Age of Wonders

Pretty Good for a Girl: Gender, Identity and Computer Games

Catherine Beavis's 2005 DiGRA paper, "Pretty Good for a Girl: Gender, Identity and Computer Games," argues that gendered identities are not fixed in advance but are actively formed within particular game-playing contexts, and that generalizing about games and gender obscures this process.

• Gendered identities in gaming are not fixed in advance; they are actively formed within particular game-playing contexts, so generalizing about games and gender obscures this process.
• The study is a small, qualitative, interpretive two-site design (a Melbourne Year 8 English unit and five South East Asian women aged 18 to 22 in an all-girls Counter-Strike clan at a LAN café), so its findings are not statistical and are limited in geography, age, and sample size.
• Students' expertise and strategies for learning games (persistence, trial and error, using tutorials or cheats, giving up) varied more with experience and interest than with gender, although boys were more often familiar with games.