Cerise Magazine

I’ve got thirty minutes before I need to be at the movie theatre for a class assignment. I’m rushing, but I stop dead in my tracks when I come upon the glow of a Gamestop shop window. I hardly ever find myself near one so, at the risk of being late, I go in. I walk past the displays and the guy behind the counter to the shelf of used PS2 games because of her face. Heather from Silent Hill 3 is staring at me with a pair of gorgeous, nervous eyes. I buy it and make it to the theatre with five minutes to spare. (more…)

By Robyn Fleming

I can’t remember if I picked them out for myself or if they were a gift, but the important detail is that my first dice were pink. Not a bold, aggressive neon, either – they were translucent and pastel, with just a hint of shine to them. I think the best adjective to describe them would be “cute.”

Which was great, because I was seven at the time, and cute was a pretty big deal to me. I happily gamed with my cute, pink dice for several years, until other things started to seem more important – things which were better represented, in my mind, by other colors and new accessories – and then I set them aside, tucking them into an old jewelry box on a shelf in my closet, where they sat in the dark for quite some time.

I didn’t use the dice again until I was in college, and gaming with my brother and a group of our mutual – all male – friends. I was playing a paladin, Tourmaline Helgasdottir, at the time, and had picked out a new set of dice in bright, pearly white for myself. But with a gaming group made up of seven people in their late teens and early twenties, someone was always forgetting his dice on Sunday mornings, and we kept a stash of “loaners” in the box with the manuals at my brother’s house. My contribution to the pool was my old set of cute, pink dice, stored in a bag that I had whimsically covered with sequins.

I believe it was Isaac who first referred to them as “the Dice of Evil,” but it didn’t take more than a couple of repetitions before everyone was doing it.

“Forgot your dice again, Stryder? No problem! Just grab the Dice of Evil,” my brother might say, trying to get the game started on time.

Dan, putting things away when we were done, would ask Jake to pass him the Dice of Evil so he could toss them in the gaming box. Even I called them that more often than not.

It bugged me a little. The dice were not, of course, actually evil. They were just dice, exactly as virtuous or wicked as any other pieces of machine-molded plastic. It wasn’t as if they were weighted, or had razor-sharp edges, or even a history of belonging to a string of players who had died mysterious and gruesome deaths. The only thing that made them stand out from any of the other dice we played with was that they were pink.

And it bothered me that it was so easy for everyone – including myself – to make the connection between “pink” and “evil.” It felt like a condemnation of femininity – something I was particularly sensitive to as the only woman in the group. My gaming friends were all good guys. I knew they liked me and appreciated my company. But I was the only woman player, and my character the only female, and between the out-of-game joking and gossip and the in-game plotlines, it seemed as though either Tourmaline’s or my own gender was always more important than it should have been.

I won’t pretend that my being the only woman in the group ever totally stopped being a problem for me. It did get better, because I got better at expressing my concerns and because my gaming friends are good guys. But there were always uncomfortable moments outside the game, and gaming storylines that made me cringe a bit. I did, however, stop feeling bad about my cute, pink dice being called the Dice of Evil.

What changed my mind? I think it was when I made the shift from being a player to being a Game Master, and was told all about how totally evil I was following the most exciting and successful games I planned. Average games were met with a general chorus of “good game”s and cheerful but unexcited “see you next week”s. Challenging encounters that got everyone’s adrenaline pumping and left characters grievously wounded but still fighting (and eventually emerging victorious, of course) netted me the much more passionate – but happy – accusations of evilness.

It was then that I realized that when one of my friends referred to my pink dice in their sparkly bag as the Dice of Evil, it wasn’t a critique of femininity, as I had believed – it was a compliment.

I have a lot of dice now, in all sorts of colors. Pretty much everyone who plays tabletop games collects them, and GMs collect more than most. I don’t know very many people who have as many pink ones as I do, though.

Article © September 2007 by Robyn Fleming.

I started gaming while at MIT. Please don’t stop reading just yet. I don’t think you’ve heard this story before. I will not speak of how, in going to the land of math, science, Assassin’s Guild, and hacking, I finally found my true niche. I will not speak of my brothers and sisters in geekdom and finally finding a place I belonged after the torment of middle school and high school. I appreciate those who can tell such stories, and I count some of them among my friends. But, I did not visit MIT as a shy high school senior and feel instantly at home for the first time. I wasn’t even a geek. I was just stubborn. To me, MIT represented the worst possible baptism into academia I could imagine — a land without the grade inflation of the Ivy Leagues, without the caring professors of the prestigious liberal arts colleges, without the whole range of ordinary kids who would make me look better by comparison, and, most importantly, without even a subdivision of the humanities. If I went there, and if I failed at math and science, I had no recourse. I did not even have the fallback of a liberal arts degree. All that was left for the “fallen” was a generic major in course 21 (“Humanities”). Obviously, if such a trial by fire existed, it was the best. If it was the best, then, to prove to myself I really belonged in science at all, I had to go there. Anything less was failure already. (more…)

Let me tell you, I’m a geek. I love comics (I love superhero comics), I was reading fantasy and sci-fi before I lost my first tooth, I’ve been a drama nerd for years and last year I gave in and bought a Macbook.

I’m establishing my credentials to soften this confession: I don’t game a lot. I played Final Fantasy VII and VIII, but the others didn’t appeal. A quick game of Solitaire or Puzzle Bobble can provide procrastination, but only after I’ve exhausted my blogroll. And though I’m fond of creating characters in WoW, I’ve never bothered to get any of them past level 20.

Some of it’s because I get sick of sexism and racism in even my casual entertainment, but much of it is because my attention span is minute and without mental stimulation I tend to get very bored, very fast. I love intriguing, interactive stories, but I hate manouvreing a character down endless roads, or beating my head against some intractable puzzle, or fighting the umpteenth Silver Goblin Dude in hope he’ll drop the Whizzbang Gobby Gidget I need for the next quest. So in most respects, I’m an extremely casual gamer. (more…)

“You’re such a gamer. Gamer!”

My big brother used to taunt me a lot with that when I got out of college. And I always stared at him funny and went, “…I am not a gamer! I don’t even like video games!”

He always snorted at that and went, “…Gamer.”

“But I don’t play games!”

And he always smirked, shook his head, and said, “Doesn’t matter. You’re a gamer.” (more…)

I have a confession: I’m not a game designer… yet. I know what the title says, but this story, like every story, is a work in progress. It all started with a dream, but with every passing day it’s one step closer to becoming a reality. It’s my journey through life as a gamer, as a feminist, and as a game designer in training. (more…)

Recently, I went into a well-known electrical retailer here in Australia to get myself the Logitech G5 gaming mouse. I am a shopper that usually does all her research before entering the store. Actually, I prefer ordering things online, but I live in Australia. And here in Oz, internet shopping is not quite what someone who has lived in the US has come to expect. There, internet shopping has almost reached the stage of instant gratification. Order something, and you just about know that you can receive it the next day. Last time I ordered something electrical Down Under it took several weeks to get the right item to me. Well, when I finally decided on my new mouse, I wanted instant gratification. So I decided to brave the non-virtual environment. (more…)

I got a great many things from my mother: my love of reading, my imagination, and my independent attitude. But I always was and always will be my father’s daughter. I inherited his unpredictable memory, his propensity to be easily amused, and his love of all things involving science, including technology and electronic toys. My own love of technology developed at a very early age, mostly due to my father wanting to have the latest computer. My parents noticed and encouraged it as most girls weren’t interested in things of that nature. But nothing could have prepared them for Christmas of 1989. (more…)

“What are y’all doing over there every day - bumping clits?”

My twelve year old eyes widened in shock. Spending extended time after school with another female friend qualified me as a lesbian? Did the male friend addressing me somehow miss our excited strategy meetings on the school bus, or our dedicated, study of a well-worn, almost bible-like strategy guide? Lesbianism was not what we were interested in exploring - we were too busy cracking codes, counting grids, and raiding tombs. (more…)

“Whoa, you know a girl gamer? That’s so cool!” My coworker relayed this quote to me from his teenaged nephew. Apparently my colleague had referenced me in a conversation regarding World of Warcraft and it had prompted this response. I was amused at the time; it wasn’t like I hadn’t heard the sentiment before. I generally take it as a positive thing to buck some expectations by doing nothing more than what I like. (more…)