In recent decades, the socio-cultural and political dimensions of gaming have been the subject of considerable public interest. Even as game worlds invite wonder, it is necessary to think about the ways in which practices of unequal treatment are carried over from the world of ‘reality’ to ‘games’, by the one factor that the two have in common: people. Consequently, the twin questions of how gendered discourses manifest in gaming and how marginalised actors navigate reified enclaves of exclusionary practice are important ones to ask. When Zahra* was first introduced to gaming, she was barely three years old. Her weekend visits to her godmother’s house soon opened up a whole new world for her. Being a computer programmer herself, Zahra’s godmother owned an i386 PC that ran on DOS (Disk Operating System). The three-year-old knew in that very moment that all she wanted to do was play, even if it meant figuring out how along the way.Her story is similar to the stories of so many others who began to hone their craft at an early age. They each discussed their experiences as gamers with me online. Our conversations spanned their gaming origins and views on the gendering of gamescapes, among other topics.Pong on display at the Neville Public Museum of Brown County. Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Chris Rand CC BY-SA 3.0When Jacqui started off with board games, it was originally part of a family ritual. She soon progressed to playing poker with her grandmother, followed by a profusion of other card games. One day, in the early 70’s though, her stepfather brought home what then became for her, the ultimate game changer – Pong. Table tennis heaven, Atari-style. Revisiting her memory of the time, she says, “We thought Pong was the coolest thing since sliced bread. Until my stepfather brought home an Atari 2600 a couple of years later.” She subsequently moved to PC gaming and has been an avid gamer for the longest time now. Importantly, these are only two of a range of stories that take us even further into a world that at all times exists at the crossroads of invisibility and tangible fact. Most of the gamers I spoke to had made entrances into their respective game worlds at a very early age, with the exception of a few. Elena, for instance, found comfort in the Commodore 64 gifted to her by her grandfather, as a child, aged five; before she knew it, Henry’s House had become the only thing that mattered to her, “I remember loving it so much I only wanted to play it all day long.”Meanwhile, Rabab’s first contact with the medium was the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) that her grandparents purchased specifically for their grandchildren to use. For those who are familiar with the NES, the memory of Ice Climbers endures, with its images of Nana and Popo, scaling icy heights with a mallet in tow, all for vegetables. Even so, this only formed one part of Rabab’s introduction to gaming and it wasn’t until much later that she came to be well and truly immersed in it. Enter: Diablo II and a boy in passing. Today, Rabab reminisces about it with a tinge of amusement. “I played it for him, later got over him, but never stopped loving Diablo II.”As a craft, gaming constitutes an important day-to-day activity, as the players indicated in our conversations. It formed a site for the intersection of skills and practices of sociality, showing that while their individual game preferences might have changed over time, there continued to be an important relationship between gaming, ideas of fulfilment and being.For some gamers like Judith, whose trajectory through game worlds began and ran in conjunction with a deeply personal process of coming to identify as a trans person, games have been a source of both joy and pain. She says that while the hate and levels of toxicity in gaming can be frightening, over time, her experiences have also shown that there are enough people out there who make her want to continue being a part of the gaming world. So, from beginnings in Burnout and Prince of Persia, and meeting a former romantic partner in a videogame, Judith’s involvement in gaming has also been a process of finding a space that, in her words, “… isn’t ideal but it’s good enough and I enjoy it!” She adds, “I just am careful about where I go and what I do.”The 1989 Prince of Persia game. Credit: YouTube screen grab.For another gamer, Sasha, who had struggled with her gender identity in the past, games were a means of exploring things while also feeling safe; pressures to conform and be “girly”, as she mentioned, could all be left behind in the real world.Taken together, their collective stories are by no means signifiers of a new phenomenon; not one of these individuals is a recent addition to the world of gaming. Having been around since the advent of gaming itself, their encounters with the renegotiation of access to spaces that are historically produced and perceived as male-dominated and misogynistic, are telling. Their stories each ask to be read on their own terms and included in conversations about the social construction of technology, of which gaming forms one of many subsets. Gendered gamescapesLong-embedded practices of gendering in the space of technology manifest in gaming too. It plays out in the form of a culture of offering help and advice, always unasked for, and of feeling the need to ‘test skills’ in ways that would never be deemed acceptable in an all-male player setting. Apparent in the deeply lodged patterns of demeaning and discriminatory behaviour toward women, these practices, in their milder incarnations, can assume variations of the ‘Omg! You’re a girl!” framing. As Rabab identified, many male members, especially in the multiplayer format, adopt a set of common approaches toward non-cis male persons: “You either get flirted with, talked down to or threatened.” On account of the continuing bias against marginalised persons in the space, some gamers prefer to adopt gender neutral gamer tags and play male characters. Rumi, for example, said that playing a male character allowed her to explore romances that would otherwise have been inaccessible to her. Some also said that they were careful about participating in voice chats due to the offensive reactions they received from male members. This is also constitutive of a broader effort on the part of these individuals to identify as gamers, without the added concern that might come from diverting attention to ‘being female’. As Nina recounted, “I’d get so many messages from magazines and interactions with real people that made it seem like I wasn’t allowed to enjoy it because of the genitalia I was born with”. So the act of continuing to be a gamer constituted, in itself, a key political moment, especially when located in a wider context of unfairness and intolerance toward female gamers. Here, the subject of female character portrayals also emerged as an area of significant concern for persons negotiating the gendered world of games. As an image that a number of gamers and non-gamers alike are familiar with, the damsel-in-distress (DID) is commonly presented as an overly objectified female in what Rabab labelled, “worthless female armour”. DID depictions have led quite a few women to turn away from such games, owing to their being the normalised option. ‘Permanent nipple-slips’ (Nina) and the demand for ‘jiggly boobs’ (Zahra) are part of a much larger problem.Signs of improvementHowever, a number of gamers also felt that the situation, more recently, has been showing signs of improvement. And while the image of the DID is still widely prevalent, there now exist more strong and able female characters than there were before. Or as one gamer put it, “There is at least some degree of awareness that maybe women would be wearing body armour too, rather than catsuits with boob windows” (Paola). The emphasis, for many, was on the need for considerations of practicality to enter the process of costume design for female characters.For example, Jacqui said: “I don’t mind if there’s a choice, sometimes it’s fun to dress my ESO (Elder Scrolls Online) character in a salwar instead of her armour. But I don’t like it if there aren’t options to dress in real armour like the male characters do.”An Elder Scrolls Online character wearing a salwar. Credit: Twitter/ @TESOnlineBut there is also another dimension to conversations on the portrayal of women that some of the respondents spoke about: of how playing a powerful female character wearing a thong can be a positive and affirming experience. For example, Rabab said, “…my assassin runs around in a thong, but she is still extremely badass! I loved being a powerful woman that slayed monsters (still do)”. The trope of the barely-clad assassin signifying an inferior character is, in many ways, challenged by these gamers who shift the discourse away from the requirements of dominant male fantasy to a consideration of how they would like their characters presented in a game. In talking about their individual introductions to, and travels through gaming, each of the respondents in this study is also staking a claim to what she views the space as equally hers. And while adding a gendered prefix to the term ‘gamer’ is itself a manifestation of the unequal power dynamics that inhere, the cultural context of gaming also shows that the terms of the discourse are not welcoming of individuals who may not identify with binary characterisations of gender. Clarissa, who identifies as a bigender person said, “Having been born a cis man, it’s just easier to present myself that way rather than risking annoying any random people who are transphobic or misogynistic.” Judith too, drew attention to her fear of online hate for identifying as a trans person; in the past, she preferred to present as male.Steps towards inclusivityThere are however, some games that respondents identified, were taking steps toward inclusivity, by giving users the option of choosing their character’s gender identity and sexual orientation. Dragon Age III, which as Rabab recounted, “had a hero whose gender was ambiguous in trailers, in addition to which it had a lesbian romance, where the character would shut down any man that tried flirting with her”. Jacqui spoke about how “story quests in the ESO include lesbian and gay couples”, mentioning also that these representations almost always generate adverse reactions from ‘dudebro gamers’. Consequently, a number of respondents reflected on the need for equality in game development and direction, as a means of creating a more socially representative gaming order.Game landscapes, or gamescapes consist of a number of marginalised persons who attempt individually, to question dominant, problematic gendered discourses that do not recognise the rights of non-cis heterosexual male members as equal players; games are an affective political experience for persons navigating these issues. For a number of gamers in this study, games assumed a part of ‘being’ itself. As a key space of cross-thematic convergence, they embody a site of resistance and a means of belonging for those involved – of getting lost in, and falling in love with game worlds; of finding support and resilience, and of charting their courses on their own terms, in more ways than one could ever imagine.*The names and identifying details of all the respondents have been changed to protect their privacy.Ramya K. Tella is a doctoral student at the department of geography, King’s College, London.