Girl Gaming

Recently I blogged about being kicked out a role playing game because I’m a girl. Or rather, I’m a girl who actually role played rather than being (as we put it) “a Daphne”. Of course, I’m sure the situation is more complicated than I portrayed it. And of course there were times when I got distracted or bored, so I wan’t a perfect player either.

But that player and I who disagreed got to have a talk and, while I take everything with a grain of salt, my perceptions have changed a bit. I was still kicked out of the game for things directly related to my gender, things which are very likely just excuses used to justify crappy behavior. But, I take what people say to me as input to their behavior, and I was told that one of the reasons I “wasn’t liked” was because I/my character “was a ball-busting feminist”.

I’ve been repeating that in my head for a few days now. So, the same woman who at the beginning of this month was uncomfortable because one blog post, one attempt to stand up, not for women, but for what I thought was just an issue of human fairness, left me labeled a feminist is a ball-busting feminist? It took me a MONTH to finally decide that yes, I did have the right to stand up to the people who had treated me that way. It took me two more months to talk about what had happened with anyone other than my BFF & my partner.

So this person who’s incredibly insecure, this person who commonly believes she doesn’t have the right to stand up for herself, is a ball-busting feminist, not for walking in a SlutWalk, not for trying to get everyone to sign a feminist petition, not even for the blog that broke this webpage, but for playing a pretend character in a certain way. For playing the character as a strong, confident person looking to make her way in the world. For not being, in my personal life or in the fiction game, a woman who depends on the males around her to tell her what to do, how to act or how to play my damned fictional character.

I’m just boggled. But it’s not just about this one instance.

See, I love the fan community for reasons like this. For reasons like my daughter telling me why Starfire is like her. For conversations with scientists and lawyers about how magic and monsters would change the world in ways other people ignore (seriously, UF authors, how would vampires change HIPAA or inheritance laws?) For my partner coming to the conclusion that Superman’s death & recovery would have made more sense if DC had just revealed that he was a Time Lord regenerating instead of the whole heart beating so slow no one knew he was alive thing.

I like geekendom because it brings me together with people. My friend Jimmy who just died, I met him because of a role playing game. I got to spend some valuable time with him before his death because of a role playing game. My kids got to know him because of a role playing game.

These games bring us together, give a reason to socialize instead of tune out in this over-stimulated world.

And then I run into situations like this, where people don’t know how to deal with me. It’s not all, it’s not even most people. But because of gaming I’ve now been almost hit by a man angry at me over a character. I’ve been ostracized from a group of friends because they didn’t like how I played my character. I’ve been hit on, even to the point of people taking liberties with my body. I’ve had people expect me to share my body with them just because I’m a female at a role playing game and that’s what the other women did (even to the point of being told my relationship didn’t matter).

Where does this crap come from? Hmm, oh, I don’t know *glares at fem fatal comic book characters who are little more than willing holes for any male in the book*

Today I’m starting a new game, trying to put past ills behind me. We’re playing Deadlands, a Lovecraftian/Weird West blend from Savage Worlds. Not to sound like a feminist, but I’ve spent the past 3 days reading the Player’s Guide and not one “example” says “she”. It’s all (so far, remember I still haven’t finished the book) “your character goes into a town. He…”

There are only three explicit references to females. A sidebar, wherein the creators say that for game purposes women are largely accepted for any reason in any job. Especially as sheriffs. Two drawings of female characters, both sheriffs and both in skin-tight pants and shirt that are tragically missing a button or three (yet also nearly skin-tight). And a reference to the profession of “Saloon Girl” as a buyable, in-game trait.

Now, I have not read the book word for word, or the other books. But I do know that in books by White Wolf they switch between “he” and “she” in passages meant to give examples. And in Steve Jackson’s In Nomine (another favorite of mine) the characters are by nature genderless, being celestial beings. The only time they have gender is when in a body on earth (and vessels are just as likely to be animals as male of female). In the old Marvel RPG (much love to it) they use Marvel characters as examples, and they profile their female characters with the same care as their males.

So why, Savage Lands?

But the biggest thing that bugs me in an otherwise great looking game, is another sidebar, where it says that despite being set in the late 1800s where the Civil War is still going on, there is no racism. Lee freed the slaves, there was no Jim Crow-ing (not to mention the racism against Latinos, Asians, and the Irish.) Then the side bar ends with (I’m paraphrasing because I don’t have the book opened right now) “Like in real life we’re beyond racism. Only villains and the evil are racist.”

Oh, really?

(Side note: I’m writing an RPG actually. I was going to use D&D’s open d20 system to do so, until I saw the provision in the terms that said you could not use any real life races or religions in your game.)

I understand perfectly how it is nicer and easier to stripe the nastiness from history for the sake of enjoying it better. But honestly I feel that true historical complexity adds so much to a story. I ran a WW Wild West game years ago and I found that a few of my players purposefully played minorities because it lead to a more complex, more challenging and therefore A MORE SATISFYING role playing experience. (In fact it’s happened more than once. I’ve done it more than once. In fact my partner has decided to play a gay male in this Deadlands game, and I’ll be playing a mixed race woman and our core concept was that were were married for both of our protections.)

These kinds of complications add to the experience, but more than that, don’t you think it’s a little disrespectful to say “We don’t like this nasty truth about the past, so we’re going to pretend that it didn’t happen?”

Really, gamers and game writers alike, Don’t you think that maybe it’s worse to strip that from your games and instead load it up with sanity checks and blood drinkers, and well, have you ever read Freak Legions (White Wolf’s guide to playing character who have been corrupted by evil and commonly do things from having acid ejaculate to ritually sacrificing children, not for death, but for slow corruption, to their gods)?

So we can play villains or heroes, we can be the children of Baron Samedi, or a vampire of the same name who slowly rots every night. We can play demons or angel (literally), our characters can live, or die from having alien larva implanted in us and eating us alive. But we’re not cool with acknowledging our own, real, provable, STILL OCCURRING dark pasts?