When women mention that they are gamers or love gaming, it is often assumed that they are referring to so-called ‘cosy games’, and very rarely would someone think that a woman is referring to anything other than that.
The ‘cosy genre’ includes puzzle games, strategy games, and any other games where one has to build, farm, or harvest – for example, Animal Crossing, which aims to relax someone and entertain them in a very calm and, most importantly, non-violent way.
However, when you find yourself roaming through Twitch, a website mostly used by gamers for live streaming (recording themselves playing games), you can clearly see that this assumption is wrong.
There are actually a lot of women out there who are not only playing ‘male’ games such as first-person shooters, but are also incredibly good at it and making a living doing just that.
Women ridiculed in online gaming
Unfortunately, women are often ridiculed and not taken seriously within gaming spaces.
And if that was not bad enough, they also regularly have to deal with sexism while just trying to do their job or, in the case of non-professional gamers, wind down.
Indeed, there are numerous videos online where one can witness this firsthand: women trying to enjoy their favourite game, playing online with others, and having to listen to comments from men such as, “You are a woman, you should be in the kitchen,” or direct insults that question their gaming skills.
For a lot of streamers who show their faces during their streams, things go a step further with them being sexualised by many people online.
Even so, women are trying not to let all this negativity get into their head and to keep going with what they enjoy doing.
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Successful female gamers do exist
Alyce Rocha is an example of a successful female gamer – a woman who games for a living.
Her internet persona, Alyska, has a combined following of 585,000 people who mostly watch her play online horror games.
Horror games were not actually her first choice, but she quickly realised they could be her key to success, so Alyce took the opportunity and built something great for herself.
“I used to hate horror games,” the streamer says.
“However, my audience loved to see me suffer, so I would play more and more, to the point I actually love them now.”
In this way, Alyce breaks the stereotype and challenges perceptions of what kinds of games women should be playing, which is an aspect she admits to enjoying.
Moreover, streaming offers a sense of togetherness as it is akin to “sharing an experience together”.
“If you’ve played the game yourself, then you want to see someone else’s reaction”, she adds.
However, despite it being something that she loves to do while also earning a “respectable wage”, Alyce does not try to hide the fact that streaming is hard work – regardless of how many people believe it is “just playing games” and cannot possibly be that difficult.
Alyce claims that she’s “always grinding”, although she has reduced her streams from 12-hour sessions to 6-hour ones.
On top of that, she needs to juggle between several platforms, including Twitch and YouTube, in order to make enough income since platforms often take a cut of her earnings.
Ultimately, when looking at how competitive the industry is, it is no surprise that the most successful streamers need to work hard and for very long hours in order to make it work.
It’s also worth remembering that, in the UK alone, the revenue of this industry is projected to reach £13.7 billion – more than music, TV, and film combined.
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Women speaking up for themselves
Surveys show that women now game just as much as men, but the audience in the streaming sector is still mostly male.
According to Frankie Ward, an eSports gamer and presenter, this has a lot to do with who games are being marketed to.
“In the past, gaming has kind of been this protected identity that men have held on to very strongly,” she says.
“Women are being a lot more vocal about the fact that they’re gamers, and they’re becoming a lot prouder to say so.”
This may or may not be because there has also been a shift in the making of video games, with developers no longer over-sexualising female characters and showing them in more rounded and natural ways.
In both Life Is Strange, a game about a student discovering she has special powers and solving mysteries in her town, and The Last of Us, which details the fight for survival in a post-apocalyptic world, women are shown to be strong, powerful, independent, and not just something to look at.
Alyce’s thoughts on this shift are that women have always been gaming, but they have never really spoken up about it until now.
“I’ve been gaming since I was a child,” she insists.
“I didn’t know anyone in my school who played games, whereas now it’s so easy to find communities and streamers who are women who you can talk to and game with.”
In summary, while it can be said that the world of gaming is changing over time, hopefully one day soon women involved in this industry will be respected and treated just as men are, so that they too can enjoy themselves without being insulted and pestered.
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Shameeka Voyiya 
Newsjustnews writers 
Ren Azrack Escosio