Breaking down borders in video games.
Posts tagged blogging
Looking Back, Looking Forward
Dec 31st
It’s been about a month since The Border House went live. Since then, a bunch of our awesome contributors have introduced themselves and jumped right into blogging some awesome, insightful posts. The comment section has been buzzing with great discussion from our equally smart readers. We’re all so grateful and excited that the blog has met with this incredible response both from bloggers who’ve eagerly volunteered to air their thoughts and insights, as well as their time, and to readers who’ve welcomed another site into the blogoverse.
We thought it would be a good time to check in with our readers and contributors, and ask for your thoughts. We want to know if we’re on track with this whole inclusive, intersectional, feminist gamer collaboration, and we welcome your feedback.
- What should we keep doing?
- What sorts of posts have you enjoyed the most? Mention specific posts if you like.
- What would you like to see more of?
- Is there anything you haven’t seen that you’d like us to cover?
- Are there any aspects of the blog that you’d like to see improved? This could be anything from technical suggestions to suggestions about how we can make our budding community more inclusive.
We’d love to hear what you think. Please keep the discussion constructive, productive, and on-topic.
If you’re not comfortable posting your feedback in public, you can always reach us individually or as a group via email. Your feedback is always welcome, regardless of this post.
As the year ends, we’d like to thank our readers and contributors for reading so far. We’re looking forward to the new year, and hope you’ll join us. 
Female gamers and website traffic
Dec 23rd
I ran across this blog post tonight on ChicagoNow.com that claimed to be written by a “gamer girl” who plays World of Warcraft. I skimmed the article and quickly realized it didn’t contain much substance, and ended up settling on one of the comments, which said:
As a female gamer I have mixed feelings about girls with low self esteems in RL (real world) who flaunt a fake confidence and avatar sexuality in the game world. On one hand I’d love to see more women gamers, on the other, those women make it harder for real gamer girls to interact with males in the game.
I really wanted to blog about the internal sexism in that statement and the words that followed it, but after re-reading the original blog post I realized that the whole post was most likely bogus. Now I can’t get beyond that. It’s quite clear to me that this was a freelance writer carrying out an assignment to be a female gamer for the sake of a blog post, and here’s why:
Lightning fast download speed
Meghan Freebeck claims:
I was first introduced to World of Warcraft (WoW) by accident. A college sophomore at the time, I walked away from my laptop in the library for a few moments and a friend downloaded the game to my computer as a joke.
So, she walked away for “a few moments” and an entire almost-20-GB MMORPG downloaded to her laptop? Mmm, okay.
Robust character creation
She then goes on to say that she spent 5 hours customizing her female warrior. I’m sorry, but blood elves don’t have that many customization options.
Exhaustive gamer lingo
In my favorite quote of the whole blog post,
My name in the ‘World’ is ‘Mulier Proeliator’, which means Woman Warrior in Latin. I am a Blood Elf from the Horde Realm.
Well, considering you cannot have a name with a space in it, and Mulierproeliator is too long…I’m doubting that. Unless of course, this is a roleplay character. However, there isn’t a realm in WoW named “Horde”. Just an entire faction.
The author on the left, and her level 1 Blood Elf on the right.
This post screams with obvious farmed website content. It even opens with a tantalizingly-sexy opening paragraph to draw readers in, and talks about her “fantastic cleavage” and skin tight armor. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen posts like this. The only thing I can assume is that these kind of articles are bringing traffic to these websites which is why they’re hiring freelance writers to create this content.
I don’t doubt that the author logged in to play WoW once or twice for the sake of this article, but was she someone who played it obsessively and didn’t leave her house for days? Highly doubtful. Was this a progressive article about women in gaming? I don’t think it was. It seems like yet another “I play games and I’m a girl so RAWR!” blog posts that we see so many of lately (even from people who obviously don’t game). Readers, why do you think that is? It feels like female gamers on the web are turning into nothing more than SEO and ad revenue for website owners and content farms. Who is monetizing on this? We could figure it out by turning Adsense on here on the Border House and see what kind of ads come up – but I don’t want to do that. ;)
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