow for certain types of interaction depending on what code is available to the users.
The social spaces that come into play when looking at Counter-Strike are not limited to the actual
physical spaces in which the game is played, either at home, the cyber café or the LAN, but there
are several online spaces – or cyber places – which become important to take a closer look at.
These include the game itself, the IRC channels used by the Counter-Strike clans and discussion
forums on Danish gaming sites. All three types of cyber places have an impact on how women
participate in the Counter-Strike scene in Denmark and might even in some cases have an impact
on how the women play the game it self, as I will be showing in Chapters 3 and 4.
23
As mentioned above the possibility for anonymity is a viable option for women who want to
avoid harassment. Lessig describes how the code of AOL makes this possible:
“As a member of AOL you can be one of five people…What does this mean? A screen
name is just a label for identifying who you are when you are on the system. It is not
(indeed, often cannot) be your own name. If your screen name is “Stray Cat” [… and] you
enter a chat room, the list of residents there will add you as “Stray Cat” (Lessig 1999:67).
Additionally this gives the users the opportunity of having names, which do not give other users
any hints of their gender – or it can give you the option of ‘cross-dressing’. In the above example
“Stray Cat” is not marked as being male or female, whereas the name ‘John Spade’ is male
marked. In AOL this also confers you the ability to be different people in different chat rooms.
Since IRC is simply another type of instant messaging protocol, it is clear that the same options
are available in that space and Turkle (1995:179ff) has documented that some women do in fact
enjoy the opportunity to have a different role than their offline persona in these spaces. But what
about the game space? In Counter-Strike where you are identified in the game by your ‘nick’,
which corresponds to Lessig’s use of screen name, but you are not limited in the amount of nicks
you can use and you can change this nick both before and during the game. This means that you
can essentially hide your gender, whenever playing online.
Additionally how you act in these online spaces has a very important impact on the bonds you
can form with the other gamers in the space. These bonds can be dependent on physical
knowledge of the players in the virtual space as is the case for EverQuest players:
”[C]ommon connections between players are physical and cultural proximity and
previously shared gaming experiences. Most Scandinavian EQ players do, for instance,
know other Scandinavian players that they have met through the game. Here the shared
language, [...] time-zone and culture in general that works as an a priori condition for the
development of the [social] networks (Jakobsson & Taylor 2003:84).
When it comes to Counter-Strike this also seems to be the case. Clans will often meet in cyber
cafés, which means they need to be living in somewhat close proximity to each other and thus are
not often made up of players with different nationalities. So while anonymity may be an initial
option for female gamers, if they’re to form bonds with other players in online spaces they must
reveal themselves to their male counter parts, if they’re to be part of the community, since they
will eventually have to meet them offline too. Additionally since Counter-Strike is dependent on
ping speeds for servers and clan members being able to meet online at specific times to practice
Bryce and Rutter’s vision that “Online gaming provides the opportunity to compete without the limitations of
geographical location but, generally, within the limitations of temporal location (…exceptions… such as e-mail
chess). This allows for the formation of online communities around game skills and competencies” (2002: 250)
ends up becoming very difficult for professional or competitive Counter-Strike players.
24
Additionally revealing yourself as a female gamer in an online FPS game may have dire
consequences. Morris (2000) gives examples of what female Quake and Quake 2 players
experienced in the late 90’s and at the turn of the century. She conducted a survey of ten female
quake players where the answers showed that:
…the most overwhelming theme was the amount of gender-based harassment these
women have experienced from male players whilst playing Quake on internet servers; for
nine out of ten this harassment was severe. Some of this harassment was directly related to
sex, such as offensive name calling, demands for netsex or descriptions of the girl's
physical attributes, and some was just malicious. Girls have been 'kicked' off public servers
(banned from playing) because male players didn't want any girls playing, or hunted down
by other (male) players to prevent them being able to score. One girl reported a team game
where members of her own team cornered her and 'killed' her because they didn't want a
girl playing on their team. (2000)
We can see from the above that the harassment that takes place in online spaces is harsh and
often have elements which most Western societies do not condone in public physical spaces:
offensive name calling, offers for netsex etc. It also goes to show that some male Quake gamers
at the time were very much of the mindset that the game should be kept as a boys-only club,
where women have no need to be, and subsequently kicked them from the cyber-space of the
game. Similar examples in The Sims Online, Ragnarok Online and Xbox Live are presented in
Schott (2004). But why should this be in an online space where you never even see the face of
your opponent? Henry Jenkins points to parallels between 19th century boy culture and the
computer game culture of modern boys (1998). He shows the boys’ culture of the time has been
transferred to these cyber spaces that allow for what he calls ’complete freedom of movement’
for the boys, who are then out of their parents’ sight and can engage in social activities which are
at times violent, but at other times explorative. With this in mind we can see the FPS as being
constructed as a typical boys’ space in the minds of the male players, despite the fact that women
do enjoy the freedom of movement which online virtual spaces provide (Taylor 2003:32-33).
With the possibility of attacks from male gamers the wish for female gamers to remain
anonymous is very understandable to me. Still, if women want to compete in tournaments they
will inevitably be forced out of this anonymity. If you’re to compete professionally on an equal
basis with male gamers – as Bryce and Rutter suggest – you must show up physically. And if the
physical spaces are gender-biased towards male participants, how can the women hope to
compete on an equal level? There are stories like that of Stevie ‘Killcreek’ Case, who was the first
ever Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) player in the United States (Kennedy 2004), but
instances of top-female gamers entering the male dominated spaces on- or offline seem to be rare
indeed and there are obvious limits when competing in tournaments to the anonymity of a screen
name.
25
On a final note on anonymity, I want to stress that having the option of anonymity in an online
community can also become a problem as Lessig (1999: 78ff) shows with his example from
.law.cyber. Here a user by the name IBEX caused mayhem on an otherwise friendly and
respectful message board tied to one of Lessig’s classes at Yale by attacking people on the board
not ideologically, but personally. Lessig describes how this changed the mood of not only the
boards but the mood in the physical class as well. This may be one of the reasons that the
message boards of the Danish gaming sites such as XplayN.dk and Played.dk require players to
register and log in order for them to post comments.
Despite the above the online spaces for female FPS players is also one where friendly players
meet and where lots of support can be found. This was the case for the Quake players Morris
surveyed and her own experiences as a player:
The majority of the women interviewed got into Quake and games in general because of
supportive male friends, partners, brothers, fathers and other relatives. And many players
online are happy to teach and exchange information regarding gameplay, new software and
programming instructions with other players, male or female. I have online male friends
who will ask me during a game about command line instructions or how to perform
different programming functions, because they have learnt that I research and collect
information and am happy to share.
Apart from the immersiveness of the game in itself and the pleasure of learning and
developing skills and exercising them in competition (as in any other sport), the social
nature of the online multiplayer game was one of the things that really amazed me when I
first discovered it. Often a community feeling builds up among players and people get to
know each other quite well. Sometimes players will just log onto a game to catch up with
friends and just chat (2000).
Interestingly the invitation into the game space came from male players – as did they with the
women interviewed by Kerr (2003) – and these males. Morris’s experiences in the Quake
community are also a nod in the direction. This also points towards the activities that take place
within these game spaces, which I shall examine below.
Gendered Gaming Activities
Having taken a closer look at the spheres of gendered content and gendered spaces I want to
round up the theoretical discussion by looking at Gendered Activities. “Given that computer gaming
is routinely claimed to be more popular and more frequently engaged by males [...], it seems a reasonable
extrapolation that the activities and practices which constitute computer gaming are also gendered” (Bryce &
Rutter 2002: 250). Here we are looking at not only how games are played by men and women,
but also at how the gamers actually view their actions in and around the games. In fact Bryce and
Rutter stress that:
The gendering of gaming experiences is, in part, related to perceptions of gendered game
content and notions of gender roles and appropriate leisure activities [3]. It has been
suggested that females are more affiliative and nurturing, preferring leisure activities which
26
have a stronger social aspect [22]. This, when linked to a general (but largely empirically
unsupported) perception that gaming is not a social activity, but a solitary activity for male
‘nerds’ or ‘geeks’, seems to quite neatly offer a model for understanding gendered gaming.
(2002:251).
A great example of this was a survey done of five hundred students, grades eight to twelve,
showing that although 81 percent of students thought that “boys and girls are equally competent in the
use of computers” their views were really quite different when they had to draw a ‘computer whiz’
and a computer ‘whizn’t’10 (de Castell & Bryson, 1998:236). One student’s drawings can be seen
below:
Computer Whiz
Computer Whizn’t
(de Castell & Bryson, 1998:237)
Of the drawings collected 71 percent of the whizzes were of males, 18 percent female and 11
indeterminate. A striking example of how even though there may reign a conception of equity
when it comes to computing, we still think of the experts of computer culture as being male.
Intel Doesn’t Play With Women
A hint that the survey above reflects a more general perception of computer experts could be
seen online in April 2004, when Intel first launched their IT Manager Game. This game put you
in the role of a (by default) male IT Manager, who had to support an increasing user base by
hiring support staff – who all, incidentally were male too – and by buying Intel equipment for the
company. You were also called in to speak with a male senior manager, who would ask you
questions about what IT equipment the company should invest in. The astute reader will notice,
that there were no women working in the company and even more interestingly you couldn’t hire
women at all in this iteration of the game. The game clearly seemed to indicate that the world’s
largest producer of microchips for personal computers did not see women as being part of the
staff of a simulated IT company. Even more interesting was that they had clearly made an effort
to include a varied racial spectrum of male employees, which makes the exclusion of women
10
Their terms for a computer expert and a person who can’t learn to use computers.
27
even more surprising, since they were obviously trying to avoid controversy on account of the
gamer not being able to hire Africans or Asians.
An example of one of the male employees you could hire in the game. This is Phillip, a
Caucasian male, whom I considered hiring in my first try of the Intel IT Manager Game in
April 2004.
Intel did pull the game offline very quickly after the initial launch with the lines: “Your Interest in
the IT Manager game is appreciated. Intel is currently making revisions to the game, please check back again in
the end of May to test your IT Manager skills”. Their revisions added options for choosing whether
your IT-manager was male or female and they included female employees for you to hire. The
Intel example is superbly illustrative because it shows not only that women are perceived not to
work with computer support, but also it presupposes that the intended player of the game is
male.
Strictly speaking the Intel example is a matter of gendered game content, but I believe it is a
product of the designers’ perceptions of what types of players the game would have, and it also
shows a male-bias to activities associated with computers from a huge multinational company. It
should not be a surprise then that many adult female gamers are not quick to identify themselves
as gamers, when they compare themselves to their male counter parts, whom they identify in that
role (Schott & Horrell 2001, Kerr 2003, Schott 2004). Add to this that most of the women
interviewed about whom they play with point to male friends, be it boyfriends, brothers, fathers
28
or male acquaintances in their social networks that are the ones that introduce them to gaming
and who they continue to play computer games with (Schott & Horell 2001, Kerr 2003). This
clearly marks the role of being a gamer as a masculine endeavour. Additionally “gamers are aware of
the social stigma of being a gamers” (Yates and Littleton: 118) which infers that girls might be under
both the stigma of being a gamer and being a girl gamer, in a way a double marginalisation.
A clear case of how playing a game can be seen as a gendered activity is shown by Yates and
Littleton (2001). They find that the affordances associated with a technology have a profound
influence on the difference of how a group of boys and girls tackled a ‘game/task’. They used a
piece of software “modelled on a physical game […] which involves manoeuvring a metal ring around a bent
wire in such a way not to touch the wire. If the ring touches the wire, it closes a circuit and makes a buzz. The
software version of this ‘game/task’ involves a cursor that represents a section through the metal ring and a
deformed angular line representing the wire.” (2001:109-110).
The reason they call it a ‘game/task’ is that they tested the software on a group of 11-year-olds,
where there was no gender difference in performance between the boys and the girls when it was
presented as a test, but when it was presented as a game there: “was a significant gender difference,
favouring the boys.” (Yates & Littleton 2001:110). To me this shows that our perceptions of
gendered gaming activities may be defined at an early age, but perhaps more importantly that the
essentialist view that gendered activities are biologically inherited is flawed. Instead a game and a
player are determined in the social context in which we define ‘playing a game’ and ‘who gets to
play’.
Another example of gendered gaming activity was seen in a study conducted in Australia of
children in computer clubs:
On a number of occasions the researchers asked girls and boys to play together in order to
examine any differences in playing style in this circumstance. This resulted in a number of
interesting incidents. The most common phenomenon, even though the children were
aged 8 – 11, was that of flirting! Although the transcripts of the talk don’t reveal this, it was
clear through other subtleties such as the eye contact, the tone of voice, the facial and body
expressions. (Thomas & Walkerdine 1999).
Here the activity of gaming is actually an excuse for something else for the children – attempting
to get the attention of the other sex – which shows that the game itself is not central to the
gendered activities taking place but rather that it serves as a tool for making oneself attractive. In
addition Thomas and Walkerdine point to the expectations of parents and peers in what games
the girls are engaged in playing and how much time they spend playing. They show how parents
in the study seemed more concerned with girls spending many hours playing games than they did
with boys. This leads them to conclude that: “Maybe it is simply not feasible, not ‘OK’ for girls to play
games with the same intensity and passion as the boys because it is too threatening or it is devalued by parents or
29
peers” (Thomas & Walkerdine 1999). I interpret not feasible here as being part of a social
construction around girls and gaming that prevents them from playing as intensely as the boys.
Not because of who they are but because what is expected of them. In fact I believe that time
and intensity are traits often ascribed to ‘hard core’ players and thus the social construction
around these players is gendered at a very young age. However this was the construction of
gendered play that female Quake players were attempting to deconstruct in the late 1990’s:
The Crack Whores [...] construct on-line personas based on the clichés of pornography,
stressing their measurements and their pleasure in ”fucking” and ”fragging.” Responding
to a woman [...]
Uncomfortable with the overtly sexual tone of their website, a Crack Whores
spokesperson explained, ”Part of the online multi-player experience is the use of wild and
extreme personas. Who would you rather deathmatch against, sweet Barbie from clan Doll
or Street Fightin’ Mona from the CrackWhores. The name IS intended to shock and
stimulate (Cassell & Jenkins 1998:33).
Cassell and Jenkins interpret this as being a move of empowerment for these women:
The ”Quake Grrls” movement gives these women, who range in age from their mid-teens
to their late thirties, a chance to ”play with power”, to compete aggressively with men and
to refuse to accept traditional limitations on female accomplishments. Their
unconventional rhetoric playfully flaunts their militarism, yet their ties to feminism remain
firm (1998:34).
However, as I will show in the next chapters using this rhetoric in the Counter-Strike universe
requires that you can back up your words, or they will most certainly come back to haunt you. So
the question remains if their attempts of empowerment have transgressed from one game to the
other. Additionally there seems to be another distinct difference in the Quake Universe and the
Counter-Strike Universe of today. Kennedy (2002) has shown how female players could gain
acceptance and empowerment by producing skins for the in game avatars that other players
would use. Still, this practice does not seem to be an activity that either male or female
competitive gamers engage in when it comes to Counter-Strike. To me this seems to indicate that
the focus in the Counter-Strike community may be on gaming rather than on skinning.
Despite these examples of how the Grrl Gamers seem to be trying to break the shackles of
gender it is also important to realise that: ”[a]lthough the presence of these groups represented a
significant counterbalance to the demarcation of the First Person Shooter genre as male, such accounts had a
tendency to overshadow less political and overt game playing experiences” (Schott 2004). That less overt
gaming experiences can in fact be gendered is further demonstrated by Schott’s focus-group
study of female gamers using the GameBoy Advance SP. He shows that the women who had
little gaming experience actually enjoyed the activity of playing games with the device, but were
clearly thrown off by the marketing campaign for the device that featured a marked tagline ”for
men” (2004:4). This seems to indicate that women do in fact enjoy the activity of gaming, but may
be put off by gender-biased advertising before they even get a chance to try playing. In short they
30
are turned off by the representational elements of the advertising, while they actually enjoy the
structural elements of playing the game.
Summary
Through out this chapter I have worked towards showing that by adopting a feminist view of the
social construction of gender and technology I have been able to shift the focus of women and
gaming from an essentialist assumption that women do not play computer games because of
their inherent non-violent natures. By showing how game content can be seen on a structural
level rather than a representational level I have adopted the argument that we need to be looking
at the spaces games are being played in and what gaming activities that are taking place there.
These spaces include both offline and online spaces, which all have a male-gender bias. This male
bias can lead to very vehement attacks on the females who do enter them, but in turn their male
friends in these spaces often protect these women. I have also shown how gaming is seen as a
male activity where women are introduced to gaming by males in their existing social networks,
how women do not identify themselves as being gamers and how even at a young age girls are
socially instructed to see gaming as an activity where being ‘hard-core’ is for the boys only.
In the next two chapters I shall apply these views to my empirical data showing how they have an
impact on professional female Counter-Strike players in Denmark and how these have had an
influence in their participation in the Counter-Strike scene in both offline and online game
spaces.
31
3
O F F LIN E G A M E S PA C E S
A C T IV I TIE S
AND
In the next two chapters I will be presenting my empirical results from my interviews and
observations. This chapter will focus on the women gamers’ experiences in offline gaming
spaces, where the next chapter focuses on their experiences in online gaming spaces. Together I
believe they paint a detailed picture of some of the struggles they face and the benefits they reap
from participating in these game spaces.
During all the interviews and my observations the women were very engaged in talking about the
structural elements of Counter-Strike. They focus on specific tactics, new strategies and issues
with one map over another. To me this indicated that the representational elements of CounterStrike did not really have an effect on why they have chosen to play this game. However I do not
feel that my knowledge of Counter-Strike tactics is adequate to properly analyse the way they talk
about these elements, other than to say that at the LAN-event and at the cyber café the male
players were using similar language about the game. This has led me to focus on the game spaces
and game activities in my study of Team All 4 One.
I will be presenting two offline spaces where I had the chance to observe Team All 4 One play
the game: cyber cafés, LAN events. I will also present some of the experiences they have had
with domestic gaming. My aim is to show how these spaces and activities that take place there
influence the perception of female gamers and how they to some extent have advertent or
inadvertent gender-biases that may be used to explain the huge gender gap found on the Danish
Counter-Strike scene. I will be looking at how all of these spaces contribute to a gendering of
Counter-Strike as a game beyond the content level, which in essence means looking at the social
constructions that have been built up around gaming in these. I believe that this gives me a
unique opportunity to look critically at these structures and the position of women in them and
their chances for achieving equity as gamers.
Cyber Cafés
I met the clan at the PlayTown cyber café, which is in Lyngby, a well-off town north of
Copenhagen. The café itself was nested in a shopping mall across from a fast food sandwich bar
32
and next to a multiplex cinema. Once inside the fluorescent lights in the café had been covered
with a red filter giving a darkened atmosphere in the place. I saw a couple of cut-out figures from
Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne as soon as I entered. The place was split into two rooms: an entry
room that had maybe 30 or 40 computers in ’islands’ of four, where the bar was also located and
a back room where there were maybe 30 or 36 computers places in ’islands’ of six. Team A4O
checked in with the manager of the place - a man in the early to mid 30’s - and were given seats
in the back room next to an opening to the entry room. I briefly told the manager that I was
studying the clan and the manager gave me permission to sit in free of charge.
The women took their seats, which had a tactical significance in the game depending on who
usually covers whom. I’ve sketched out their positions below (the grey spaces being tables and
computers), and shown where I sat during their boot camp:
Tibi
Artamis
NissePigen
Tatiana
Muus
Me
I tried to sit as unobtrusively as possible in a position where I could see all their monitors and
still have an overview of the room they were playing in. Sitting this way however meant that my
back was to the corridor where other players would walk by, and since I was also jotting down
field notes, I think this might have given some of the male players there the impression that I had
an official connection to the team. It might have had an impact on how many or few of the male
gamers there actually decided to stop and talk to A4O. Also, while I could observe all the players
and see what they were doing when playing the game, it was not possible for me to see what was
going on in the IRC channels that they were using between games which limited my observation
to the physical space and the game space.
The girls seemed pretty much ’at home’ in the cyber café. Most of them had brought their own
equipment – mouse pad, mouse and headset. Tatiana had apparently forgotten hers which caused
NissePigen to chide her in a friendly manner: ”We need to give Tati a list so she can remember her stuff!”
They began setting up almost immediately: plugging in mice, checking keyboards and adjusting
seats, logging on to IRC-clients and the game, and configuring the game using commands in the
game’s console, which means tweaking the game to their preferred play style. Obviously they had
plenty of experience in this type of game space.
33
Girl Gamers – a Minority in Cyber Cafés
When I arrived at the café at 15:00 there were no girls or women playing games while the place
was filled to about a third of its capacity with pre-teen and teenage boys. There were a few older
men there – e.g. the manager. When A4O began setting up there were a few curious looks from
the guys, but no one approached them at that time. Some of the younger boys were loud at times
and a few were wrestling and hustling nearby where the clan were playing, however during a
game which counted as a tactical exercise before an actual event all the women’s attention was
tightly focused on the screen.
At around 17:30 to 18:00 there seemed to be a shift in the age of the male gamers with more guys
in their late teens and early 20’s showing up. At around 20:30 there were a couple of men in their
30’s too. While A4O were playing games a few guys came over to look over my shoulder, but
whether this was out of curiosity or just to look at a clan playing the game was hard to tell, since
they seemed to be the only clan playing there that evening. The women did not seem to notice
these older guys either if they were playing.
During the 7 hours I spent in the café I observed only two girls using computers there; one was
checking her email as I walked by, the other was chatting via an MSN Messenger, with no game
running in the background. The only other female there was one of the employees, who did not
help with technical issues, which were the manager’s domain it seemed. Her role there was to
serve snacks and soft drinks from behind the counter, clean tables and wipe screens.
I had the opportunity at one point to ask the manager about the scarcity of female gamers when
he came over to ask me a few curious questions about my project and to watch the clan play for a
little while. I asked him if women came into the café to play games. His answers can be seen in
the excerpt from my field notes:
He shakes his head: “A few girls come in – not many. One or two are really good. I think
they mainly play at home… The girls come to surf the internet… I think they prioritise
their money differently. [Buying clothes]”
I confront him on this issue, in order to see if this is actual knowledge or just common
preconception: “Yeah? I think young Danish males are starting to think about their clothes
too?”
Manager: (Nods) ”True. There’re a few guys who come in here (shakes his head) they
spend 1500 to 1800 kroner11 on a pair of jeans.”
11
Approximately € 200 to €400 at the time.
34
This not only shows that girls seldom come into the café to play and the few that do enter
basically surf the net. Additionally it also shows how the manager seems to think that women
prefer to spend their money on clothes rather than games. He admits to some young men
spending too much money on clothes, and yet those guys still come to play in his café. He did
not seem be reflecting on the fact that a girl’s experience of walking into his café might be a little
intimidating; being the only women there besides the girl cleaning could be a reason for female
gamers not flooding the place.
This made me curious about what these professional female players’ first experiences in a cyber
café had been like. What did it feel like to enter a space that was dominated by male players
young and old? During the interviews I learned that just as in previous studies (Morris 2000, Kerr
2003 and Schott 2004) all of the women had been introduced to the game by their boyfriends or
their brothers. Some had been taught to play at a computer at home, while others had their first
gaming experience in a cyber café. Tibi was actually the only one who had gone with a female
friend the very first time she was in a cyber café rather than being brought along by a male
gamer. She recalls the experience12:
<Tibi^Tøjvask> […] It was actually quite a long time ago, when ChickZ, the girl clan I
‘gamed13’ in, decided that we should meet.
<Tore> Mmm?
<Tibi^Tøjvask> Actually think that there was a time before that in our local cyber café in
Holte14 […] Yeah that was some experience.
<Tore> How so?
<Tibi^Tøjvask> everyone stared when I and another girl came in there and said we were
going to play
<Tore> Yeah?
<Tibi^Tøjvask> It was just a completely different world, a lot of boys sitting and staring at
their csreens
<Tibi^Tøjvask> screens*
12
This is taken from the IRC interview, which can be seen by the < > surrounding the nick’s we used for that session.
I have presented the nicks as they were seen on screen, because I believe it also shows how these represent something
beyond the mere name of the participant. In this case, as I mentioned in Chapter 2, Tibi was doing laundry during this
interview, which is why her nick is followed by the word ’Tøjvask’ meaning just that.
13
She actually uses the English verb ’to game’ here. This is something that I noticed the Danish CS-players at the LAN
used too. It’s interesting since there is a Danish word for it ’spille’, but I think that since that also applies to playing
board games the computer gamers use the Anglicised verb in order to signify that they’ve moved beyond just board
games.
14
Another well off town north of Copenhagen.
35
<Tibi^Tøjvask> and I remember that there were crappy machines
<Tibi^Tøjvask> and a very small café
<Tore> What did it mean to you to that you were the only girls?
<Tibi^Tøjvask> Not really a lot, we were just going to play and people quickly stopped
staring and kept on playing themselves.
<Tore> Do you still experience staring when you play in cafés?
<Tibi^Tøjvask> There’ll always be a little, also because more girls have come on the
scene and people probably want to check if it’s someone they know who walks in the door.
[…]
<Tibi^Tøjvask> I also take an extra peek when other girls come in whom I don’t know at
first.
<Tore> Yeah?
<Tibi^Tøjvask> It’s curiosity.
<Tibi^Tøjvask> which will never go away
<Tibi^Tøjvask> :)
Tibi's description of the cyber café was that it was ‘a completely different world’ where ‘guys
were staring into screens’ seems to show that she initially felt out of place, but since they were
two girls in there together they were able to overcome their initial worries and play a game in
there. Indeed taking the first step into a cyber café must be a little intimidating for women. First
of all you have to be willing to enter what feels like a different world where no members of your
own gender are present. Secondly if there are other women they will probably give you a second
look as when they step through the door, as Tibi admits to doing now.
Walking into a dark room with anywhere from 10 to 90 people looking up from their screens at
you must feel a little eerie. But being a solitary woman in a cyber café did not seem to be a bad
experience for any of the women I interviewed though. Artamis told the following anecdote
during the group interview:
Artamis:15 The first time I was introduced to it, it was my younger brothers, who - I’d just
come home from South Africa and then they said: “Hi. We’re going to a cyber café, me
and some friends and stuff like that, and you’re coming with us!”
“Oh I am?”
“Yes you are! Now come on!”
Then we went down there and were going to play that Counter-Strike. And I was sitting in
15
A nick in bold indicates a quote from an interview where the informants and I were in the same room. This means
that in all these cases the interview data is from the group interview, except where I quote Vildkatten.
36
front of the monitor and then “Fuck…. FUUUUCK what am I supposed to do? Who’re
you?” Then I point and there are like tonnes of little boys around me.
[Speaks in a soft voice] “Should I buy for you?”
[Own voice] “Ok! You do that.”
[We all laugh and she continues in her own voice] “Where am I supposed to go?”
[Soft voice] “Try to go over there. You’re supposed to shoot that guy.”
[Own voice]“Ok!” Duh-duh-duh.
Even though it was her brothers who insisted that she should go to the cyber café with them, she
actually got help from ’tonnes of little boys’. To me this shows the friendly face of the cyber cafés
– a place to hang out after school and teach newbies a thing or two about a game. Artamis got
help in the given situation because she was a grown woman, who was not afraid to voice her
insecurities about the game in the café – and quite vocally it seems by her language in the
situation. Judging by the reaction of the little boys a grown woman must have been quite a rarity
in that café.
In Muus’s case it was her former boyfriend who brought her along, initially because she was
opposed to even going:
Muus: I had never gained the interest [in the game] if it wasn’t because I had almost been
forced, because I really nagged about even going to a cyber café, how much fun could that
be!? Then he said: “The try to come along, for Christ’s sake, instead of just sitting down
and being mad about it.” “Well, ok.” So I had to come along.
Tore: Do you remember what you had against cyber cafés?
Muus: Yeah, I couldn’t understand why he had to spend so much time on it. I thought it
was corny, when we could to lots of other fun stuff. Like going out looking at clothes or
something. [Everyone chuckles]. That was just so much more fun. I couldn’t see why he
had to spend 5 hours at a cyber café on a weekday where we could be sitting at home
having dinner together or something. I thought it was completely ridiculous, but then I
found out that playing computer games was a hell of a blast.
Muus tells in her story of her transition from sceptic to gamer initial cyber café experience that
she was ‘almost forced’ into gaming. Tatiana also talked about this being forced into trying the
game. These experiences show the resistance that these women might initially have had towards
Counter-Strike do not necessarily lie in just the game, but perhaps more so in the game space it
was being played in. In Muus’s case it was not even a desire to check out Counter-Strike or a
cyber café that got her into gaming, but rather a desire to spend more time with her boyfriend at
the time. Now she seems to make fun of her former viewpoint who liked ‘buying clothes’ or
‘having dinner’ rather than having ‘a hell of a blast’ playing computer games. A little of the
chuckle being generated at her ironic statement about clothes is reflected in her view of
femininity, which she expressed in the IRC-interview later:
<Tore_> What is femininity to you?
<a4o|muus\\> lol, I’ve never thought about that… in my case I just think it’s about
dressing feminine and looking like a girl
37
<Tore_> How do you think, one “looks like a girl”?
<a4o|muus\\> puhh, now you’ve gotten me onto thin ice :P
<Tore_> That certainly wasn’t intentional;)
<a4o|muus\\> well do yourself up a little, walk around in clothes that are aimed at girls
etc
<Tore_> Ok. Then let me ask, do you feel that you are feminine?
<a4o|muus\\> yes, I do
<a4o|muus\\> e.g. are pink and baby blue my favourite colours and [I] have a lot of
clothes in those colours :D
<Tore_> :D
<Tore_> Do you experience any problems with uniting femininity and cs?
<a4o|muus\\> no not at all
Muus’s view of femininity is tied to the visual colour signals sent by women in the clothes they
wear, which perhaps made her juxtapose the experience of being in a cyber café with shopping
for clothes in her statements earlier. I think this can be seen as a contrast in her perception of
gendered activities and what was acceptable to like. Before becoming a gamer she indulged in the
feminine activity of shopping rather than the male activity that her ex-boyfriend indulged in,
going to the cyber café. Now she feels that she can indulge in both activities though16.
During the boot camp session an incident occurred, which I found particularly interesting in
terms of gender roles in the cyber café. Just before Team-A4O began playing the first of their
practice games a young man came by and began asking questions. Artamis nodded towards me
and told him to ”Talk to our manager”, which made the other women chuckle - so much for
unobtrusiveness. He then turned to me and asked, ”Which one is Tati?” I felt that it would be
unnatural not to tell him, since I did know who she was. Wouldn’t a manager know who was
who in a clan? Yet, although I didn’t really feel comfortable pointing towards Tatiana, I felt that it
would be the most natural thing to do in the situation17. He then proceeded to ask her for her
autograph, and while looking at the monitor she demanded to know what he wanted it for. He
just smiled and asked what she thought autographs normally are for. She smiled a little crookedly
at this and mumbled something about how people normally got paid for that. He didn’t really
16
I do think that this may have been a methodological mistake on my part, since I could probably have gotten a more
detailed response from Muus here if I had asked the question more openly i.e. ”How do you unite being feminine with
playing Counter-Strike?”
17
I think that if I had told him that he would have to ask the women directly they might actually have thought that I
was an annoyance to have along, since answering a simple question normally is not that hard a task.
38
seem to hear this though as he had apparently given up on getting the autograph just then. All
through this brief conversation she hardly looked at him. He did come back later, when they
were playing, pounded one hand on his chest and loudly proclaimed several times that “Uh-uh.
Uh-uh!” When she briskly demanded to know what he was moaning about he said “You’re hurting
me! You’re hurting me!” while he pounded a hand against his heart. When he finally left the café a
few hours later he tapped me on the shoulder and said that I should get her autograph for him
and leave it at the counter, which indicated to me that he had some sort of affiliation to the café,
but I couldn’t say whether he was an employee who was just there hanging out or just one of the
regulars.
I think the incident with the ‘autograph hunter’ exemplifies that men and women were not quite
equal in this gaming space. The young man should have noticed that Tatiana was slightly
uncomfortable with his request to begin with as she mainly looked at the screen when he was
addressing her, yet he insisted on being a bit more aggressive in attempting to get the autograph
from her. The pounding of his heart and his hint that she was hurting him show that he is almost
flirting with her to get her autograph. Also he didn’t really seem humble at all when he demanded
the autograph; his questions seemed almost like commands.
The Cyber Café as a Social Space
However not all the odds seemed to be against the ladies in this place. Later in the evening a
young man walked in whom Tatiana seemed to know. She greeted him with a hug and they spent
some time talking when she had a break from the practice games. I was in no position to hear
anything they said, but they seemed to be conversing as normal friends do. In fact friendships do
matter when it comes to playing Counter-Strike in cafés:
<Tore_> Why did you keep playing Counter-Strike after your brothers brought you to a
cyber café the first time?
<a4o|Artamis> I had a good friend who also played, and when I moved to Århus and got
internet we made a clan. Everyone in the clan knew each other and were the same age so
we had it damn fun when we played
<Tore_> So it meant a lot to have a circle of friends who were into it too
<a4o|Artamis> yes I thought so
[…]
<a4o|Artamis> I don’t think that I would have continued if e.g. my friend had not played
<Tore_> Ok. Why not?
[…]
39
<a4o|Artamis> it was a thing we had together, if no one I knew had the game then I
probably couldn’t be bothered [to play] either
Artamis emphasises her dependence on a social circle of friends who ‘knew each other and had
the same age’, which I believe shows how important it is for players of a multi-player game like
Counter-Strike to be able to get along with the others that they play with. During the interviews
Team-A4O and Vildkatten all talked about this on several occasions indicating that if you’re to be
‘bothered’ to keep coming back to a cyber café with your friends you all need to be able to get
along socially.
A final albeit small thing that struck me about the physical space of the cyber café was that it had
three bathrooms, but none of them had any logo or writing on them indicating whether they
were for men or for women, which is the norm in the vast majority cafés – not cyber cafés – in
Copenhagen and it’s suburbs. Did this mean anything to the women, when they were there?
<Tore|Away> [...] When you Boot Camped at Playtown I was stuck by the fact that there
were no men’s and women’s bathrooms. What do you think about that?
<a4o|NisseP^away> ohhh welll.....I suppose you could say that not many girls come there
..but when they do have 3 bathrooms they could make one a girl’s bathroom....would’ve
made it a little more hygienic for us girls..among other things they have that at net-x in
Roskilde18
<a4o|NisseP^away> but [I] don’t think they’ve split it up at boomtown19 either
To me this seemed to show a slightly unintended ‘markedness’ of this space as a male space that
Cassell and Jenkins (see Chapter 2). NissePigen says that it’s unhygienic for the women,
indicating that she feels that a toilet space used almost exclusively by men is unclean.
Summary
In the section above I attempted to show how cyber cafés to a large degree can be regarded as
gendered game spaces where the activities that take place there are also perceived by the
participants as leaning more towards male than female activities. The striking absence of female
gamers in the space makes it intimidating for women to initially enter a cyber café and the initial
scrutiny from all the other players in there is something a woman must overcome if she wants to
participate in the space, although if she does enter and plays she may get help from male players
in learning the ropes of playing Counter-Strike. However, women could possibly be approached
by male regulars who are looking for a little attention from them. This may cause some women
to have reservations about playing the games in the cyber cafés, and unfortunately the gendering
18
Net-x is a cyber café that sponsors Team-A4O
19
BoomTown is often seen as the cyber café by gamers in Copenhagen, although since it’s a franchise there are also
BoomTown cafés in Århus, Odense and Ålborg , the largest towns in Denmark after Copenhagen.
40
of the cyber cafés, inadvertent as it may be, is also keeping women away from the social activities
that take place there.
LAN Events
Although the competitive aspect of gaming is present during boot camps in cyber cafés the
stakes at LAN events and tournaments are much higher because this is where clans can win
prizes – big cash prizes on some occasions. These events often last several days and/or
evenings/nights where Counter-Strike clans may play three or more games a day. The Danish
LAN-scene is strikingly similar to the Australasian LAN scene described by Swallwell (2004),
which means that the events are often run by a few individuals and are not-for-profit events. In
the following section I will be taking a look at LAN events and show how these are indeed
gendered game spaces (Bryce & Rutter 2002: 250) again, not necessarily because the organisers
want to keep women out, but rather in the way the space is structured without thinking about
gender.
PlayedLAN, the event I attended in September 2004 was held in a closed-down factory, which is
owned by a Danish ISP, who also sponsored the internet connection for the event. The closeddown factory was in the industrial quarter of a suburb in western Copenhagen. Since participants
were required to bring their own computers, monitors, mattresses and sleeping bags for the
three-day event, the only way to get there was by car. This meant that parents were driving many
of the participants who were under 18. I immediately noticed a fair number of men and women
in their 40’s driving these cars loading off their teenage sons and their friends and then driving
off again. Aside from the 5 women of A4O there were no female gamers at the event out of 29
competing teams in the Counter-Strike competition – the main attraction for the event with cash
prizes going to the top five teams. All in all that meant that there were 140 male gamers to 5
women, which comes out to roughly a 3%-4% female representation. This included boys as
young as 11 or 12, teenage boys up to men in their mid 30’s. The majority of the male gamers
were probably in their mid teens to early 20’s though. I spotted only three other women at the
event when it was up and running: one was tending the bar/snack stall, and two others came by
to hang out with their boyfriends for a while. All the officials, the organisers themselves, the
technical support staff and the administrators, called admins, were male.
Because of the age spread of the gamers the organisers gave wristbands to all the participants.
Anyone under 18 was given an orange wristband while the over 18’s were given green
wristbands, allowing them to buy beers from the ’bar’. When getting a wristband you would have
to show identification in order to get a green band they’d announced. In my opinion the
wristbands are a visual example of how the organisers had thought of a difference factor
41
separating the gamers at the event. A difference that could have legal consequences for them if
they did not have a system in place to make sure that minors were not in a position to purchase
alcohol. The question was if similar considerations were in place for the tiny minority of female
participants. The wristband situation had to do with the law after all, but the other conventions
of the game space would probably have their roots in norms.
All the gaming was to take place in a huge room with a concrete floor and few windows. The
organisers had set up rows of plywood tables with network hubs and power supplies. White
plastic chairs were provided for the participants to sit in. I’ve included a photo from the gaming
hall below. The entrance hall of the place had been refurbished with a long interim desk covered
with black cloth. Behind this desk were the snack bar and the admin area. Additionally they had
set up a projector that would be showing some of the games being played at the tournament on a
huge white wall.
Shot 1 from the LAN – A4O were sitting at the back under the big banner, where they had placed
their own smaller banner underneath.
42
I noticed that Team All 4 One had brought a number of
‘trophies’ along with them along with their computers
and sleeping bags. These trophies turned out function
almost like territorial markings of the section they were
seated in during the LAN. They had brought along their
‘official’ laminated sign from the ESWC, for which Tibi
asked me to get some duct-tape so they could hang it up
on the wall behind them. Tibi also showed me the giant
fake cheque they received at that tournament. I was
allowed to listen to a rap that a male gamer had made
especially for A4O for the clan’s first anniversary. I
noticed that both Muus and Tibi were mouthing the
words to the rap while they were either chatting on IRC
or playing practice games before the actual competition
was to start the following day. As the final icing on the
Team A4O’s ‘Official’ sign from
ESWC with both sponsor logo from
NVDIA and the Danish flag.
cake they also covered the backs of the white plastic chairs with their sponsored t-shirts. I take
this as the clan being very proud of their achievements since they are very eager to display them
when they play in public spaces. Also the rap indicates a strong support from parts of the male
community.
I noticed that only a few of the male clans had banners. For instance ‘Fearsome’ had a spray
painted cloth banner hanging near ‘their’ section, however none of the other teams that were at
the LAN had brought along nearly as many trophies to put on display. This made me think that
the trophies in a way symbolise the team emphasising their right to be there, although Tibi
claimed in an online interview before the event that there was no pressure just because they were
women:
[Interviewer] Do you feel any “pressure” by being the only girl clan to be found at Played
LAN? ;)
[Tibi] No I wouldn’t say that. After all, we’ve tried this so many times before that we don’t
really mind (http://www.played.dk/2795)
It’s interesting that the interviewer feels the need to add quotation marks around pressure and
adds a wink after the question has been asked. I read this as him being a little uncomfortable
asking a question which has to do with gender, since the quotation marks show him marking the
word as either ironic or with reservations. The wink at the end indicates that he’s asking the
question light-heartedly. Tibi’s answer shows that their experiences of being women at LAN
events are the norm for them is a good indication that the female to male gamer ratio I
mentioned above is not uncommon.
43
Aside from the trophies Muus, Artamis and NissePigen had brought along little stuffed animals
that served as mascots. I didn’t see any of the male gamers there with mascots, so this little detail
was unique to the women. At one time NissePigen had a see through plastic bag, which
contained a small hand mirror not only a huge amount of cables for her computer. These are
little indicators that the women of Team-A4O are not attempting to completely blend into the
male space at the LAN. There are in fact small differences in what they bring to the event aside
from the essential gaming and sleeping equipment.
The LAN As A Gendered Game Space
Just as the cyber cafés can be considered to be male dominated game spaces I also saw several
factors that indicated to me that a typical LAN-event was in fact a male-biased gaming space. For
instance when it came to the bathroom facilities here, the organisers had set up three stalls
outside with non-flushing toilets. I noticed the women complain about them being disgusting so
I decided to ask Tibi about them during our interview:
<Tibi^Tøjvask> At the [LAN] you attended they were really terrible, and yeah not really
me, so it was good that us girls were allowed to use the indoor ones later. […] There’s
probably a little too much Holte-girl20 over me when it comes to that.
<Tore> Hehe. What do you mean by Holte-girl.
<Tibi^Tøjvask> Hehe yeah. I am probably too used to things being proper, so outdoor
toilets are not me at all or sleeping on a concrete floor
<Tibi^Tøjvask> Even though I wouldn’t describe myself as a snob, there are just certain
things I don’t really appreciate.
The organisers took pity on the women and they were allowed to use the indoor bathrooms the
owners of the building had in their offices. However is was not only the toilet facilities that
position the space in a more male camp, but Tibi being a ’Holte-girl’ doesn’t really appreciate the
dust or the poor sleeping facilities. But how does that translate into femininity? Later in the
interview when we talked about femininity she told me:
<Tore> […]Do you feel that you can be feminine, when you’re at a LAN like Played?
<Tibi^Tøjvask> Yes, I’d think so.
<Tibi^Tøjvask> But I still don’t like sleeping on the floor under the pc
<Tibi^Tøjvask> so it suits me fine that we [Tibi and Artamis] went home and slept in the
evening21
20
The reason I laughed at this (’Hehe’) is because a Holte-girl is an idiom in Denmark representing an uptight and
posh stereotypical rich girl. Since this is not normally a badge women want to wear I found it funny in Tibi’s case. But
I also wanted to know what her view of this was, and hence I asked for her definition of it.
44
<Tibi^Tøjvask> That’s probably my feminine side shining through.
<Tore> :) What is it you don’t like about sleeping on the floor under the pc?
<Tibi^Tøjvask> It’s just not me, sleeping in a big hall with who knows who snoring and
farting and what do I know, no that will never do it for me.
<Tibi^Tøjvask> Waking up with morning hair and having to run about there
<Tibi^Tøjvask> no
<Tibi^Tøjvask> I’d like to take a bath and stuff like that in the morning
Here we clearly see how the game space conflicts with Tibi’s likes and dislikes as a woman. She
doesn’t initially think the space disallows for her to be feminine, but she does admit to not being
comfortable in a large room with many strangers who ’snore and fart’ and without facilities that
help her feel good about herself. She realises that in order to play Counter-Strike in this space she
must discard those comforts, but being given the chance she was glad that she could sleep at
home during the night.
Another thing that made the LAN space default to male in my view was the lack of any separate
room for the girls to change in. When competing Team All 4 One wear t-shirts with a sponsor
logo. In this case it was their black shirts sponsored by Watt Energy Drink. However Muus was
not wearing one just before the first game was to take place, so she had to change inside the
factory hall. This mean that Tatiana had to hold up a t-shirt that Muus could discreetly change
behind. I see this as an indication of the fact that LAN events are primarily thought of as boy’s
spaces and since girls normally don’t participate it probably never occurred to the organisers that
it might be prudent to have separate bathrooms and separate changing rooms for the female
participants.
In fact this issue of the LAN-event as a gendered space has consequences for the gendered
composition of top Counter-Strike clans in Denmark:
Artamis: It also has something to do with that there are not that many boys who believe
girls can play and for example [...] your really good friends, those from GK, I don’t really
think that any of them have a clue that I really can play, actually. And GK used to be one
of the best clans in Denmark. They’ve had some player changes and they’ve taken people
in, who you never really knew of and who haven’t been really good – and then they’ve sat
and trained them. But they would never, never ever if I’d played at least as well as the guy
they took in, they would never have asked me for example.
Tore: No?
21
Because of technical problems at the LAN event that ended up postponing the Counter-Strike tournament most of
Team-A4O were without network connections until late in the morning the following day, so Artamis and Tibi decided
the night before to return to their flats in Copenhagen to sleep there and return the next day.
45
Artamis: No. Because they don’t believe you can play. And I also believe that boys, if it
ultimately is a top clan, then I don’t believe they want a girl player in because the social –
that, what do they do if they’re going off to events and stuff like that and they have a girl
with them? What do they do with her? Put her in the same bed as one of the boys. I don’t
think they think about it that way at all. You can’t do that.
Artamis indicates that the male gamers perceive the actual gaming activity of being a top
Counter-Strike player as being a male exclusive activity. They would ’never, never’ ask a woman
to join their clan because of the gendering of LAN-spaces. Also Artamis emphasises that the
social aspect of a top clan is tied to the game space they’re since you can’t put a girl in the ’same
bed’. These issues are quite common when it comes to letting women into men’s only clubs in
society at large. When it comes to competitive gaming it really does not require that much of the
event organisers to set up a small separate section for female gamers at events in huge factory
buildings, however it would require that the events had regular female players and that there were
more of them.
Thus the lack of pressure Tibi mentioned above comes from experience. When first entering the
LAN or tournament space the experience can feel like a lot of pressure as Vildkatten when she
was the first woman ever to play in the European CPL a few years ago. She had travelled with
her clan, where she was the only woman to play in a CPL tournament in Berlin:
Vildkatten: Back in 2002 [...] there was an extreme amount of focus when a girl was
playing and suddenly there was a girl down at the CPL playing. It’s got nothing to do with
me as a person it was just that I was female and playing with the guys, and that caused an
extreme amount of spot light to come my way. And playing, you’re damn nervous enough
already. You know there is double pressure for a girl. One thing is that you want to deliver
a good presentation, but you also know that there are 500 guys in the back, and they’re just
waiting for you to fail, so that they can say ”What did I say? It’s a girl she doesn’t know
how to play CS.” So there’s a kind of double pressure on you.
In Vildkatten’s experience there was a double pressure for her in not only having to play in the
CPL, but also being a woman playing in the CPL. She feels that 500 spectators are waiting for her
to fail. Had she been a male gamer she would probably not have had the ’spot light’ on her
because of the rarity of female Counter-Strike players at the time. Luckily for her in the actual
game she managed to pull off a very spectacular win for the team she was on. This obviously
made her proud:
Vildkatten: Not only for me but also for [the team]. It is a team game. But it was also my
personal achievement which I was amazingly happy about because, holy cow, I’d just
disproved all the boys watching! Those that were thinking, “Yeah, yeah. It’s a girl and she’s
probably going to die.” And then she makes it anyway. It’s also a little to show that us girls
can damn well too. So even though I don’t like the fact that [competitive tournaments are]
segregated by gender I also want to show that girls are also capable in order to break down
the guy’s prejudices and to say “We can play on an equal level with you.”
Although she emphasises the team aspect of the game, Vildkatten’s statement also shows that the
personal victories at a tournament with hundreds of spectators watching has a profound effect
46
on your self-esteem as a player. She is ambiguous about accepting this personal victory because
earlier in the interview she had stated that she didn’t see the point of Counter-Strike being
divided into male and female divisions,22 but here she is celebrating a personal victory partially on
behalf of her clan, but mostly on behalf of her gender.
However, Vildkatten’s battle back then may not have struck a chord with many male gamers in
Denmark, as my brief talk with Shai, one of A4O’s male managers, at the LAN-event showed.
He told me that unlike some the other female teams at the ESWC A4O received very little
support from the Titans the Danish team who won the male competition at that tournament. For
instance the Chinese men came out to cheer on the Chinese women when they played. In an
online interview Artamis comments on the lack of support:
[Interviewer]That Denmark ran away with first place in both Counter-Strike tournaments
is impressive. How was the solidarity between the two teams during the event?
[Artamis]Disappointing. I think it’s a shame that 2 Danish teams can’t stick together during
one event; I think at the end that our patriotic feelings came up in all of us and that
brought us a little closer. I have to say thanks to Rom and Onsberg for the good backup
around us, but we didn’t see or hear much of the players themselves from [the Titans]
(Christensen 2004).
So even though the two Danish teams had a chance to socialise and support each other at the
event it was only the other team’s managers who took this opportunity, which made Artamis
’disappointed’.
As the situation is right now the perception of gaming as a male activity among the top gamers
and the gendered space of the LAN seem to be two vital barriers for women achieving equity in
competitive Counter-Strike. However, the painting of LAN events with regards to female players
I’ve painted so far has been bleak to say the least, but of course there are good reasons for TeamA4O showing up at these events to play, despite the gender odds being against them.
Supporters and Socialisation at LANs
At the LAN event I noticed on several occasions that there were very courteous male gamers at
these events too, who seem very supportive of Team-A4O. When they arrived the guys helped
them carry their computers into the game hall. One member of the formerly reclusive Titans
actually carried Tatiana's computer for her and came over several times to chat with her. He did
not seem to be engaging in flirtatious activities like the ’autograph hunter’ at the cyber café at any
time. Also after the girls lost the game I watched them play by just one round they were outside
getting a little air. One man in his late teens or early twenties came up to Muus and said
something along the lines of: ”Man that was close! Before the game I’d told the admins that they should show
22
Read more about the ambiguity of male and female divisions in the section on ’Stars and Starfuckers’ on p. 64ff
47
your game, because your two clans were the most evenly matched and that would’ve made an excellent game to
watch on the big screen!” His statement shows that not only does he respect the women for being
able to play ’an excellent game’, but he also shows that he has prior knowledge of their gaming
abilities since he claimed to have told the admins to show the game on the projector inside. The
support for the team is also shown, as I mentioned earlier, by the rap that was made for them on
their anniversary and the LAN-event gives them the opportunity to share this with even more
people. I even noticed a couple of guys quote the rap when talking to the girls: ”Muus is the ninja!”
indicating that the rap was indeed an homage heard not only by A4O, but by members of the CScommunity as well.
Also there is Counter-Strike itself, which at the competitive level is very exciting to watch. In the
game I watched A4O play they lost the first half 2-13, and thus had to win 13 rounds in the
second half to beat the other clan. As I watched them get closer and closer to their goal my
hands were shaking and my pulse was speeding up and it was very difficult for me to write when
the score was 12-2. Unfortunately they just lost the final round and were unable to tie it. I had
the opportunity to observe their opponents play too, as I could just manage to sneak behind
them. Their tactical language was very similar to A4O’s with one notable exception. They
referred to the women’s game avatars as ’she’ and ’her’ even though the in-game representation
of the avatars was male. This seems to be a strong indication that the context surrounding the
game has an important influence on how you perceive the content. Even though the men were
seeing male avatars they knew they were playing against women.
Finally, even though there is a tournament with prizes to be won the LAN-event also seems to be
a space where you socialise with your clan and meet other clans. During the long wait for the
network to get properly up and running the girls were having a beer with their mates or m8’s as
they’re termed on the Counter-Strike scene, playing games casually like Bejewelled or the arcade
classic Bubble Bobble23. When these games were being played the women were more aware of
the people surrounding them and were often laughing or joking about something while playing.
I could see that the women of Team-A4O were really an accepted part of the social community
at the event. While there were a few people they knew in the cyber café where they boot camped,
there were many more here, which gave the event the air of a get-together rather than a
competition per se.
23
Bejewelled is an online puzzle game with game mechanics similar to Tetris or Columns. BubbleBobble was an arcade
hit in the 80’s where you controlled a little dinosaur or monster who blew bubbles to trap enemies and when the
dinosaur popped such a bubble the monster would ’die’. The game featured 100 levels and was immensely popular
because of its collaborative two-player mode.
48
Professionalism
At the end of the day however Team-A4O were at the LAN event at the expense of their
sponsors, which meant that they actually got the admission to the event paid and they were in a
competition where the winners could go home with 10.000 Danish Kroner24. While they didn’t
win any cash prizes at the LAN they did bring back $10.000 from the ESWC. Also they were
playing using all different sorts of sponsored equipment, which they brought to the LAN. During
the group interview when they were talking about their winnings and their sponsorships:
Tibi: [...] Sometimes I sit at home and think ”That’s funny. My speakers, I’ve gotten those
from a sponsor. My keyboard, I’ve gotten from a sponsor. I have a mouse, I’ve gotten
from a sponsor, the mouse pad is also from a sponsor.” I feel like, ”Hmm, what did I buy
here myself?”
Despite the prizes and the sponsorships Team-A4O do not see themselves as being professional
players, with the exception of Tatiana who is the only one who equates the many hours she puts
into the game and the money she wins with professionalism. Muus has a different opinion:
<Tore_> What does it mean to you that there is money involved when you’re playing at
tournaments?
<a4o|muus\\> nothing in the game, if you think about it you might as well not play
<Tore_> Why is that?
<a4o|muus\\> For me it’s just an extra bonus, but really the cool thing is showing that
you’re the best
<a4o|muus\\> if you think about the money it shifts your focus and you loose your
concentration more easily
<Tore_> You want to be number one?
<a4o|muus\\> yes
<Tore_> Do you see yourself as a professional CS-player?
<a4o|muus\\> no not at all, I see it as a hobby, where I get to live out some dreams and
have fun
<Tore_> But you are sponsored.
<a4o|muus\\> yes we are sponsored, but it’s not something I can make a living off. The
sponsorships just make it easier to get to tournaments, and it’s always the tournaments that
are the fun, what you train for.
Although Muus does not see her self as a ’professional player’ since she cannot make a living off
playing the game, I still maintain that her attitude towards the game shows professionalism. She is
focused when she plays as she doesn’t think about the cash prizes, she has a very clear ambition
24
2nd place gave 5,000 DKR and the last prize-winning place was 5th with 1,000 DKR.
49
of being number one, and she is willing to put both time and effort into practicing so she can get
to the tournaments the ’fun’ part of playing Counter-Strike at this level according to her.
Summary
I have attempted to show how the social structures at LANs and the tournaments that take place
there are biased towards the male gamers. Just as with the cyber cafés the LANs are massively
dominated by the presence of male gamers, where however with the introduction of female
tournaments there is a slight shift in the gender balance. Unfortunately the creation of female
leagues and tournaments is not welcomed by all male gamers or even female gamers who claim
that since Counter-Strike is a computer game there are no physical advantages or disadvantages
to being male or female. I think these players are overlooking the fact that the game spaces in
which the clans practice these games have an inherent male dominance. However LANs do also
provide a space in which the women can socialise with their male friends, and the excitement of
competition and tournament play is a big draw for the women who get a chance for personal and
team-based victories.
Domestic Gaming
Whereas the LAN events represent both a social space for getting together with other gamers
and a competitive space for tournaments the domestic game space is where Team All 4 One
spend the most hours practicing the game. As I mentioned in the introduction the women spend
more than 20 hours a week practicing Counter-Strike here and thus this space also has an integral
influence on their experiences with regard to the game. In this section I will attempt to show how
this space is also gendered with regards to gaming hardware and ownership, and also how their
non-gaming female friends view the activity of gaming.
Owning a Gaming Computer
One experience that several of the women experienced at home was an initial male dominance of
the computer at home and how they had to negotiate for play time on the hardware
corresponding to the findings of Schott & Horrell (2000) and Kerr (2003). The fact that males
dominate the gaming hardware in the domestic sphere has been experienced by three of the
players. When Tibi got into the game and began putting more hours into it she initially played on
her ex-boyfriend’s computer:
<a4o|Tibi> I began by playing a little on his pc when he wasn’t at home and that didn’t go
especially well. That was also on a 56K modem at the time, which didn’t make things much
easier. So after a while my boyfriend at the time didn’t think it was fun that I’d be sitting
with his pc when he wanted to play too, so he put together a machine from his discarded
bits :)
<Tore> :D And then you could play full time?
50
<a4o|Tibi> I could at least play when I had the time and I wanted to and I was at his
place.
Tibi’s experience shows that she would loose the negotiation about who got to use the actual
equipment for play when they both wanted to, since it was his computer. She could only play
when he wasn’t in. Additionally the equipment she was given to play on as her own was built from
bits and pieces that he was done using from his ’discarded’ equipment. Tatiana also told me that
she was given her brother’s old computer when she really got into gaming. When NissePigen
began playing Counter-Strike at home in a small network with her ex-boyfriend and his brother
she initially had a disappointing experience:
<Tore|Away> During the last interview you told that it was an ex-boyfriend who
introduced you to CS, is that right?
<a4o|NisseP^away> Yeah more or less...
<a4o|NisseP^away> But it was because of him I began to play online :)
<Tore|Away> You didn’t play online before that?
<a4o|NisseP^away> Though [I] can’t really remember when I saw the game for the first
time or tried it for the first time.
<Tore|Away> Ok.
<a4o|NisseP^away> Had played it [on] LAN with him and his little brother before we got
internet and played online
<a4o|NisseP^away> But that was only a couple of times because I didn’t really think it
was that fun then.
<Tore|Away> Why not?
<a4o|NisseP^away> Think it was because the computer I used was so bad that you didn’t
hit what you shot at... And normally you also have to learn how to play a game before it
becomes real fun.
NissePigen’s experience clearly highlights how women are at the bottom of the computer food
chain when playing games in the domestic sphere. It is as if she receives the leftover computer
without even being asked to switch once in a while. However at a point she had the need for her
own computer:
<Tore|Away> When did you have a need to have your own computer that could run CS?
<a4o|NisseP^away> after having played online for almost a year and was tired of fighting
with my boyfriend at the time over the computer and that he always messed with it so it
never worked.
This seems to underline the belief that computers are first and foremost boy’s toys and since it
takes NissePigen almost a year to get the need of having her own gaming system. However
NissePigen was also the only one who told me of going to LAN-parties in high school. At these
51
events she would borrow one of the boys’ computers to play on because her own computer was
not fast enough back then either. So despite her having an active gaming history she always
seemed to be in situations where she could borrow a system. It was not until she became so
engaged in Counter-Strike that the negotiations about borrowing a computer became too
bothersome for her.
Non-gaming Women’s Reactions
Another factor I came across was the view of gamers as being solitary geeks. Spending many
hours at home playing computer games had an effect on how these women were viewed by some
female friends and relatives. They found it difficult to understand why one would spend this
much time sitting at home. That was until they won the first prize at the ESWC and the media
exposure that came along with that.
<Tore> How do your female friends respond to you playing CS?
<a4o|tatiana> They still call me a nerd and get annoyed that I’m at home in front of the
computer instead of meeting up with them. But I won 10000$ with my clan at the ESWC,
it’s easier to accept that I spend so much time gaming :]
Tatiana’s experience is one of being a nerd and having to struggle with the demands of playing
Counter-Strike at this level seem on a collision course. Although to me it seems that she is
implying that the acceptance she gets from her friends is tied to the fact that she has won money
by playing the game. Had she not won Tatiana would probably have faced a less understanding
group of friends. Muus tells a similar tale about how her sister changed her attitude towards
Muus’ gaming activities:
Muus: [...] My sister was very much at the time, ”Get home from the planet you’re living
on” and stuff like that. And is just completely, different from me, and loves to go to a café
with her friends and is always out. And I’m just in front of my computer having to practice.
And down in France Morning P325, I think it was, called [and asked] if I couldn’t do an
interview later. Yeah, yeah [I could...] It’s really funny. And I did that interview and she’d
been sitting in the car and then [shouting] ”NO NO! THAT’S MY SISTER!” and people
from her work had called her and told her ”It sounded soo much like you” ”No that’s my
sister!” And after that she has become a little more understanding about it. And there was
the fact that we won the money and stuff.
Here we see how Muus’ non-gaming sister who is ’completely’ different from her is shocked to
hear her sister on the radio because she had been spending hours practicing something which is
’from another planet’. Furthermore it is an example of how these women achieve empowerment
and respect through gaming at the level that they do. Muus’ sister shifts from regarding the
activity as something silly into telling her co-workers proudly about her. I think the above
examples really illustrate just how much you have to achieve as a gamer in order to be accepted by
25
A popular morning show on Danish national radio
52
your non-gaming friends. However that accept does seem to empower these women in their
social spheres because of the coverage they receive from the mass media
Summary
Even gaming at home can be a gendered activity where the male gamers own the computer
system and hence have the final say in who gets to play and who doesn’t. Instead of sharing their
systems they relegate the women to lesser machines that make the game play experience less
entertaining. However it is strange that the women who had this problem didn’t just buy their
own gaming systems to play on. I believe I could have looked closer into this issue however,
because my data shows no clear evidence of why they didn’t. Also along with struggling with
male opinions of Counter-Strike female gamers have to deal with stigmatisation as ’geeks’ or
beings from ’another planet’. However by playing the game at the level they do Team A4O make
the news in mass-media which in turn empowers these women to a great degree in their female
social networks and in effect tones down the whole geek perception of them as gamers.
53
4
O N L IN E G A M E S PA C E S
A C T IV I TIE S
AND
The online game spaces in which Counter-Strike is played have values that are in part based on
what the code in these spaces allows you to do as a participant. Whereas in the offline spaces it is
fairly obvious to the male participants when a woman enters the space, the same does not hold
true for the online spaces. These spaces do not necessarily have a direct connection to the game
itself. The many IRC channels where gamers meet to find games, check the latest results or to
chat have not been produced by Valve or Sierra to enhance the game experience. Instead they are
separate cyber spaces that are decentralised from the game itself. Also the Danish gaming sites
that have Counter-Strike tournament related information are not owned in any way or form by
these companies. They are run as separate spaces, which may have commercial interests in the
players of the game, such as XplayN.dk, a sub domain under Boomtown, the cyber café franchise
I mentioned in Chapter 3. Others such as Played.dk or CSWeb.dk are non-profit gamer run sites
that produce news and results from the European Counter-Strike scene.
I want to stress that although Counter-Strike is an online game it is very dependent on server
pings that can make a game highly unbalanced if one clan has a much lower ping than the other,
since this makes them able to spot their opponents’ in-game avatars much quicker than their
opponents spot them. In fact, all the women except Vildkatten26 seem to orient themselves
towards the Danish CS-scene and the Danish players there. They do however mention Swedish
or German clans from time to time. This means that in essence when I am talking about the
Counter-Strike scene in these online spaces it relates entirely to European clans and mostly to
experiences the women have from playing games against Danish clans or online experiences
involving Danish male players.
Inside the Game Space
On the Danish Counter-Strike scene you are known by your gaming alias – your nick. This
corresponds to the screen name Lessig (1999) describes in AOL, but the nick is used as an
identifier both on the IRC channels, on Counter-Strike related forums or websites and in the
26
Vildkatten used to work for CPL-Europe as a reporter and through that got to travel a lot and meet gamers from all
over Europe, which is probably why she orients herself more towards the European scene than the Danish scene.
54
game itself. All these spaces allow you to have multiple identities just as AOL, which also means
that the women have chosen their own nicks. I was curious to what the motivation behind their
choice of nick was, and if it had anything to do with allowing them to act in different roles as
Lessig (1999) describes. In this section I will show how both nicks and the clan name ‘All 4 One’
can be used to signal gender neutrality, and the reasons why the women may feel the need to do
just that.
Vildkatten (The Wildcat) and Muus (Mouse27) were the women’s actual real life nicknames that
the women brought into the online spaces. In Vildkatten’s case, it was her brothers gave who
gave her the nickname. Muus had been called ‘Mus’ by her dad since she was little. NissePigen
(The GnomeGirl) was ’given’ her name in one of the casual clans she used to play in, where there
was a NisseFar (GnomeDad) and a NisseDreng (GnomeBoy) so she was ”obviously” NissePigen.
Tatiana is the only one whose nick is actually her real name – although on IRC and in the clan
she often goes by the short form Tati. She claims she wasn’t as creative as the other girls, and
thus didn’t have a ‘cool’ nick. I did not get the chance to ask Artamis about her nick, but it is very
similar to Artemis, the Ancient Greek goddess of hunting – definitely a name that signifies
strength and power. Tibi is the only one of them who actually chose a nick for a reason that has
to do with gender bias:
<Tore> How did you make up your own nick?
<Tibi^Tøjvask> Well it’s actually a long story. But I began by being called Stinna (short
for [my real name]) but got away from that very quickly, since I would prefer being called
something that did not symbolise that I was a girl. One of my friend(s) from irc said that
he would find a good nick for me and suggested a couple, among them Tibi. In Latin I
think it means something with a person who can give love, or something along those lines.
So I
<Tibi^Tøjvask> really liked that hehe :)
<Tibi^Tøjvask> And so have been called that since.
I view the uses of nicks sort of like a mask not only can they hide your gender identity if you
choose, but they can also be masks that show what you’re doing at the moment. Tibi is washing
clothes above. At the LAN event one of the women was gaming as ‘[Nick] | a4o * hates gaynet’
showing her frustration with the technical problems and delays at the event, since something ‘gay’
is considered something negative28. The nicks actually function as the players’ real names within
the game space both online, but more surprisingly to me, offline too. I noticed this first when the
girls were talking about some of the other players on the Counter-Strike scene: “StarHydra” or
27
Mouse in Danish is actually spelt ’Mus’ but Muus told me she misspelled it one of the first time she played online
and that version of the nick stuck.
28
I’ll be discussing the homophobic discourse later in this chapter.
55
“Ref”. This means that you get to dub yourself within the Counter-Strike community. Your
experiences may cause you to change your nick, but I get the feeling that you should do it quite
early in your ’CS-career’ since people will call you by your nick and not your real name. In some
cases, like Tibi’s, you can actually use it to hide your gender.
The fact that all the women are known on the scene actually forces them to play with what they
call ’fake nicks’ when playing games online. In essence they have lost the initial anonymity the
nick provides when playing online. Instead they use ‘fake nicks’ both for themselves and their
clan, since the consequences can be quite unnerving:
Muus: I remember just after ESWC. You see, sometimes we play using fake nicks where
we play under some odd clan names like chowowow or sodavand, and then we have some
weird nick so people don’t know who we are. And then [they ask] – it was on dust2, right?
Then they [our opponents] ask us: ”Who are you really?” because they were getting their
asses prreeety beaten up. And then we changed to our real nick Team A4O blah, blah,
blah, blah. And then it came... ”Whores!” and ”Sow” and ”Don’t goddamn think that you
are something just because you are girls!” and stuff like that. And then I wrote to them:
”You are exactly the type of clan that forces us to fake nick. Because we simply don’t want
to hear that every time we have to play a PCW29. We don’t wanna hear it.”
The male gamers begin harassing the women after they take off their masks and show their ‘real’
online faces, which in Muus’ case would be ‘Team A4O | muus’ and it echoes the experiences of
the female Quake players surveyed by Morris (2000). In the example above Muus stands up for
herself, but her reaction also shows that this is something they have experienced before. All the
women mentioned that they had gotten tougher when it came to dealing with this type of
harassment online. Either they quickly leave servers or IRC channels where they experience it, or
they put people on their ‘ignore lists’ in their IRC clients, which blocks these individuals from
sending them text-messages. Here we see how the code of the online tools actually allows for
them to escape harassment quite quickly. Nonetheless, it still leaves an impact on them if it
happens consecutively and I was frankly quite embarrassed at how some young males in
Denmark speak to females in online communities as seen the example below where the women
retell an experience from playing an official game:
Tibi: […] They dissed us all through the match and then we took screenshots and took
demos and we sent it to the admins and they looked through it, and then they could see
that it was not really good
[…]
Tore: But what types of comments did you get in that match, do you remember?
Artamis: Do you really want to know that?
Tore: Very much.
29
Practice Clan War, meaning that two clans are actually playing each other, but the results are not counted officially
anywhere.
56
Artamis: Repulsive pig, sow, shitty hag, shit whore, whore.
Tatiana: You have to remember that these are 12-13 year-old boys who have just learnt
some no-no words in their class
Tibi: And yeah, who think they are really great at CS and then they are suddenly whooped
and then, goddamn it, hell just breaks loose right?
Artamis: And then you get it all
Muus: Yeah the most disgusting thing is when they write I hope you get raped and bla bla
bla.
Tibi: Yeah, but the other stuff you can just shut out, but if you play five games and in all
of the games they shoot off those types of comments, then the last game you play then you
just begin not being able to concentrate on the game any more, but you just begin to puke
over of those boys.
Now harsh language is one thing, but the level of the threats these women are facing is
exceedingly harsh and misogynous. Even though they were able to get the ‘boys’ banned from
the XplayN ladder, which shows that the older males, i.e. the admins, do not approve of such
things, it did leave an impression on them; especially when the insults turn towards rape. This
means that the harassment can in some cases reach a level where it even affects their ability to
play the game properly. The women may loose their concentration because of the threats and
want to ‘puke’. Team All 4 One have existed for a little more than a year, and they told me that
was quite a feat on the Danish girl scene. Perhaps one of the reasons many girl teams fail or
female players are only briefly on the scene is to be found in threats from the younger males, like
the ones above. They may in some cases be immature 12 or 13-year olds, but you can’t see that
through the in-game text or in the IRC channels only by looking at their profiles at their clan
webpage for instance. The male gamers trash talk each other too on the Danish Counter-Strike
scene, but here it tends to be a homophobic discourse that is used to attack the other guys. On
several occasions at the cyber café and at the LAN I heard someone yell out ‘homo’ or ‘fag’ for
instance. Interestingly this does not cause the younger boys to attack the girls with hints of
lesbianism. The social discourse here is that women whom they feel a need to demean default to
victims who can be raped while the other guys are attacked for being ‘gay’ i.e. non-masculine.
It is not only the women’s nicks that may be used to signal gender neutrality. During the group
interview Tibi mentioned that they chose the name Team All 4 One for the clan because it did
not symbolise that they were girls. I asked her why this was important during the IRC-interview
to which she replied:
<Tibi^Tøjvask> Think we all more or less were tired of people looking down on girl clans,
so we’d rather be called something that didn’t say that we were girls at a first glance. And
also personally I think it is ridiculous to be called something like super girls or girls armey
or whatever girls can come up with these days. Think names that at once say that you are
57
girls send out a signal that you want to be contacted and chat with guys and not really that
you want to play.
This shows that the clan name is used to distance Team All 4 One from other female clans that
do want to signal that they are girls playing the game. But I also think it shows the imbalance of
genders in the Counter-Strike game space very clearly. By signalling with your clan that you are a
group of girls that play Tibi seems to think that you actually draw attention from the male players
who want to ‘contact’ and ‘chat’ with you rather than ‘wanting to play’ the actual game. Put
bluntly I think Tibi is saying that if you signal that you are a girl – by using the word girl in your
clan name – you’re basically signalling that you’re in the chat room to get attention and not to
play Counter-Strike. In Denmark female clans such as ‘[Babe]’ or ‘SoldierGirls’ would be obvious
targets. Although this stance may not be very supportive of the other girl clans I do believe that
this view reflects Tibi’s experiences with her playing as ‘Stinna’ and being in the ‘GirlZ’ clan. So
when it came to choosing a name for the clan her prior experiences with the male gaming
population of the Counter-Strike scene made her support a clan name, which would not invite
guys that think they did ‘not really want to play.’ I see this as a sign of how the IRC channels that
are used on the Counter-Strike scene are gendered spaces, where if you draw attention to your
femininity in your nick or through your clan name you are treated differently than if you, via your
nick and your clan name, attempt to hide the fact that you are a woman.
Good Girls Don’t Swear
I get the feeling that some of the harsh language used in the online spaces is tied to the
competitive element in the game and it is not exclusive to young men bashing women verbally,
but rather it is used by players in game if things are not going their way (Wright et. al 2002). Still,
this does not excuse the misogynous discourse at all. I did find, however, that the women
adopted a language online, which came into conflict with their perceptions of being feminine:
<Tore> Do you think there is a difference between Tibi and [your real name]?
<Tibi^Tøjvask> No not really. […] it’s just two different environments they are in. But I
would think that a person like my mom would say that there is a big difference, because in
her eyes I’m, the “good” girl and on irc you have to be tougher and things are said on vt30
that I would never say otherwise.
<Tore> What do you say on irc or vt that you would not otherwise say?
<Tibi^Tøjvask> Normally I am a very cautious person who doesn’t want to step on
anyone’s toes, but on irc you have to do it once in a while. So in that way there’s a
difference between us.
30
Acronym for Ventrilo, a voice chat program that they use both when playing at home and at tournaments, which
enables them to have their hands free for playing the game instead of using Counter-Strike’s text based chat function.
58
<Tibi^Tøjvask> Like I can call people homos or hags or just sit around and swear, even
my boyfriend says that I begin speaking foul when I’m sitting there [with] the chicks or
other mates.
<Tibi^Tøjvask> :)
<Tore> :D
<Tibi^Tøjvask> with*
<Tibi^Tøjvask> it’s probably a ‘work related injury’
<Tore> hehe
At first denying that she has a different attitude online, an online alter ego if you will, she does
establish an image of herself online, which contrasts her offline personality. She would never call
a person a homo or a bitch to their face, but the online environment gives her this ‘tougher’
language. She does jokingly refer to her use of harsh language as a ‘work related injury’, which
considering some of the comments she’s used to getting as a woman is not that surprising. It’s
also an interesting linguistic juxtaposition that when trash talking males she adopts the male
players’ discourse. I was curious as to how she felt being this tough trash talking identity:
<Tore> How does it feel to talk nastier than you would otherwise do?
<Tibi^Tøjvask> A little liberating actually but it has come gradually, don’t think I talked
just as nastily 1 year ago on vt, but when you’re sitting there with chicks or guys who can
burp and fart and proclaim out loud that they have to go take a dump, then you probably
become a little more indifferent if you say something yourself which is not really that nice.
<Tibi^Tøjvask> I was almost laughed at if I said on vt that I had to go take a wee, “you
have to say that you have to go piss” said [Vildkatten] e.g.
<Tibi^Tøjvask> you*
<Tibi^Tøjvask> still have a hard time saying it though :)
<Tore> But you still do it?
<Tibi^Tøjvask> Can’t remember right off when the last time I said it was.. actually think
that it was when [Vildkatten] was still on board, because she always laughed and said the
other thing to me.
The above example shows how the tough language of the online space and Vildkatten’s jests
influenced Tibi’s language. She is well aware that ‘good’ girls shouldn’t be talking this way and
she would never do it in public, but in order to fit in she toughens up and actually finds the
experience ‘liberating’. I would also claim that Tibi’s change of discourse also shows what
limitations women are under in other social spaces, where they actually feel constrained by the
expectations of e.g. mothers – or even boyfriends i.e. males – who have a very clear view that this
isn’t what good girls do.
<Tore> Ok. I’m wondering, what does the world feminine mean to you?
59
<Tibi^Tøjvask> It certainly mean a lot, but it’s about finding the boundary in this male
dominated world, we would like to be taken seriously as players and at the same time be a
pure girl clan.
<Tibi^Tøjvask> But also really think that you loose a little of it when you play and when
you stop then it’s there again.
<Tore> How does your own femininity express itself when you stop?
<Tibi^Tøjvask> Then I am back in my own world again and all the nasty words are
forgotten then, as it were.
<Tore> :D
<Tibi^Tøjvask> Then the manners are there again too.
<Tore> What manners are those e.g.?
<Tibi^Tøjvask> Like I said, I would never dis someone irl31 or call them homos.
Tibi makes a very clear distinction between the online ‘world’ and the ‘real world’ this distinction
seems to linguistically distance the online spaces she makes use of as being not real, although as
I’ve already described she very much feels the impact on the online space on her ‘real world’ self
when she’s being harassed by male players because of her gender. She does not believe that
femininity has a place in the male dominated online spaces. It’s almost as if it’s something that
can be hidden away and be put on again in the real world. Also her tie in of manners into the
equation shows yet another aspect of the “good” girl that is only used in ‘the real world’.
In Tibi’s case her online persona seems to differ from her usual timid self, but Vildkatten felt that
she at times had to tame her temper when playing online, which she underlined when I asked her
about why she was not one of the women playing the Sims or using the EyeToy:
Vildkatten: [...] I’ve played a hell of a lot with boys, while growing up too. So I thought it
was much cooler to play cops and robbers than to sit and play with Barbie [Tore laughs]. I
thought it was much cooler to dig holes and things like that, and doing stuff you weren’t
allowed to do. Setting stuff on fire [We both laugh]. Hello! Frying ladybirds in the woods
together with the mates.
This shows how Vildkatten constructs an image of herself as being a girl who got to hang out
with the boys when she was little. Her example is clearly one of a girl participating in what
Jenkins (1998) calls 19th century boys’ culture. She also claimed that this had made her brasher
when she spoke, which had an influence on how she would act around other female CS-players:
Vildkatten: […] If you’re playing with the girls there are things, which you shouldn’t say.
If I’m playing with the guys then […] unfortunately it’s rubbed off when they trash talk. If
they get really pissed then they say stuff, and if you’ve been playing with the guys for three
years and they say certain things. You’ll take that too.
31
Acronym for In Real Life – here Tibi actually uses the abbreviation as written irl, which shows the influence the
English language has on the language used by the Danish Counter-Strike community online.
60
Tore: What’s that for instance?
Vildkatten: Well, it can be some very, very bad things. I’m not even going to say it
because it’s not feminine at all! [We laugh] I’ll say it like this that my boyfriend he gets a
chock once in a while if I’m gaming and if he has to study then he walks over and says he
simply gets afraid of you. And then he says “You’re not damn feminine.” And I say “No I
haven’t made any claims to be damn it!” When you’re playing then you’re not feminine.
You aren’t. They’re not nice words coming out of your mouth […] It can actually be some
very harsh things coming out.
What I find especially fascinating here is that even though Vildkatten ascribes herself as a girl
who liked to burn things as a child, she is also very aware of the fact that she is not being
’feminine’ when she plays Counter-Strike and gets ’pissed’. Also she claims that she has to tone
down her language when playing with the other girls, but the guys’ harsh language has ’rubbed’
off. In the interview situation she is even a little embarrassed to a degree where she won’t tell me
exactly what she says but instead brands it as being ’not feminine’. From the interview with Tibi
though I seem to get the feeling that Vildkatten was a little brasher than some of the other female
players. Although she later says that she’s never claimed to be feminine when her boyfriend
playfully chides her. It seems that in order to fit in on the Counter-Strike scene Vildkatten has
adopted a discourse that is not feminine, although this is not necessarily in opposition to her selfimage.
Summary
I believe I have shown how the online game space is gendered, not because of the
representational content, but because of the gendered activities that take place within the game
space. If the female players do not take precautions and use fake nicks when playing they open
themselves to attacks on their gender from male players, which may be extensively misogynous.
Even the clan name Team All 4 One was chosen to signify gender neutrality. This puts the clan
in opposition to other female teams that actually want to show that they are girl gamers. The
women have adopted the discourse of the male players in order to fit in and are very aware that
this discourse is not seen as being feminine. Whether you are normally a timid girl outside the
game or a girl who grew up burning ladybirds there seems to be no large difference in adopting
the discourse, however, being able to speak from the gut seems to be a liberating experience for
these women.
IRC Channels and Game Sites
Now I want to move outside the game space and into some of the other online spaces where
interaction between players takes place. These also have a strong influence on the male gamers’
perceptions of the female gamers and how they feel the Danish Counter-Strike community views
them. In the previous chapter I talked about how some of Team All 4 One’s female friends did
61
not seem to understand their fascination spending so much time using the computer. When it
comes to the game the spaces of the IRC channels play a vital role in this fascination:
Tatiana: It’s really funny how you are so sucked into the community. And all the other
people you know they know nothing about it. So they don’t understand it in any possible
way. They say “How can you sit in front of the computer for so long? I get turned off after
five minutes […] The reason I get sucked in is because it’s a whole community, right? It’s
the mIRC32, not just computer games which are [the] place.
Tatiana clearly states that it is the connection between the game and the IRC channel that ‘sucks’
her in and this community is what her friends ‘don’t understand it’. There is something besides
the game space that is an attraction too. But what is it about the IRC channel that sucks you in?
Vildkatten: […] Actually if you take the mIRC community then you can actually
compare it to a youth club. Just multiply it by the number (of people), right? There are
many more people. There is also just as much gossip. Even though people are sitting very
far apart from each other then mIRC is a bit like a youth culture house in a way where
people meet and people sit and gossip in the corners, and things are going on. […] And
then there are some games, and some people are cheering for one side and some are
cheering for the other. […] But it’s also like some people dare to be a little cheekier over
the net, because they are sitting at home behind the screen. But other than that it’s the
same. People via the screen, but it’s still people, right?
During the time I spent in the clan’s IRC channel I noticed that much of the conversation was
not about Counter-Strike, between calls from players across Scandinavia to join so-called mix
games, there was casual conversation about hangovers, work or even jokes about sexual
behaviour. At the LAN-event Tibi proudly told me that they’d had over 180 people in their
channel when they celebrated their anniversary, which seems to indicate that the online ‘youth
club’ was almost the frame work for a party. I also noticed that many of the people in the
channel would be regulars, i.e. people who were not officially part of the clan, but rather friends
who just came to hang around. The Danish game sites seemed to have similar communities of
players who engage in discussion forums, where the conversations are more asynchronous, but
are still full of gossip and cheering. For instance news of Team All 4 One participating in a
tournament will get hailed on the forums with posts saying “GL” (good luck) and “HF :)” (have
fun). Also there seems to be flirtatious behaviour going on here too similar to what Thomas and
Walkerdine (1999) observed with children playing games in computer clubs in Australia. Here is
an example from the 22nd of October following an announcement that A4O “the reigning world
champions” would be taking on challengers at a computer trade show later that month33:
(Male Gamer) 18:32 22/10
Wonder if [you] can play for special yields if victorious:D
32
mIRC is an IRC client. The name of the client is often used synonymously with IRC.
33
This excerpt is from the played.dk forums. I have made the male gamer anonymous, although his name does appear
on the website. I felt this would be most fair to him, since I have not gotten his permission to use his statements for
my example. According to his profile he’s 24 years old.
62
NissePigen 21:01 22/10
Any special yield maybe…..but if you loose then phew….if [nick34] dares show up
and looses(which he most definitely will..loose that is!) then he has to jump on a
trampoline wearing a kilt..!!:D
(Male Gamer) 22:37 22/10
Hehe, he does that voluntarily:D, [I] was more thinking of you
[girls] in gnome girl outfits maybe:)
This snippet of a forum discussion is filled with smileys both from the male gamer and from
NissePigen, which have quite a few grins ‘:D’ and a smile ‘:)’. The male gamer is indicating that he
would like ‘special yields’ which NissePigen turns around into a ‘yield’ for the women – seeing a
man jumping on a trampoline so they can look up his kilt35. This makes the male gamer stop
beating around the bush and says that he wanted to see the girls in special ‘outfits’. To me this all
seems in good fun. Despite the friendly tone, however, there are also quarrels taking place and it
appears again a gender bias since the women did not seem to feel that the male gamers respect
them as players. This can be seen in an example from another male gamer in the same forum
thread:
(Male Gamer 2) 19:06 22/10
Won’t it be a bit embarrassing when a Danish team comes out and says they’re the best
women’s team in the world (even if they probably are), and then they are beaten by 5 teens
who really don’t know jack about the scene, but have played a lot of ffa?
Tibi (all 4 one) 19:08 22/10
Ehm….if you know a team like that then send them along.. like [we] said above
we’re doing this for our sponsors and for the fun of it. We have proven that we’re
the best girl team in the world so we might as well advertise it :)
(Male Gamer 2) 20:28 22/10
It’s not meant as disrespect or anything, just a scenario I could
imagine :)
In this example the male gamer, although claiming not to be disrespectful is being just that, as far
as I see. First of all he is assuming that a group of teenage boys who have no team experience, i.e.
they’re ‘ffa’ players, can waltz in and beat A4O who just ’say’ they’re the current world
champions. Tibi’s rebuttal sends him on the defensive, but he admits it to being a ’scenario’ that
he ’could imagine’. In other words, in his mind a group of women – no matter how good – can
probably be beaten by a group of inexperienced boys. This bias seems similar to the one of the
’whizzes’ and the ’whizn’ts’ (de Castell & Bryson 1998), namely the assumption that the boys are
just better at playing Counter-Strike.
34
I’ve edited out the person’s nick here, but NissePigen naming him, obviously shows that she knows the player she’s
referring to.
35
I also take this as a hint that if he’s a real Scotsman he’ll not be wearing anything underneath the kilt.
63
Stars and Starfuckers
During my interviews I seemed to get the impression that the above scenario of a young male
gamer doubting the women’s abilities as gamers was not that uncommon. I also believe this is
what is at the root of a phenomenon which Team All 4 One referred to as the ’Starfuckers’36
during the interviews. I was asking Muus about how they would recruit a new member if one of
the clan decided to call it quits, which made her write about this in the interview:
<a4o|muus\\> Would probably look in the smaller clans, that maybe have 1 good girl
gamer and see if we could find one who hasn’t ”made herself especially” noticed on irc
[...]
<Tore_> Why is it important to find someone who hasn’t ”made herself especially”
noticed on irc?
<a4o|muus\\> Because it can put the clan in a bad light. If you take in a player who is a
”starfucker” you’re asking to get a bad image and then [you] accept as a clan the way that
quite a few girls behave
<a4o|muus\\> and currently we’re not a part of that
<Tore_> No, that’s certainly not my impression.
<Tore_> What do you think the ”starfucker” phenomenon does to the reputation of girls
within the CS-environment?
<a4o|muus\\> It only makes it bad and it makes it so that it becomes even harder to be
accepted as a girl clan who play because it’s fun.
<Tore_> How do you experience that?
<a4o|muus\\> I think the boys are really good at jumping on the bandwagon. I mean
some girls are only part of the cs-scene so they can get attention, and they do it really
thoroughly… so thoroughly that some boy apparently think all girls on the scene are there
only to grab attention
<a4o|muus\\> and not because they think cs is fun
<Tore_> Do you feel you’re being put in a box?
<a4o|muus\\> Yeah of course girls are put in a box. We get a lot of careless tarnished
remarks time and time again, but we have all become better at ignoring them.
<a4o|muus\\> and to be indifferent to what others might think.
Muus underlines that if they were to recruit a new player she should definitely not be one that
had made herself noted on ‘irc’ and equates that with being a “starfucker”. She puts herself in
opposition to the “starfuckers” by not wanting to accept them into the clan. The “starfuckers”
are apparently what give women players a bad name because they make the boys ‘jump on the
bandwagon’, i.e. generalise broadly, because they seem to be on the IRC channels to grab
36
I use the word as they typed it in the IRC interviews. Obviously the correct English spelling would be star fucker.
64
attention, not to have fun. In fact, the generalisations made by male gamers seem to have
escalated. Tibi mentions that ’tarnished remarks’ have increased since she began playing and that
her attitude has become tougher too because of that:
<a4o|Tibi> Back then the whole thing was very overwhelming to me, a whole new world
suddenly opened up with a huge amount of people you didn’t even know who wrote to
you and wanted to know all about you. Really caught me with my guard down
<Tore> Yeah? Is it different now?
<a4o|Tibi> Yeah, I’ll say, you know a lot of people today and I’ve learnt how to tackle
things. Back then I was nice and talked with everyone who wrote to me, whereas today
more and more people are put on ignore because there are many more ‘lamers’37 on
quakenet38, or it seems that way at least.
*Tore nods
<a4o|Tibi> Girls on quakenet are not a novelty like they were back then and that’s why I
think people they badmouth more today
<Tore> Are you being badmouthed more today than back then?
<a4o|Tibi> Yeah I think so, or maybe it’s not me in general, but girl gamers and girl clans
[I] feel I get jumped upon time and time again today.
I was a little surprised by her view that since the scene has grown more ‘lamers’ have appeared,
and that more girls did not mean equity, but rather brought more ‘badmouthing’. So rather than
creating a more balanced gender space by an influx of female gamers Tibi feels that the situation
for women in this cyber place has actually worsened. Also just like Muus Tibi made a connection
between “starfuckers” and disrespect from male gamers:
<Tore> How do you feel about them being dissed because of that?
<a4o|Tibi> I think it’s low, but it happens everywhere work places, schools, high schools
etc. so it’s not something new, but since the girl boy ratio on quakenet is so uneven and
many girls like being the centre of attention and scoring them all, then it’s hard. I hate it
when people begin to disrespect other girl gamers in front of me.
<Tore> Do you go against them?
<a4o|Tibi>No, I either leave or else I just sit and listen. I’d say that some times there are
also some dense chicks here on quakenet who just don’t think very straight and then you
can’t help laughing when the boys tell stories about them
<Tore> Ah.
37
A ’lamer’ is basically someone who is lame or dumb. I noticed the women talk about gaming experiences where they
were just playing casually, i.e. non-competitively, as ’laming’. But it appears that one can also ’lame’ outside the game as
Tibi indicates here.
38
Quakenet is the collective name for the server network that hosts all the IRC channels used by most of the FPS
communities in Europe.
65
<a4o|Tibi> So in that sense I’m not one who tells them to shut up, I just think it gets old
in the long run listening to the same [people] being disrespected
<Tore> Ok. Why don’t you tell them to be quiet?
<a4o|Tibi> Don’t think it’s my business, [I] am the kind of more quiet type of person,
also think it’s a little harmless as long as they don’t do it in front of the girls who’s backs
they’re talking behind, don’t think I’d stay in a group of boys if they were talking about
someone who was right next to them and could hear the whole thing. It takes place in all
places and so there are just active and passive participants in talks like that.
What I still don’t understand from my brief introduction to the ‘Starfucker’ phenomenon is
where is the limit? When are you dating someone who plays Counter-Strike and when are you a
Starfucker? All the women from team a4o told me that they have, or have had, boyfriends who
either play Counter-Strike or are in fact part of the Counter-Strike scene. Some of these
boyfriends were really good players too, apparently, but they also distance themselves from being
Starfuckers – e.g. Muus above. So to me it seems that they are adopting a condescending view of
younger female players based partially on hearsay and rumours spread by the male gamers.
Obviously calling yourself a Starfucker is not an option for any of these women, and it should
most certainly not be. I get the feeling that they’re heavily influenced by the male-dominated
discourse of the gendered space the game is in. And if flirting occurs between computer gamers
on both forums and in IRC channels should it not follow in the offline spaces when these players
do meet? What I find really interesting is that women who excel at scoring men are ostracised
and ridiculed by other male players, because they are doing something the males cannot do –
using physical attraction to get close to the ‘star’ male players.
However, the discourse that surrounds the ‘Starfuckers’ is that they don’t play the game but they
just hang around and chat:
Vildkatten: [...] That’s also why the girls, it’s not why they are bad, but many of the girl
clans spend more time chatting than they spend on playing
Tore: Ok? How do you sense that?
Vildkatten: Because they plat goddamn terribly! [Laughs] There are just some people
where you say: “Oh Lord have mercy! Is that your first time playing!?” I mean it’s almost
like when they call themselves CS-players, I can almost get really steamed and say “Call
yourself for IRC-player, right?”
It seems to me that women must earn respect as players first and foremost before they can
actually begin to chat about causal things outside the game space, which is not unlike the
situation faced by women in management in Denmark today that must prove themselves as hard
workers rather than people with good social skills. The danger of being branded as a ‘Starfucker’
if you hang around the channels too much seems imminent. In other words the perception seems
to be game skills before social skills. And if we look to the statement from Multimedieforeningen
in Chapter 1 we can see a correlation between the essentialist masculine and feminine values. The
66
males are gamers. The women are social. This gives me the feeling that for female gamers it
seems to be harder to be casual gamers on the Counter-Strike scene, especially if they happen to
be dating a good player. Yet, there also seems to be issues with the way some of the women
players present themselves to the Counter-Strike community at large, in fact the professionals
who have ‘made it’ seem to think that the behaviour of the inexperienced younger women
damage their reputation as a whole:
Vildkatten: I was the first female CS-writer. I was the first female CS-ShoutCaster39. I
was the first female CPL-contestant40 […] and I sort of think that it was a little ground
breaking, even though I didn’t talk to any of the other girls and I didn’t play with any of the
other girls. And I distanced myself from those who used the game in that other way. You
know all that with promoting oneself and making that type of film and putting out photos.
Some of them sent out more or less semi-pornographic pictures. And I said “You know
what? I think you should go on the Jubii-chat or dating.dk41” or what the hell it is called.
“Because this is a game. And it’s serious.” […]
The above quote shows the pride Vildkatten has in her achievements and she tentatively admits
that she would like these to have been (’ground breaking) eye openers for the guys on the scene.
By almost avoiding the other girls on the scene she distanced from promotion of oneself based
on bodily factors that have nothing to do with the game. Even though it’s a game, it’s serious
business. Why? Because these women are investing a lot of time and effort in the game and since
they experience that the guys easily jump the gun and call them all starfuckers because of the
actions of some of the girls. She admits however to starting out with a different attitude:
Vildkatten: In the beginning, during the first six months when I played, I could sit
around and chat. I could also enjoy chatting with some boys, and stuff which I distance
myself from today. But the instant you get into those tournaments then you totally develop
from there and say, ”This is a sport. This is serious business. This is about Counter-Strike
and it’s money.”
In Vildkatten’s eyes the newbie gamer is one who can enjoy ‘chatting with boys’ where as the
serious gamer sees the game as a ‘sport’, ‘serious business’ and ‘money’. I see this as being
exemplary of what newbies on the Danish Counter-Strike-scene can aspire to in the game spaces
depending on their gender. If you’re a boy the way to the stars lies before you. You can earn the
title of a star player, and if you prefer socialising to gaming, well, you’re just part of the horde of
other guys. Whereas for girls that tend to socialise, fall in love perhaps, or are just driven by plain
sexual desire they can look forward to wearing the badge of a ‘fucker’. This also means that even
though Team A4O are a well-respected team within the Danish CS-scene, they’re not seen as
stars or star players. The question then is, can they ever make this transition? When it comes to
39
ShoutCast is actually a streaming radio service, which is synonymous with internet radio. A ShoutCaster is a
presenter who covers Counter-Strike games and interviews the players after the games.
40
Vildkatten told me earlier in the interview that she was the first female to play Counter-Strike in the CPL Europe
before the branch went bankrupt, which is what she is referring to in this excerpt. She is not claiming to be the first
female ever to play professionally – which was Stevie ’Killcreek’ Case as mentioned in Chapter 2.
41
Jubii is a portal site in Denmark used by more casual internet users. Dating.dk is an online dating portal.
67
their non-gaming friends and relatives I believe it is possible, since they get their information
about the Counter-Strike scene from mass media, who seem to focus on the World
Championships. However, the respect from the male gamers seems further off, since the voices
that disrespect the women seem to drown out the ones that do respect them in the spaces that
matter to gamers on the IRC channels of QuakeNet and on the gaming forums.
But why is this then? I think we can look to the current division of gender in gaming
tournaments for a possible explanation. The women all acknowledge that they are not currently
able to compete at the same level as the men, but there are different opinions about having male
and female tournaments:
Vildkatten: Personally I’m against dividing it by gender, because it’s a shame doing it. I
was really happy watching the equestrian jumping at the Olympics. Because it’s not divided
by gender. They jump together there damnit. I’ve always been against it. I’ve been beaten
up by the other girls because I’ve voiced my opinion, and I think that it’s a load of crap
that you separate it. Because the girls can be just as good as they guys if they really want to.
It’s a question of enthusiasm and motivation, and you having ambitions. [...] It’s not a
question of your gender that is. [...]
Vildkatten’s stance is that since there are no gendered divisions in equestrian sports there
shouldn’t be any within Counter-Strike, because it’s a question of the player’s individual attitude
towards the game based on ’motivation’ and ’ambition’. Additionally she claims that this view has
caused her to get into trouble with the female Counter-Strike community at large, which I believe
shows that the women who play this game at top level are divided in this issue. Even Vildkatten
herself admits to struggling with this.
Vildkatten: I’ve also said, “Yeah ok. We can win some money with the girls anyway, so
that’s what we’ll do.” […] So I also hope that…I’ve had a part in raising the girls’ level,
with the tactical insight suddenly, that the boys have been going with. But the computer,
really, couldn’t give a damn if you’re tall, short, fat, skinny, yellow or green, right? I mean it
doesn’t give a shit if you’re male or female, right? It’s a question of will.
I think this statement really underlines the main problem that many of the male gamers on
gaming sites seem to have with the female leagues that I will be discussing in the next section.
The hardware or the software doesn’t care who you are, when you play the game, however as I
have shown above when it comes to recruitment the male gamers do care since women on the
team cannot socialise on an equal level with them. This seems not only to be unique to A4O or
Vildkatten as we can see in an interview with Zirkeline, another Danish female player that I came
across:
[…] a lot of girls don’t like the way they are treated by men. Playing in female cups is much
easier than playing against men. It’s finally possible to play in the way it should be, without
flames, lame behaviour or sexist jokes. In a female cup they will feel respected and because
of that they will be more confident about themselves.
[Another] big reason is the skill part. Girls aren’t involved in gaming that long yet.
Therefore there is a difference between male and female gamers as it comes to experience
68
and skills. Also a lot of female gamers aren’t taking gaming that serious yet. Female cups
are a good way to attract woman to competitive female gaming, to build experience and to
stimulate them to become better (Neuteboom 2004).
I see Zirkeline’s statement as a brief description of how the male players in general treat the
female players in the community, and also how she sees female tournaments as a place for female
gamers to be free of harassment. This means that the experiences of Team All 4 One do not
seem to be isolated cases of the pros, but something that is perhaps experienced by many female
Counter-Strike players. However, as I’ve shown earlier in this chapter, there seems to be a view
that the female tournaments simply are not as good as the male ones, so in the end although the
female tournaments provide a game space which is less hostile to women, they are also adding
fuel to the bonfire that girls really have no place in the top Counter-Strike teams.
Summary
The IRC channels and gaming forums seem to be highly biased towards the male majority on the
Danish Counter-Strike scene. Women who are not good players, but date good players are
looked down upon as being “starfuckers” and it seems that a few bad apples ruin the bunch.
There is very little indicating that the good female players can ever become real stars since both
the male players and the females view the female tournaments as being inferior. Although for the
women the money is an incentive. So female cups and championships may be a way forward for
the small group of women participating in Counter-Strike. Still, all is not doom and gloom. The
women have strong social networks in these online spaces and share grins and laughs there too.
These spaces are online social rooms where you can find support even if you want to puke
because of sexist remarks.
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5
C O N C LU SIO N S A N D F U T U RE
P E R SP E C TI V E S
In this thesis I have shown that a multi-player first person shooter game such as Counter-Strike is
more than just a gaming technology made up of code and graphics but rather it is a game that is
made up of the code of the game and the social practices of its participants. On a purely
representational level the game seems to exclude women since there are no female avatars to
choose from and fetishises combat with modern weapons, the structural elements of the game
such as tactics and team play a large role in the female player’s enjoyment of the game.
Additionally it’s not just about the game itself since the technology and how it is used by gamers
is surrounded by values and practices adopted by the players who form a strong community
around it. This community is built in the offline social spaces and online social spaces.
In my case study of the professional Danish female Counter-Strike players who participate in
these spaces I have shown how these spaces and the activities that take place there are gendered.
I do not claim that these findings can be applied to all women who participate in these spaces,
but similar findings from Morris (2000) seem to be a clue that women who play first person
shooters share many of these experiences. Also as shown in previous studies this gendering
begins at home (Kerr 2003, Schott 2004) where it is usually the boyfriend or brother’s computer
the women begin playing the game on. But since they don’t own the hardware they don’t have
the final say in when they get to play. Additionally they may be relegated to secondary machines
in the domestic space.
The cyber cafés where clans meet to practice for competitive events are gendered spaces too. For
a woman entering a cyber café for the first time it can seem like entering another world since it is
filled to the brim with boys and young men staring at their monitors or wrestling in the corners.
The few women who are at the cafés are often engaged in non-gaming activities such as chatting
or checking their email. Even if there are women playing a game there they will probably throw a
look towards any other women entering, just out of curiosity. Secondly the managers see this as
women not being interested in games and hence do not think about how their cyber cafés could
be adapted for female players – by adding a ladies bathroom for instance. The gendering of the
space can be an advantage to women because the guys there will often be helpful, especially if
they are newbies. Some of the more bashful fellows may however begin to flirt which can be
70
uncomfortable. Cyber cafés are not just places where you play the game, but also places where
you socialise with your clan or even hang out with players from other clans.
A similar scene unfolds at LAN events, where the spaces default to being male, since there are no
places for the women to change or clean up. The social space of the event then prevents women
from activities, which some of them consider to be part of their feminine identity such as being
neat and presentable. Hence, if women want to participate as gamers they must abide by the
values defined by the male participants and organisers. The professional players of Team All 4
One seem to be respected both socially and skill wise by the male players at these events, who in
some cases are world champions themselves. Still, there are no clans today made up of both male
and female players, which the women ascribe to the biased view of the male clans. Apparently the
top male clans consider women a hindrance to their social interaction – the odd woman out, who
cannot sleep in the same bed as them. This leads to the male clans recruiting new members
exclusively from the existing male player base effectively keeping women out. Instead the top
female teams participate in women’s tournaments, which in turn are not considered to be as good
as the male tournaments by most of the community since the top female clans are not close to
beating the top male clans today. This is where I see the Catch 22. In order for you to get good
enough at Counter-Strike to play in a tournament you have to practice in a cyber café with a clan,
preferably a clan with players that are better than yourself, so they can teach you the tricks of the
trade. But since none of the top male clans at the moment are hiring female players, perhaps
because they are under the impression that women are a hassle to have along at LAN events and
tournaments, the women get excluded from the top clans. In effect this means that women have
a really hard time progressing as top-level Counter-Strike players.
The view of women being lesser players is most evident in the online social spaces that are part
of the Counter-Strike community in Denmark, for instance on a forum where a male gamer
indicates that a random group of male teenagers can beat the reigning women’s world champions
in an exhibition match. Although Team A4O have many male friends who defend them and
rebut such statements, they are nonetheless affected by the assumption that most female
Counter-Strike players are ”starfuckers” who are only part of the community to score a ”star”
who is per default a top male player. In turn the professional female players see these, often
younger, women as giving female gamers a bad name because they are more interested in IRCdating than being serious about playing the game. It is not transparent though what makes you a
”starfucker”, and it seems very much like a role created by the younger male gamers in order to
defend their territory. It seems that in order to legitimately be allowed to flirt or have a male
player for a boyfriend, a female must have proven herself to the male gaming community first.
Also her actions will be closely scrutinized by the female pros because they do not want to risk
71
being associated with a ”starfucker” and they feel that these actions undermine their hard-earned
achievements as players. The advice to be passed on to the younger players seems to be that they
shouldn't make too much noise and instead play the game - speak softly and carry a big gun.
In order to be part of the Counter-Strike scene the women were very much aware that they had
to adopt another discourse than they would normally consider feminine. They accept this, but
also seem aware of the schism between their offline persona and their online persona. They had
even experienced that their boyfriends would jokingly say that they were not being feminine if
they swore or cursed too much. In other words the language you have to adopt online is
gendered to favour a masculine discourse if you want to be taken seriously by the other gamers
there, but the discourse can sometimes become too much. All the women reported many cases of
being harassed by highly misogynous comments from especially young and immature male
players. Yet this immaturity could in some cases make the women give up playing for the night.
Although the technology is there for the women to quickly escape these encounters online the
remnants of the spiteful words seem to linger for quite a while in the women’s minds.
Despite the negative sides of the community the empowerment these women experience by just
participating in professional tournaments is something they are immensely proud of. This shown
not only by their display of trophies at the events they participate in, but also in the way they talk
about their achievements. They are also given status from women outside the gaming community
who are tremendously proud of their world champion friends or sisters. Before becoming world
champions A4O had to deal with the stigmatisation of being a gamer, but it is thought provoking
that if you want to be accepted as a female Counter-Strike player by your non-gaming friends you
have to achieve something at World Champion level before it becomes acceptable. So even
though some of the male gaming community believes that female tournaments are inferior
compared to the ‘real’ world championships, society at large sees their achievements in a different
light.
At the end of this thesis many questions still seem to linger though. It would be interesting to see
further research done on the gendered composition of clans. How do the recruitment processes
work in the top clans? Do they pick new members because they know them personally or do they
look at gaming statistics? What do they think about bringing female players along to events. Also
many of the girls’ stories were those of being the only female in a team of five players. Why is it
that so there are no teams of two women and three guys playing? What are the social structures
of clans that seem to prevent this?
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I hope that by unveiling the social structures surrounding a group of ‘invisible’, but highly
proficient female gamers, I have shown the flaws of arguments which brand first person shooters
as violent and anti-social purely based on the representational elements of these games, and in
turn claim that these games are in opposition to women essential natures. Instead I have shown a
rich community that has a heavy male bias, which may cause many women to only scratch the
surface of the game, but then get out quickly. For those that do stay in the community though
the potential of having empowering experiences of achievements and personal victories does
exist. Still a major shift in the mentality of many of the younger gamers is required, however the
bias and harassment they subject the female players to need to be tied to greater issues of inequity
in general. I believe studies like this can hopefully show these younger players that women can
play and they want to play, but they need a space to play in.
73
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A P P E N D IXE S
I – My Gaming Bias
I want the reader to know that I am not a very good FPS-player. My main experience with games
in this ’genre’ comes from playing about 8-10 afternoon sessions of Enemy Territory in a game
studies class at the ITU in 2003, and from completing Wolfenstein 3D in the early 1990’s. The first
time I played Counter-Strike was in November 2003 in a 1 vs. 1 game in a cyber café in Germany
against a fellow student on our way to a Games Conference in Utrecht. This is why I am not at
any point qualified to make tactical statements of any sorts with regards to how good or how bad
the women I’ve studied are in comparison to their male counterparts. All I can observe is that
they are not placing among the top clans when playing tournaments against male clans, but they
are beating male clans when they practice.
That being said, I am a gamer, and have played a vast amount of games – mostly RPG and
adventure games – on a large array of systems for about 25 years. Thus I have respect for gaming
and the time and effort it requires to master a game. This also means that my experience playing
games influences my view on the media effects debate when it comes to gaming. I cannot be
convinced that violent games can be directly correlated to violent behaviour. I hope that the
reader will take this into consideration when reading my Thesis.
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II – Interview Guide: Group Interview
This is a translation of the semi-structured interview guide I had prepared for the group interview
with Team All 4 One.
A4O Interview 19th of August, 2004
o Can you tell me a little about a4o’s history?
o
How did you hook up?
Tournaments/Professional Gaming
o How did the last tournament you were in (LoeW) take place?
o How did you find just that one?
- How else do you figure out what tournaments you want to participate in?
o Why did you pick CS?
- Rather than UT or Quake?
o How many CS tournaments with prizes do you participate in during a year? –
Which ones?
o What does it take to make a tournament really cool?
o How was LOEW different from ESWC?
o Where do you find sponsors?
- What do they say about you being a female clan?
o How do you practice?
- How often?
- For how long?
o Crew. Can you tell me a little about them?
- Are they important? How?
Self image
o Why do you play in an all woman clan?
o Why not a mixed clan?
o Why are there even male and female divisions in CS?
Recruitment
o What does it take to play CS at your level?
o How do you find Danish women who want to play in your clan?
o Is that difficult? How so?
Developers
o Claus Due, president of Multimedieforeningen, said in Dec last year:
” Some of the best selling computer games target girls and women. E.g. the popular series
The Sims, where you create and develop a virtual family. Also innovative initiatives like the
EyeToy for the PS2 draw the girls in. Here you are yourself a part of the games where you,
among other things, dance and move about in competition with friends”
o ”The social aspect is exactly one of the drives behind these games’
success.
The Feminists
o
What does it mean to you that you can’t pick female skins in CS?
o
Would you like to have them in there?
o
Why/why not?
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o
Violent/non-violent games…
Their Male Opponents
o
How do you experience playing against men who know you’re women?
o
Boys?
(Male) Friends/ (Female) Friends?
o
What do your male friends say about you playing CS?
o What about your female friends?
The Future
o
How does the future look for women in CS in Denmark?
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III – Interview Guide: Individual Interview with Vildkatten
CS in General
Can you tell me a little about how you began to play CS?
o Why was it CS you fell for?
o
Tournaments/Professional Gaming
I read earlier this year that you were in Las Vegas to play CS – can you tell me a little
about that?
Are your ambitions still to play CS on a professional level?
o (yes) Why do you play professionally?
o (no) Why not?
o
o
o
Can you tell me a little about the last tournament you were in?
o What is the role of the coach?
o
Are you still active in the Danish E-sport Union?
o What do you do there?
Female clans
o
o
I can understand you’re in a mixed clan now …
How was it playing in an all woman clan?
o Which disadvantages were there?
o What about mixed clans?
o How is it in comparison to a mixed clan?
o
Why are there separate male and female divisions in CS at all?
Recruitment
o What does it take to play CS at your level?
o How do you find Danish women who want to play in your clan?
o Is that difficult? How so?
Developers
o Claus Due, president of Multimedieforeningen, said in Dec last year:
” Some of the best selling computer games target girls and women. E.g. the popular series
The Sims, where you create and develop a virtual family. Also innovative initiatives like the
EyeToy for the PS2 draw the girls in. Here you are yourself a part of the games where you,
among other things, dance and move about in competition with friends”
o ”The social aspect is exactly one of the drives behind these games’
success.
Skins
o
What does it mean to you that you can’t pick female skins in CS?
o
Would you like to have them in there?
o
Why/why not?
Male Opponents
o
How do you experience playing opposite men who know you’re women?
o
Boys?
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(Male) Friends/ (Female) Friends?
o
What do you male friends say about you playing CS?
o What about your female friends?
The Future
o
How does the future look for women in CS in Denmark?
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IV – Sample Interview Guide: IRC Interviews
This is the guide I had prepared for the interview with Tibi. It was also semi-structured
thematically with a few references to things she had previously told me.
Questions for Tibi – individual IRC interview
Her personal gaming history/history
During the last interview you told me it was a boyfriend who introduced you to CS, is that right?
Can you tell me a little about that?
Was CS the first computer game you played?
How did you begin playing computer games?
May I ask how old you were when you began playing computer games?
The clan
What is the difference of playing on the national team and playing in a4o?
What would happen to a4o if one of you quit playing CS?
Her nick and her avatar
Why did you pick the name All 4 One for the girl clan you founded?
How did you make up your nick?
Is there any difference between Tibi and Christina?
Do you pick the same T or CT model when you play?
Why?
Professional gaming
Why did you begin to play CS at tournaments where you can win money?
Do you think of yourself as a professional CS player?
What does it mean to you that there’s money involved when you play.
Do you feel you play any different when you can win prizes?
Femininity/Social construction
What does it mean to you to be in a girl clan?
What does the word feminine mean to you?
Are you feminine?
Can one unite being feminine and being a CS-player?
What does the word nerd mean to you?
Are you a nerd?
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Other women
I’ve heard several women say that playing computer games takes up too much time. What do you
think about that?
Do you play too much CS, do you think?
I’ve read that women don’t care for war games, but you play CS. What’s your view on the
violence in CS?
What do your girlfriends say about you spending so much time on CS?
Why is it you and not them who are spending time on CS?
Were your toys any different from other girls when you were little?
The Guys vs. Girls
Does it feel any different winning over boy clans than girl clans?
Do you play any different from the boys?
Support and sponsors
You told me earlier that CS is really boring without the internet. How much does the CScommunity mean to you?
What does it mean to you that you know some of the guys when you are at a LAN?
Would you go to a LAN if they weren’t there?
What does it mean to you that Futtah has mad a song about you?
What does it mean to you that you have Watt T-shits, your ESWC sign, your mascots etc. with
you at LAN?
Do you think about what you’ll be wearing when you’re going to a LAN?
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V – Summary of the Work Process
This Master’s Degree Thesis started somewhere completely different from where it ended, which
is not unusual if one takes a hermeneutic perspective on the information I have acquired through
this process. I began by wanting to do a classic comparative study of female gamers and nongamers. I thought that by doing so I could get closer to solving the riddle behind the huge gender
gap I was seeing in a place like the Boomtown café I mention in Chapter 1. My original research
questions were:
1. What does a game design model, which takes potential female gamers’ interests into
consideration, encompass?
2. How can such a model be developed?
3. What target groups of non-gaming women do we need to focus on for such a model?
4. What are the traps and pitfalls of player-centred design that needs to be avoided by
developers?
5. What methodologies may be used in order to avoid these traps and pitfalls?
I’d written up a “methodology” too:
I'll be using qualitative methods to interview female gamers in Denmark about why they
play games. Additionally I want to observe how they actually play, and how their
surroundings influence this. I'll also be using qualitative methods to interview non-gamers
about why they are not into games, and try to find out what media types or past times they
enjoy instead.
I'll be examining literature pertaining to the subject in order to get an idea of what traps
and pitfalls there may be in making games for the non-gamers.
Finally I might want to do a participatory design seminar with non-gamers and (hopefully)
developers in order to pin-point the final shape of the model.
Looking back at this I’d say it was quite a mouthful. As it turned out gathering data from just six
pro female gamers was quite an undertaking, so if I’d also wanted to add a number of nongamers and a participatory design seminar to the formula I would have needed much more time
and many, many more hands. Also through my reading it became clear that the issues
surrounding women and their invisibility in gaming was not a question of ’women who game’
and ’women who don’t’ because who in fact were the women gamers. If they play online-poker
are they a gamer? If they play snake on their cell-phone are they gamers? I knew from my courses
in target group analysis that my initial target group of women was way too large, but actually
coming to terms with looking at a very select few women who game actually took almost six
months of reading, meetings with TL and lots of debating with myself – and some helpful people
on my weblog.
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Once I’d established that I wanted to see how pro gamers were experiencing being women in a
male dominated universe it was fairly straight forward to get the data collected, since my
informants were very generous with their time and their willingness to be interviewed despite
their busy schedules. What proved to be the biggest hurdle for me was actually writing the actual
text in this thesis. I believe I had an inflated opinion of how fast I could write because many of
the ideas were in my head. They just had to come down on paper. Things were not that simple,
though. I really struggled with sitting down at home writing my thoughts down. In retrospect I
think that having an office outside the home could have done me quite a lot of good. Also
writing alone only made me accountable to myself. Apparently I shouldn’t trust myself too much
though, because I had a poor tendency to procrastinate and ignore obvious signs that things were
not progressing as well as they should. I think it comes down to me wanting to write a great
thesis, but also in the back of my mind expecting the writing process to be a cakewalk.
It would probably have helped tremendously with a project partner too. My reluctance to do so
had nothing to do with the fact that I was not comfortable working with others. All five years of
my university education has been structured around project work. Instead it had to do more with
me not knowing anyone at the time who were interested in writing on this subject. My years of
project work has taught me that when doing bigger things personal dynamics become more
important than the intelligence of the people involved. So I was perhaps a bit too cautious in
searching for other people, who were interested in the subject. As it turns out two women,
Sutakamon Højrup and Emma K. Witkowski at the ITU were actually looking at gender issues
with Counter-Strike at the same time as me. TL tried to set us up doing some of the datacollection together, but at the time they were ready to start I was not mentally ready. I believe if
I’d been in a group some of the lethargy and procrastination would have had to be overcome
because I would have been accountable to more people.
All in all this process has been hard. I’ve had to kill a lot of darlings in the writing process and
work many nights doing the final weeks. However, all good things must come to an end too. As a
one of the PhD-students at the IT-University told me: ”You’ll never finish. You’ll just stop
writing.”
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