Oswald Rant: Female Gamers: Felicity

Given Name: Michaela H.
Alias: ]_[Felicity
Age: 21
Location: Germany
System: AMD Duron 800; GeForce 2 MX; 512MB RAM

Oswald: How do you balance your real world social life with that of your Internet life?

Felicity: As I am a student the extent of my Internet life depends on what I have to do in real life. During the semester I am online when I don’t have lessons and when I get home from the university. I have to work 3 or 4 evenings during the week and afterwards, I usually meet friends or go online again. On my holidays I am online during the day because most of my friends have to work. On weekends I go out as much as possible to spend time with my friends again. I enjoy my real life and my internet life very much because I have good friends in both “lives.”

Oswald: When did you start playing games and how were you introduced to it?

Felicity: When I was 12 my cousin’s father had a computer and I often went there to play Worms, Lemmings and Commander Keen (I really loved that one ;)). At the age of 16 friends of mine showed me Duke Nukem 3D and we played that a lot but most of the time we spent playing various racing games and Tekken on PlayStation.

Oswald: What drew you to Internet gaming?

Felicity: I guess I came to online gaming like most of the other female gamers…through a boy. In 1999 I met ]_[RookieOne who became my boyfriend. He had been playing Quake II and Quake III and was member of Clan Underscore. I watched him playing Q3 online and I was fascinated by the idea of playing a computer game with people all over the world. I asked him to show me how to play Q3 and started to practice it on my dad’s PC. As soon as I got my own computer in 2000 I played Q3 regularly and joined Clan Underscore. When Urban Terror was released I started playing it in addition to Q3 and Rocket Arena 3. Soon I liked it much better than the other Q3 mods and therefore I continued playing Q3UT only, which I haven’t changed up to now.

Oswald: What sort of reactions do you receive from your friends when they find out you enjoy computer games?

Felicity: Actually Clan Underscore consists mostly of my real life friends. Most of us live in the same town and went to school together, work in the same office or have known each other since we were kids. They were surprised in a positive way that I suddenly shared their affection for online computer games. Those friends of mine who are not in our clan play computer games themselves (although not online) and so it’s nothing special for them. Of course there are some people who don’t like computers at all and they don’t really understand how one can spend his free time in front of the monitor playing games and some of them laugh about it but accept that I like it. I haven’t met anyone who reacted in a very negative way to my gaming.

Oswald: Do you feel a difference in how you are perceived because you are a female gamer?

Felicity: Well…if there was no difference this interview would not exist 😉 So yes I do. When I am in IRC and people get to know that I am a girl they get curious and start asking a lot of questions like why I play computer games, why I am in IRC, what I look like and so on. I think males take a closer look on a female’s gaming than on a male’s. In case that I play better than a male I often hear comments like “uh.. how embarrassing to lose against a woman” or “well not bad…for a woman.” So I notice a difference in how my gaming is judged, compared to others. I think the reason why male gamers consider females as something special is that we are so rare (at least here in Germany).

Oswald: While it might be a misconception, some males are more serious when it comes to online gaming. How serious are you when you sit down in front of you monitor?

Felicity: I would say that I take gaming seriously because I try to be good but still the main reason for me to play is that I want to have fun. Of course I’m glad when I’ve had a good match and I am disappointed when it went bad or we lost a clan war but I don’t get furious just because someone played better than I did.. I know that there are a lot of people who are better than me as well as there are some who are worse…it’s just hard sometimes to find the later ;). After all it’s just a game!

Oswald: In many of the school related shootings, one contributing factor that seems to rear is head is computer gaming. We hear, “He played Doom, that is what drove him to commit this act of violence.” What are you thoughts on violent video games and how they effect kids today?

Felicity: Concerning the shootings at schools, I think that there are a lot of reasons that made those people do it, be it pressure for good grades, trouble at home or other problems. Ego shooters are definitely not the only reason. I think the press just needed a proper scapegoat and it’s much easier to blame computer games than the parents, the government, classmates or whoever. Computer games don’t show you how to handle a real gun.

The worst thing that the media or politicians can do is to blame a community of thousands of gamers for the deeds of single persons who (in my opinion) didn’t even belong to the community. They played the same computer games as we all do but I think they had no contact to other gamers. They remained for themselves and drowned in their problems.

I think it is possible that you get influenced by those games or violent videos when you are too weak to make a distinction between fiction and reality. Every normal stated person should be able to do so.

Computer games give you the possibility to get rid of your anger (if necessary) and in my opinion its much better to do it in a game than hurting people in real life. After all I think that most of us don’t play the game just because they can run around and kill people but because they can act together, produce tactics, make friends, be good at the game, earn respect of other gamers and have a lot of fun spending time together in the internet.

Oswald: Are you known in the gaming community because you are a skilled gamer or because you are female?

Felicity: oO(am I known?) Well, if I am then it is definitely because I am female and I spend a lot of time in many IRC channels and not because I am a skilled gamer…which I am not 😉

Oswald: How does your online persona differ from who you are when you are away from the computer?

Felicity: Maybe you’d better ask the people who know me in both Internet and real life. I’d say that there is no huge difference. In real life I may be a bit more shy and very moody which I can hide in the internet quite good because I don’t have to face the people I am talking to. Seeing the personalities behind the nick names I try to respect people and be friendly even when I have never met them in real life.

Oswald: Any thoughts, comments or shout outs you have for the community?

Felicity: uhm no .. nothing special. Just greetz to all the people I know and especially to my clan, ]_[RookieOne, Clan Zool, Lemming; Clan Advocati Diaboli, Dakota, Kuchen, Estoroth; Vampy; Lioness; Vansilly, Oswald, nlc, all the other female gamers, Mum and Dad ;), my rabbit (RIP), my computer, everybody I forgot and everybody who read this interview 😉