Back in my formative years, I played video games without even questioning that I should. I had an Atari, and I would play Bubble Bobble, Zak Mckracken, Full Throttle and some spaceship shoot-em-up whose name I can’t remember. I bought a Sega - and added Road Rash, Street Fighter, Streets of Rage, and so on. A typical gamers story, except I’m a girl, and girls don’t game. At least, not those kinds of games. Sure, they might play The Sims, and Bejeweled, and some of them might even play World of Warcraft. But they don’t play shooters. They don’t play racing games. They don’t play Command and Conquer, or Half Life, or Bioshock.

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The other day my Political Science professor was talking about types of leaders, and heuristic devices. Inevitably she stumbled upon the million dollar question: can women be leaders as well as men?

We’ve heard both sides, probably. We’ve heard there would be no wars if females were president and we’ve also heard that females should learn to stay in the kitchen and mind their own business. Politically, I could just point you to Margaret Thatcher of the UK and her reign as prime minister or Hilary Clinton’s upcoming run for the 2008 presidency. I mean, they’re leaders, right? But while GDG has feminist tendencies, it’s not a political blog; it’s merely a blog about video games by gamers who just so happen to be women. And as such, the million dollar question becomes more intrinsic to us when posed like this: can women be leaders in video games as well as men?

Unfortunately, the answer to this question is a quagmire that makes Iraq look simple.

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“LOG OFF, NOW!”

You may recognize this as the climactic line of the television previews for last Wednesday’s episode of CBS prime time series CSI New York. In the short preview, it lends the scary impression to the viewer that its resident video game murderer can somehow kill one directly through the computer. Pretty climactic indeed.

I wonder now about how safe gamers, particularly females, feel online in the game realm. How seriously do we take privacy?

The question should really start as: Do we even consider it at all?

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