What is a girl gamer?

[Luinbariel]

I had planned to start this with “The gaming industry tells us that the female gamer is a scarce individual” and then go on from there, but I couldn’t do it. It wouldn’t be true.  “Tells us” would imply that a male gamer is speaking to other male gamers about the female demographic. No, I can’t assume that position and pretend I fit in with that group, no matter how much I think I do (at least in spirit).

The next logical, antithetical headline seemed to be “Insights on the elusive girl gamer” and yet I still couldn’t go that route. That would be jumping right into a subject that I couldn’t adequately outline, and that even the most hard-core girl gamer could identify, thanks to a fundamental flaw. How can you offer insights into something that no one can really define? Sure, you could say it’s as simple as “there’s a girl, and she likes games” but there are so many questions left unanswered, like does she fit the other typical gamer stereotypes? How did she get into a market that is largely male? What sort of games makes a girl gamer? The questions seem endless and unanswerable.

So that’s where I plan to start.

What is a girl gamer, exactly?

Like any self-respecting denizen of the internet, I thought I’d better check Google first. That seems like a stupid thing to do, but if enough people have asked this same question, there was at least some hope that an answer was out there, somewhere. Of course one of the first links available was a Wikipedia entry, and this was pleasing. We know that even though wiki’s aren’t necessarily reliable sources of information, at the very least they’re a collection of what everyone else thinks. So, maybe, I could get a good idea of what everyone else thought a girl gamer was.

The very first thing I noticed about this article was that it was marked for deletion.

Seriously?