| 29 August 2009
Now-a-days anyone thinks they can set up a girl gaming site and make it pink and pretty and the girlie femme types will come a-runnin. This is not so. It takes a lot of work to run a site like this and even more work to sustain it for years. There are few of us who've put our blood, sweat and tears into maintaining a place where women can come to discuss gaming. While we took a hiatus to rebuild our site, we also had to take some time to think about our place in the gaming community. Is there still a need for "GIRL" gaming sites and why?
We decided yes, we are still needed but we needed to change and evolve much like the industry is doing. We opted for a chic-er (is that a word) look and decided to do away with the standard formula for starting/running a girl gamer site. You know, the ones where there is a sexy woman's silhouette, sporting a gun (and this is no dig at our sister gaming sites who do this, we've got your back regardless). We asked ourselves if women found this appealing and in truth were on the fence about if it was appealing. Some women feel empowered seeing these images and some find it alienating. We began doing more research, as one must do when trying to evolve and came up with what we think our sister gamers would want to see in a site. They want to see themselves there. Some of us are what society considers pretty, some of us are not. We're daughters, mothers and grandmothers, who span the globe and share a love of gaming. While in 'Boy' world we're told that if we don't play a certain game or console we're not 'real' gamers. Our podcast Gamer Girls Radio, has proven time and again that this is not a label that applies to us. We as women love to simply play and our 'hardcore' comes from our passion for what games we play, not the console played on and not which games we play. The woman who spends hours playing Viva Pinata to create the perfect garden and unlock all the achievements is no less hardcore than the male playing Counterstrike for hours just to get his achievements.
From this very concept is where we drew the conclusion that we as a site are still needed and wanted to continue to be one of the many voices for the female gaming community. We've gotten your letters and IMs and calls and yes we're still here. We were just resting our eyes a bit and saving our voice so that we could speak louder, play harder and talk even more trash than we use to. Unfortunately gaming is 'still' a man's world, but be ready boys..we're coming.
-Editor
