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Video gaming has long been stereotypically considered the domain of spotty teenage boys who play games in their bedroom alone due to an inherent lack of social skills. Recent statistics that suggest females make up around 48% of gamers overall doesn’t seem to have done much to quell this belief. As a female gamer, there are times when you can feel entirely isolated within the gaming community and as a lesbian gamer, this feeling of exclusion can be even more prominent.
 When it comes to the heavily male-dominated world of video gaming, lesbians have on the whole been invisible, marginalised or ignored. For the uninitiated lesbian, gaming is only for the geek girls, but there’s a whole social world out there that is continuing to grow as more lesbians proudly come out as avid gamers.
Now, let’s get one thing out of the way first – I am a proud geek, gaming, gadget-loving grrl. Gaming can be fun, and it’s definitely not only the domain of the boys. Some of the coolest gaming characters recently have been female. Nariko from PS3 title ‘Heavenly Sword’, Commander Shepherd from Xbox 360 title ‘Mass Effect’ and who could ever forget the lovely Lady Lara Croft from the ‘Tomb Raider’ series of games? The hottest game for queer chicks at the moment is 'Mass Effect' on XBox 360. You can play a cool female commander and have a lesbian relationship in game. It's also a very cool RPG game. Other great titles that not-so-straight girls will enjoy are: ‘Heavenly Sword’ (PS3), ‘Halo 3’ (Xbox 360), ‘World of Warcraft’ (PC) and ‘MySims’ (Wii).
Yes, there is plenty out there for the gay girl gamer; all it takes is a little bit of searching.
What exactly is gaming?
For those who know nothing about gaming at all, it may seem like a strange mystical world where people lose hours of their lives pretending to be someone else. To a certain extent, you may be right, but for the complete newbies, here comes the science bit. Console gaming is all about buying a console, plugging it into your TV and off you go. Whether it’s an Xbox 360, PS3 or Wii, they’re all very similar to get started with – all you do is connect it to your TV and step into the big wide world of gaming.
There are tons of different types of games to play and without boggling your mind too much, some of the main ones are role-playing games (RPGs), first-person shooters (FPS), simulation games (Sims), sports, action adventure and more. The great thing about gaming, whether you’re a lesbian or not, is that it allows you to escape for a while and become completely absorbed in a title. You can play a variety of existing characters or at times create your own and then head off on your adventure. If your thing is being a swashbuckling pirate, fighting against orcs and elves, seducing your neighbour, tomb raiding for ancient artefacts or simply pottering around gardening or creating an online life, gaming has it all.
Girl-on-girl action
For the queer girls already immersed in the world of gaming, one of the biggest stories this year was the ‘lesbian’ sex scene in top selling title Mass Effect. The story was so huge that typing it into Google will return around 280,000 hits. The sex scene in the game between the lead female character and her mono-gendered alien friend caused such furore it was banned in Singapore for its homosexual content. The reason for this is that the alien resembled the female form and therefore the sex scene was considered lesbian.
This isn’t the first time there’s been some girl-on-girl action in a gaming title – it may however be one of the few times where the content didn’t appear to be there to purely satisfy the male gaze. Although it’s highly unlikely that lesbian content is added to a game purely to appease the lesbian gaming public, it is still a positive step when characters are able to pursue same-sex relationships in the same manner as the heterosexual characters are. Yes, gaming is slowly … very slowly, starting to incorporate a few more female characters and in turn some lesbian characters also – or those that lesbian gamers can identify as lesbian at least in their own mind.
Many lesbian PC gamers have their own World of Warcraft guilds and console gamers have their own clans. They create safe, fun environments for both newbies and experienced gamers alike to hang out, meet other lesbian gamers and do some social networking whilst laying some smack down. If you’re looking to step into the world of gaming, or just interested in what other lesbian gamers are into at the moment, you may want to check out a new website dedicated entirely to lesbians and gaming.
Lesbian Gamers.com (or the LG as it has affectionately been termed by its members) is primarily a blog that exists to provide any lesbian-related gaming news, views and reviews. As you can imagine, that can be pretty sparse at times, so Angela Simpson, the site creator, has had to be extremely creative and inventive when it comes to getting daily content onto the site. As she herself states, “It was and never will be the intention of Lesbian Gamers.com to provide the same old gaming news that can be found on any other gaming website. Branding it with as many lesbian-focused items as possible means that when people come to the site, they already know what to expect and know what they want.”
This has led to some amusing features appearing over the initial few months of the site. Some of the most popular have been an original LG comic strip, a spoof glimpse into the future of some of our favourite gaming goddesses and a regular feature entitled ‘dyke doubles’ that looks at a female gaming character and her real-life double. One of the most popular ‘dyke doubles’ featured Carla Valenti, a semi-dykey character from the title ‘Fahrenheit’ and the Sarah Shahi (Carmen from The L Word) character Dani Reese from the TV show Life. With regular articles appearing that address questions such as whether it’s possible to create a butch female character in ‘Oblivion’ or why there are so many lesbian-looking females in ‘Mass Effect’, the LG is proving to be a good source of information for gamers and non-gamers alike.
No machismo, thanks
Some people who aren’t into gaming, or even some who are, may not fully understand the desire to create a lesbian-only space that focuses on gaming. A perfect example of why it needs to be there was highlighted through a recent discussion on top-selling macho game ‘Gears of War’. A prominent online forum populated by males was discussing whether ‘Gears of War’ should have a female playable character. The overall feeling was no, it shouldn’t, but some of the responses were pretty pathetic and overtly sexist. Two in particular stand out – “If there was a chick presented in Gears of War 2 as a main character she would be some buff-manly-dyke-butch character” and “If I play a female character, will I have to play a little tampon reloading mini game”.
These kind of responses alienate not only the female gamer, but especially the lesbian gamer and it’s from this that people start to look for alternatives. As with many areas online, one bigoted homophobe can ruin an entirely safe and fun site, and this is no different for girls who like to game. Finding a safe space is one of the most common desires many lesbian gamers have.
Ultimately the visibility of lesbian gamers in general will hopefully continue to grow and as more lesbians find places to share their individual voices in a collective environment, perhaps developers and publishers will start to listen. Lesbian Gamers.com has recently been signed up by After Ellen.com, the web’s foremost lesbian site, to provide weekly video blogs on lesbian gaming and gaming in general.
If you haven’t yet taken the plunge and bought yourself a next-gen console, get your hands on one and jump into a whole new way of meeting other lesbians. If the thought of pushing buttons to get the lovely Lara Croft to do everything you demand isn’t enough of a temptation to get you started in gaming, maybe nothing ever will be. For those of us who are already converted, we know what Lesbian Gamers.com mean when they say ‘because sometimes we use our hands for other things’.
www.lesbiangamers.com
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