Hi, my name is Mighty Ponygirl. I figure since this is the first real blog I’ve written, I might as well introduce myself formal-like.

If the words “feminist” and “gamer” didn’t seem obvious… well, I’m a feminist, and I’m a gamer. I’m a programmer, too. And a writer. I wouldn’t mind working at a Game Studio one day, but that day isn’t today. Up until I punked out and installed WordPress on my site today, I could claim that my entire site was hand-programmed by yours truly. I don’t have that kind of time anymore.

I, Ponygirl

I’ve always loved games and gaming. Back when I was three years old, we had an old Trash-80 (Model III!) that I would program my own games on so that I could play them. We also owned an Atari 2600 and I remember my mom taking a polaroid of my high score on Oink! (it was sort of like reverse breakout, where you were the pig trying to re-brick your house while the wolf puffed the bricks away) to submit to Atari’s high scores club. Once the 2600 was put away, there weren’t any more consoles for a long time. I was one of the few kids I knew who didn’t have a Nintendo Entertainment System, and I won’t lie: I was obsessed with them. It made me a pain in the ass if you had one and I was your friend.

During my non-console years, I continued playing and programming games. One of my last serious game-programming efforts was a clunky ripoff of Bard’s Tale. My cat overwrote that game to a filesize of zero when he walked across the keyboard while I was trying to save my work. I played a lot of computer games, mostly the Sierra titles. The Quest for Glory series was easily my favorite. As time went on I learned to enjoy other companies, including Apogee, id, and SSI.

frodo has the ring.
orc hits frodo!
frodo is dead.
sam has the ring.
orc hits sam!
sam is dead.
merry has the ring.
…

I’ve always gravitated to high-fantasy games and RPGs, but I’ve enjoyed my share of shooters, real-time strategies, and simulation games as well. In high school, I spent a lot of time playing pen-and-paper games, I was a Ravenloft DM, and I also enjoy independantly produced Board Games.

After college, I bought a long-obsolete Super Nintendo and played the hell out of it. Then, I gave that away, and didn’t have another console until I picked up a GameCube. They were offering a bundled Legend of Zelda collector’s edition (with the two NES Zeldas and the two N64 Zeldas) and it was just too tempting. With a steady job and a little more free time in my evenings, console gaming soon re-emerged in my life as a force. I stood in line on the night the Wii was released to pick one up and recently upgraded my PC in order to play the newest generation of processor-hogs.

As for feminism, my history as a feminist is about as long as my history as a gamer. I’ve always struggled against the expectations my gender had set for me. I’ve always bridled at the idea that the only way to have any power as a woman was degrade yourself enough so that they decided that you were “cool enough” to throw some table scraps to. I’ve belonged to a handful of online feminist communities in my day.

It’s hard to say if my love of video games, computers, comic books, and other male domains has done a lot to make me the feminist I am, but I’m willing to bet the answer is yes. At first, I didn’t think much about the representations of women in these genres, or I thought they looked cool and wouldn’t mind looking good and kicking ass like that myself. Then I realized that there were no other options. With male characters in videogames, you have variety. They’re not necessarily even young and handsome:

But oh, the women…

…You get the idea.

It’s not that I refuse to play a game that has an unrealistic portrayal of women in it, but I do pay attention to these things… it’s hard not to. And the worst part is, that some of these games are really fun, and some of the characters are a lot of fun to play. But there are fun games featuring women who aren’t totally popping out of their outfits (of course, these women are still drop-dead gorgeous), and they deserve a little credit.

But let’s face it, costume design isn’t exactly the cutting edge of feminist game criticism. From anti-gay policies in World of Warcraft to quid pro quo in Everquest, the most distressing trend in the gaming world has been sexual harassment in online gaming. I hope to address this as well.

You are standing in front of a white house.

I don’t think that this blog will suffer from a lack of material, but I also don’t want it to only focus on the negative aspects of gaming, because I love gaming. I love the stories, the dialogs, the concepts, and the interface. So I decided to create a blog that wasn’t just critical of gaming’s bad points, but would celebrate its good points as well. I look forward to building a community that women (and men) can talk openly about their gaming lives without the unnecessary element of sexism.

Master Sword sleeps again…

Mighty Ponygirl posted this entry on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 7:32 pm and filed it under Games, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.