When would you tell a significant other that you're a gamer?

The only games I've ever been able to get girls to play were Nintendogs on DS, Katamari, and Co-op Toejam and Earl on a Genesis Emulator.

My sister's male friends learn very quickly that she's into games, because they almost invariably mouth off about how great they are at said games and get trounced. She will throw down at Mortal Kombat and Smash. Almost all of her friends are into games, too, so I've learned not to prejudge people on whether they play or not. I think it's a generational thing, it's no longer just for teenage boys in their basement, games are much more mainstream now (and they don't all appeal solely to the 13-year old male demographic, so that helps broaden the audience too).

True Bragatyr. Girls play lots of games these days, even hardcore games like fighting games. There is a girl named Sherry Jenix that plays Street Fighter 4 competitively. She may not be the best, but she can hang with most of the top players. She also plays one of the more technical characters in the game: C. Viper. There isn't a big female presence in the fighting game community, but there is some.

Yes nowadays, a lot of girls are playing even hardcore games ! So that's great

Bragatyr wrote:

My sister's male friends learn very quickly that she's into games, because they almost invariably mouth off about how great they are at said games and get trounced. She will throw down at Mortal Kombat and Smash.

I'll tell ya one thing…I did this same thing (in Smash, Brawl to be specific) with the competitive guys at college. Oh boy. Not only did they laugh at me for 'lol girl' but also because my character of choice with them was Ness, who is offbeat and generally considered not that good, plus it takes a while to actually get good with him. So imagine their reaction when I show up, select Ness, get laughed at and then proceed to systematically destroy all my competition so hard they teamed up on me and STILL couldn't beat me. They did not have the first clue about how to approach a player who's actually competent with Ness. After that I garnered a lot more respect from them (and for Ness…yay!)

Same thing happened at PAX East last year (which I'm returning to, BTW…next month, Saturday and Sunday passes, PSYCHED…though I won't be able to participate in the Friday Smash tournament). It seemed a very novel thing that A) a woman could be good at Smash and B) that there's a way to play Pit besides spamming his arrows and side special (aerial maneuverability, to be specific, and his gliding slash is insane). So again, I select Pit, everyone expects spamminess, and I do none of that and instead spent probably 75% of the match in the air and not many people knew what to do about this. Several of the guys who I was playing against were congratulating me over it when all was said and done.

Games aren't just a guy thing anymore. Gamers know this, as a whole, I think, or it's at least being realized, though there's definitely still trouble for women in the gaming community. But society still can't quite shake away the stereotypes and girls who are not in the community…well, it's easy to keep holding to that stereotype.

That's awesome, Wolf Bird, I totally feel you on the underrepresented character thing, I main Bowser, who's bordering on being bottom tier. Ness definitely shouldn't be overlooked, he actually has pretty decent matchups outside of Marth and Dedede (and DK, apparently, I think he gets grab-released pretty badly in that one, which is definitely why Marth murders him so badly). I've seen Shaky and FOW do some amazing stuff with Ness.

I do think the fighting game community as a whole, and Smash in particular, has a real problem with inclusiveness, there's a very clique-ish mentality that can at times be very annoying. It doesn't help that the community seems to think it's alright to constantly make rape jokes and is pretty rampant on the homophobic stuff too. That kind of crap definitely doesn't make for a more welcoming environment, and it has no place in a competitive atmosphere. Kind of goes in line with the constant cursing on commentary and stream, I mean, I get that it's mostly college-age guys playing this stuff, but tone it down in public, you know, it's meant to be a kind of general audience thing.


But yeah, VistaBlade, speaking of notable female players in the fighting game community, Nicole plays a really amazing Peach in Brawl. She's definitely really technical, I don't know what the tech ceiling is like on C. Viper, not really familiar with SF IV, though the character definitely looks tricky, but I know from experience that Peach is very input-heavy in Brawl. I was about to post a video of one of her matches, and then I realized it had a lot of the goofy cursing and questionable content I was talking about, ha ha.

As much as I love Smash, you couldn't pay me to join any online communities around it or pay attention to big tournaments or the top-level players. I love the game and I think I'm generally pretty good at it, but I really do not like the community that surrounds it, basically for all the reasons you mentioned. For me, it's just so bad that it sucks the fun out of the game to spend too much time looking at that stuff. If that's what they want to do, I mean, more power to them, but I would rather steer clear. I will play among my friends (and these tournament people at college were among my friends) and at events held in my area (like PAX East), but that's about it. I have fun with what high level play I do, but I play for fun and when it stops being fun because of who I'm playing with, I'm done.

The only tournament I've played at was a small convention held in Pittsburgh. I placed second, and Bragatyr, you will be glad to know the guy who beat me played Bowser. He shook my hand after that one match and explicitly stated he wanted to play me again since it was so close. Second time, I beat him.

The Smash community was shunned by the fighting game community for the longest time because of how immature they acted at their own events. Lots of the people would get sidetracked and not show up for their matches, and then raise a ruckus if they got disqualified. The commentators would often curse endlessly on streams, and overall they were just bad news at the events.

They recently got their act together, they are being more responsible, and they are now allowed to compete in some of the tournaments with the regular fighting game crowd. You see very litle, if any crossover though. It seems like the players either play regular fighting games, or they play Smash, but not usually both.

Bragatyr, here is thread discussing the difficulty of using C. Viper: http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/975212-s ... 549?page=3

You may not understand it all, but as someone who has used a lot of SF4 characters I will tell you that she is very hard to use, and she relies on lots of move cancels and feints to even give her the needed mobility to compete with the top tiers.

It's something that logically should come up when the "What do you like to do for fun?" question comes up.

As long as video games aren't your only interest, it shouldn't be something to worry about. I think it's more eye-opening to your potential partner if it's the only thing you do, instead of being one thing in a group of varied interests.

So in my case, I could say I play video games, I could also say I'm a huge music buff/critic, occasional reader/writer and avid sports fan. That doesn't really scream "pasty basement dwelling nerd" than it simply says I have multiple interests and video games happen to be one of them.

Wow, way to go Wolf Bird!!! I would have loved to see you in action in those game matches,