Women, Quake II, and the Media
— by Hellchick"Oh, you're them!"
It's weird being quasi-famous. Nearly the moment we six
Female Frag Fest finalists set foot in New York, every media
outlet, it seemed, wanted a piece of us. Our mere arrival at
the CPL gaming event on Thursday generated megawatts of media
electricity. Even CBS News showed up for a piece of the
action.
The event itself began at 6 p.m., but for two hours before
that we were each inundated with people wanting interviews or
quotes. An hour before the event, CBS News reporter Bob
McNamara sat down with us in pairs to ask us about the event.
"How do you see the violence in these games?" He asked us. He
wanted to know what it was like to be a girl in a
male-dominated gaming arena. He asked us to comment on the
social view that the violence of Quake 2 will marr our
sensitive, delicate female selves. When we were through with
CBS, we were pulled gently aside by various other reporters,
some from well-known agencies and some from the lesser known.
And all of them wanting to know the answer to one question:
what makes us chicks dig Quake?
When it came time to play the tourney, none of us could
decide what made us more nervous: playing five women who we
thought were excellent players, or the camera crews hovering
around us in electronic swarms. Lucidity and I sat three
computers apart for our round two match. As I played, a
cameraman for CBS News positioned himself behind the monitor
directly in front of me, filming my every reaction. The
microphone boom hovering a foot away picked up the occasional
obscenity as Lucidity passed me up on the map. He turned the
camera on Lucidity, where it was obvious she felt the same
annoyance I did. And the fascination only got worse as the
brackets got narrower.
When it came down to the final match, the room was tense.
Cameras hummed, reporters scribbled frantically on worn
notepads. Even Bob McNamara stood behind Lilith with his eyes
locked onto the monitor, his face a study in concentration. He
seemed to find as much fascination with her game as he did
with the question of why she enjoyed it so much.
When the match was over and Lilith declared the winner, the
room broke into applause as well as chaos. Lights appeared
from nowhere, and microphones were thrust in front of Lilith.
People were vying for her attention in a huge way. Even those
of us who were at the bottom of the brackets didn't escape the
attention -- I was pulled aside by Global Japan and
interviewed, and then by a newspaper in Toronto. And through
it all, Killcreek -- the most famous of all female gamers --
stood in the center of the room, entertaining the occasional
reporter or camera.
So what is it that generates so much excitement
about women who play Quake? In an age where women are
certainly on equal footing with men in nearly everything, a
female gamer is still unique enough to garner enormous
attention. I tried to answer the question when CBS News posed
it to me: there are still so few of us, even in an age where
such a thing shouldn't be possible, that to see any of us
playing in the big leagues is a big deal. The overwhelming
attention and the popularity certainly didn't get us into the
game, but it's an interesting, if strange, side benefit. Will
it last? Probably not -- FFF99 is only the first in what will
likely be a series of gaming events focusing on women. With
continued attention, the idea of women gamers will eventually
become uninteresting. Until then, it's a phenomena that
provides unique entertainment in and of itself.
Hellchick
