Cerise Magazine

In high school I was what you might call, well, different. While other girls were busy getting ready for the prom and going to the movies with their girlfriends, I was sitting around a table with a bunch of pasty-faced guys in my friend’s basement, rolling up half-Drow magic-users and moving Panzer divisions across the Rhine. As a girl gamer in high school, I was a rare specimen: in fact, geekier even than the female sci-fi fan or computer nerd, I was one of a kind at Southern California’s Clairemont High School in the early 1980’s.

While other girls were busy getting ready for the prom and going to the movies with their girlfriends, I was rolling up half-Drow magic-users and moving Panzer divisions across the Rhine.

I was the kind of girl who haunted the fringes of high school society. None of the popular kids wanted to have anything to do with me, so I hung out with the unpopular ones. These were the kids who were into Model United Nations, comic books, military history, and pushing little miniature soldiers around on maps. They might have been a little strange, but unlike the surfers, the preppies, the dopers, and the rich kids, the unpopular kids would actually talk to me. So I developed a circle of friends, all guys, who were gamers. We met every Friday night at my friend Phil’s house and played role-playing games, strategy games, and board games. Those gaming sessions formed one of my only social activities, and my fellow gamers were my best friends.

It was weird, in retrospect, for a high school girl to be hanging around with a bunch of gamer guys. It was especially strange in the early 1980’s, when table-top gaming was still relatively new. These were the days of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Avalon Hill, Diplomacy, RuneQuest, and Traveller. Role-playing games centered on killing the monster and looting its treasure. Female characters were rare and female players even rarer. Being the only girl gamer in a group of guys made for some strange and uncomfortable situations. Like the time we decided to formalize our group into more than a loose affiliation of friends and actively recruited new members. I was hoping that more girls would join. Instead, we got some of the strangest guys coming by to play a few games with us as a test before we decided whether or not to let them join the group. I vetoed the membership of the guy with urine stains on his crotch. That, plus his blank stare, left me feeling a little uncomfortable.

I sometimes felt a little threatened by guys like that hanging around. But the element of gaming served to level the playing field, so to speak. I could beat all my friends at Diplomacy, storm the Allied forces in Panzer Blitz, or be the first to build an inter-continental railroad in Rail Baron. I could save the party from the beholder in the dungeon, or fight off the space pirates in Traveller. While I didn’t win at wargames all the time, I did well enough that I felt part of the group, and not just like a hanger-on.

Doing well in games gave me a sense of accomplishment and a feeling of belonging. My gaming group was the one place where I wasn’t on the outside looking in.

Doing well in games gave me a sense of accomplishment and a feeling of belonging. It helped balance the feelings of alienation and rejection I felt in school from being an outsider socially. My gaming group was the one place where I wasn’t on the outside looking in.

That feeling of belonging I experienced in my gaming group may be why it was the one place where I found guys I felt comfortable dating. The first guy I seriously dated, Scot, was the person who introduced me to the group when I was in tenth grade. We didn’t start dating until much later. He was older than I was, a senior in high school, and I was very impressed with his extensive knowledge of World War II-era German tanks and Starfleet Intrepid-class vessels. What can I say? I was an impressionable young girl geek. We broke up shortly after he graduated, mostly because I was too immature for a relationship that involved real emotions rather than reaction rolls. I had a complicated relationship with Phil, a talented game designer who hosted our game sessions. Phil was interested in me, but I could never make up my mind if I wanted to be his girlfriend or just his friend. And since my skills at communicating this to Phil were less than perfect, I probably caused him more grief than I ever intended. Phil was a sweet, decent, loving person who lost his battle with depression several years after I last saw him, dying shortly after his wife left him and his game design company went under. The game he published, Silverton, a Colorado railroad board game, was later bought by Mayfair Games and nominated for an Origins Award in 2000. I used to love playing this game as a playtester when he was first designing it and using our gaming group to work out the kinks. It is a shame he never knew that so many people would end up appreciating his work.

When I graduated from high school, I went away to college in a small town about 200 miles up the coast. There I again found a small group of friends to game with, all in my college dorm. We tended to play role-playing games much more than wargames or board games. This group was a bit more mixed, with a few women as well as men. And by some strange quirk of fate, several of the men ended up coming out as gay during their college years. My new friends were more willing to play female characters, less likely to sexually harass my own character or any poor NPCs they came across and tended to be more into role-playing in general as opposed to bashing the monsters and taking the treasure.

I still game today, over twenty years after I first started, in a much larger gaming troupe than ever before. There are four GMs, including myself, and over half of the twenty-or-so players are female. We play role-playing games almost exclusively except for special occasions like New Year’s Eve, when we like to spend hours upon hours playing games like Apples to Apples and Trivial Pursuit. We have played role-playing games ranging from a Mage: The Ascension campaign with rival sects of sorcerers struggling to prevail during Communist China’s takeover of Hong Kong, to a sequel to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged using GURPS, with players taking on the role of rugged individualists trying to rebuild America after the Strike, to a Buffy the Vampire Slayer campaign set in Spanish-ruled California in 1810, to a military campaign in Godlike set in the Crusades where player characters were super-powered soldiers anointed by Allah to drive the infidels from the Holy Land. All of these campaigns feature strong roles for both women and men with an emphasis on role-playing, even those where combat plays a major part. For me, these game sessions are a big part of my social life, a place where I get together with my friends, catch up on what’s going on in our lives, and have some fun. I realize that a lot of people would consider what I do on my Sundays as pretty weird, or at least kind of different. But for me, gaming has been a major part of my life for many years. I can’t imagine living without it.

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Fast Times at Clairemont High: My Life as a Teenage Gamer Girl

June 2007 Issue

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