Charlotte Henry

The increase in girls playing a wide range of video games is having a dramatic effect on the market and the gaming community. Devs are slowly but surely being challenged on their sexist errors ("girlfriend mode", Lara Croft being threatened with rape,") and women like Veronica Belmont in the US, and Helen Lewis over here, are regularly writing and talking about this major entertainment industry.

Bearing all this in mind, and as a girl who likes video games myself, I was rather pleased to see a piece on The Kernel called "Rise of Girl Gamers".

Then I read it.

The piece is just riddled with chauvnistic nonsense, from the picture captioned 'like, oh my God, I'm totally out of ammo for my rocket launcher', to the suggestion that women simply exist as mothers playing games between running errands.

It furthers degrades female gamers by implying women simply play online casinos and other casaul games, as oppossed to them being people who fully engage in playing complex, full length shooters, fantasy games, and so on.

No doubt that the writer would say he is looking at a certain type of female gaming, which is certainly on the rise, but that is hardly the implicaiton of the headline. Little attention is given to the other aspects of gaming that women partake in to balance out the other observations either.

The piece simply looks like attention seeking, and it's a shame to give it some, but such notions need challenging. Nevermind the games industry needing women on their boards, as the article actually rightly summises, it looks like tech and games journalism could do with some more female voices too. Who knew?

Anyway, I'd better go, that bathroom isn't going to clean itself.