Stop the Sexism: Girls Play Video Games, Too! Wednesday, February 01, 2012 By Emma Dawson - Yahoo Advertising Girls, if you’ve ever played a video game and some dude has found out your gender, have you ever gotten this? “Why aren’t you in the kitchen?” or “Where is my sandwich?”  or “Girls don’t exist on the Internet.” If you game a lot and use a headset, you most likely have- and if you’re like me, you hate it. I don’t mind the occasional jibe at my gaming skills because, hey, I’m not an amazing gamer, and I make mistakes, but if you say it’s because I’m a girl, then I’ll get mad. For one, I can beat any dude’s butt in Mario Kart. For two, some guys suck at video games and there are some amazing female gamers, so what’s the point of classifying any one gender at being awesome or being terrible at gaming? On WoW (World of Warcraft), whenever a girl identifies herself in trade or in a party or raid or wherever, you can sometimes get called this: Guy in Real Life (mostly in Trade because trolls EVERYWHERE). Yes, G.I.R.L., Guy In Real Life.   I figure most of the time it’s just the guys trolling the girls for laughs, and it comforts me to know that most of them will end up single later in life, but it doesn’t make them saying it any less annoying.  It doesn’t dampen the game experience, though, at least not for me. For every really annoying person there is an equally amazing person that you find in the game, plus there are options in online games like a block list or an ignore list and you can turn off chats or channels. There’s also the fact you can completely avoid people finding out you’re a girl, unless you’re using voice chat because then it’s pretty hard (apparently you can be mistaken for a prepubescent boy, though, HUZZAH). You see, the super secret trick to hiding your gender is... DON’T. SAY. ANYTHING. Seriously, if some idiot is all “ooh you’re a girl, oooh pics plz, whats ur facebook,” etc, etc, just be like “dude, I’m a dude.” In games like World of Warcraft where there are plenty of male characters that play females, no one will doubt you. I used to be one of the girls who said “I’m not a dude, but okay,” when another player would say ‘dude’ to me. Now it irritates me whenever someone else does it, because it feels like it’s for attention. Yeah, back in Burning Crusade when I was in middle school I guess I wanted attention, and I guess I kind of felt special as a girl playing WoW because I felt rare. Trust me, I’m not. Most of the WoW gamers I’ve met and actually liked turned out to be girls; in fact, I play with three female WoW gamers constantly now. None of us ever say anything about being a girl, and no one ever asks. It makes for a whole lot less annoying people spamming you with questions and rude comments. Not saying that all comments are sexist and rude, a lot of guys don’t really care. And for all the people who doubt our existence in video games… we exist. Plentifully, in fact. (Apparently, every 1 in 5 WoW subscribers are female and there are 11.5 million subscribers. Do the math and that is a lot of females.) So take your sexist crap elsewhere, please and thank you. To the guys who DON’T make sexist remarks—kudos to you, friend, and keep it up. I don’t really know about other girls, but no matter what people say to me (or how bad I am) I will keep gaming until I get bored of it. No amount of sexist jerks can keep me away from a good game. (Note: WoW is not actually a good game.) And that’s my opinion on that. (Note Dos: These opinions are mine and they are not meant to reflect the personal views of the WoW community as a whole. Sorry if I insulted your race/religion/sex/whatever. Unless you’re a troll, in which case I hate you.)

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