Post #2467102

2026-05-03 21:33 UTC

You know, growing up I always thought it was super odd for the 'gamer guys' I knew to talk about gaming as a hobby that boys and men are into by default and girls, and especially women, just wouldn't understand. They mentioned or assumed it so casually in all kinds of contexts, as if it was just a fact about the world everyone knew or agreed upon. Meanwhile, most of my girl (and later, women) friends played games. And not just the type of games the guys would look down upon, like mobile games, but established major gaming franchises like Final Fantasy, SimCity or Legend of Zelda. They wrote fan-fiction about Sephiroth, they snuck their little DS lite under the school desk to finish a section of Majora's Mask, or they spent weeks at a time meticulously crafting a storyboard in Sims 2. I never understood why the cultural image of gaming at the same time only included guys and maaybe one pick-me-esque 'gamer girl', when most girls and women around me actually were super into some games. I eventually realised that these 'gamer guys' just never interacted with the girls I knew. Their entire world view came from the internet, from movies and other cultural sources. That was an eye-opener. It makes me angry and sad to see games with a traditionally female userbase, such as The Sims, to be lumped into 'casual' genres, when I never knew a single Sims player who had a casual relationship with that game. They were typically much more intense about these games and fandoms than your average male FIFA/Call of Duty/Battlefield players, but the latter count as 'real gamers'. It's really just misogyny.

Replies (2)

@christian@lemmy.ml 2026-05-04 12:28

> It makes me angry and sad to see games with a traditionally female userbase, such as The Sims, to be lumped into ‘casual’ genres, when I never knew a single Sims player who had a casual relationship with that game. They were typically much more intense about these games and fandoms than your average male FIFA/Call of Duty/Battlefield players, but the latter count as ‘real gamers’. This is a really good point and it makes me realize that "casual" as a genre translates pretty well to "games stereotyped towards women". I'd go as far as to say most modern video games *can* be played casually, but if we actually put the bar at games that aren't intended to be played otherwise we're looking at freecell.

Open ##2467205
@boonhet@sopuli.xyz 2026-05-03 23:13

Growing up, that whole stereotype was actually accurate in my class at least, which of course caused me to also believe it was this way until later in life. Girls here would at most play sims. Most boys would play various iterations of Need for Speed, Runescape and Counter Strike (1.6 of course), with the nerdier ones (me included) playing a bunch of other things too. Pretty much every boy played something. I've since gotten to know several gamer girls, but literally all of them from other towns in my later life, none from my old school days. Which makes me think there was some localized girl gamer shaming going on, but I'm not sure it was from the boys in this case, it always felt like some of the more popular girls in school saw gaming as something infantile and therefore their clique just didn't do it, or didn't talk about it. Wouldn't be surprised if some of the more quiet girls played a bunch of vidya and just never talked about it though.

Open ##2467206