Keeping the Gaming Treehouse Open to New Members
As a woman who plays games, the last few months have been fairly challenging. I’m not talking about the hordes of men that camp at my door waiting to catch a glimpse of an apparently rare species (they keep out the draughts). I’m talking about the weird clusterfuck between two equally angry groups that don’t seem to be canceling each other out. As a naturally not-angry person, my reserves were sapped within a few weeks, and now I just watch in horrified fascination as one group tears down all the progress that games have made over the past few decades. And sometimes I get called a bitch.
Needless to say, the waves of negativity have dampened my enthusiasm a bit. So I decided to go on a little journey into the past to find out what ignited my passion all of those years ago. I’m also dragging you along with me because I’m not allowed back into the ’80s and ’90s without adult supervision.
Back in my day, text adventures were high art
Before we had any new-fangled iBytes and megadongles and CD drives, we had Granny’s Garden, a 1983 text adventure game for the BBC Micro. Granny’s Garden charged you with rescuing the king and queen’s children from an evil witch through the medium of puzzles and good old fashioned childhood trauma. It was also my first game.
This was just the beginning. My first hit was given to me for free by my father, a person I trusted, leading me down a feverish dopamine spiral that, 20 years later, would make me drop $300 on an 18” Mass Effect statue and fund an evil empire (EA).
But in the days before cynical merchandising, Granny’s Garden had everything. A gripping plot. Pixel art that challenged the imagination. Eight colours. My dad sat at my side as my squire, facing whatever dangers befell us with one word commands that the game could understand, like “apple” and “cupboard”.
I suspect many of the games my father sourced back then weren’t completely legitimate. With every game he excitedly sat me in front of — Lemmings, Podd, Pac-Mania — he drew me into his underworld and made me an accessory to his crimes. He would wake me up on weekday mornings, telling me that he’d finally completed level L of Twinworld and that my mum was stuck on a Discworld puzzle again (you had to stick an octopus in the toilet, put prunes in the caviar and then steal a belt buckle to tame a dragon — point and clicks did not fuck about back in the day). Of course I had to play with him that night so we could see what happened next.
Doom and somehow not becoming a homicidal maniac
Although my love for gaming was first kindled by my father, the rise of 3D would claim him and his sense of balance with bouts of crippling nausea, leaving me down a soldier at a tender age. Doom ultimately confirmed the death of my innocence and was, arguably, my first “proper game”. It had guns, and things to shoot, a system so popular that many games haven’t really got over it. It was also a hit with my friends, all boys my parents would often lose me to, only for me to emerge, days later, pale and malnourished, with RSI in both hands. I think they were just glad I was socialising.
We were all a bit odd back then, us “gamers”. We huddled together like penguins, chubby and genderless, staring hollow-eyed at such lost tomes as Mean Machines and Super Play. We were united by our love for games and welcomed all-comers, especially that one boy around the corner who owned all the systems. He and I became best friends pretty quickly. Ten years later, we would be awkward friends, and then almost-friends and unrequited friends. But back then, we were just good friends.
In between shooting BB pellets at each other and trespassing on farm property, we would gather around the joystick to save Mars from Hell and occasionally wonder whether we were being groomed into mass murder. This was around the time the media went crazy about violence in videogames, so our hobby was legitimized for a while and we could bully penny sweets off the smaller kids.
Everything is a remake
And now the controversy in gaming is sexism. It has been said this is a backlash against games becoming more mainstream and women finally picking up the controller, but this erases the experiences I and many women my age have had over the decades. I never felt invisible back then. I went through all the difficult experiences geeks had in childhood, but I found solace in the men (and women) I shared them with. We were “gamers”, not “male gamers” or “female gamers”. We were simply united by our love for games.
The fact is without my father, the boys I grew up with and all the guys who have ever seen my eyes light up at the sight of a controller and wanted to share it with me, I wouldn’t be into gaming today. From buying me my first joystick, to swapping game codes in the playground and holding hands covertly underneath a blanket in the final cutscenes, their generosity, shared enthusiasm and above all, their respect, have given me and the men in my life some awesome memories. This renewed interest in gaming as a legitimate art form should be celebrated, and by welcoming new people into the fold with all of their new perspectives and ideas, we are acknowledging the people that first welcomed us.
I don’t know why anyone would want to deny that from today’s little girls, and I’m glad that us little girls and boys grown up can give them a voice. Speaking up means we can shuffle over to make room in our little treehouse, push the trolls out, hand over our controllers and maybe, just maybe, let them play as Mario for a bit.
