Empowered Fire

World of Womencraft

Editor’s Note – This will show me to start a post the day before and not finish it until well after midnight. IWD was yesterday. It is never too late to talk about though!

It was International Women’s Day. If you are like me, it might have not been a holiday you were innately aware of until recently. Maybe you live in a country that celebrates it as a national holiday. IWD celebrates the economical, political and social achievements of women everywhere and highlights some of the struggles women still face. As a woman myself who enjoys the freedoms of things like voting, personal safety and equal rights, I felt that maybe dedicating a blog post to the female gaming world might be in order. It might not be as important as the first woman to receive an Oscar for Best Director, or first Latina to serve as a Supreme Court Justice, but there are definitely some contributions and some women I’m highly fond of in the Warcraft community. Women have had quite a shift in perception in the gaming world and while we’re not 100 percent where we should be, the fact that more and more studies have been done showing us as a larger segment of the market share is a great thing. Warcraft has done a lot to get women into gaming and I feel that that is a good thing. It hasn’t always been easy – there’s still a very large pervasive gamer culture that promotes stereotypes about women, and takes casual attitudes towards things like rape, misogyny and homophobia. There’s also issues of harassment and general rudeness. I feel that it has been getting better, however. The more visible women are in games and the gaming culture, the more we can enjoy ourselves and enact change. Here is a short-and-by-no-means extensive list of some of the women who have made my gaming life a little better:

1.) WoW Ladies -

I’m gonna stay straight off that I do not necessarily ideologically agree with a portion of posters there. There’s a lot of attitudes and play-styles that occur there that I just do not participate in, do not enjoy and such. But the fact that a large, fairly non-homogeneous group of women can come together and have a fairly dedicated space to discussion of all things WoW-related is something I haven’t found in many other places. Livejournal may be the subject of jokes and whatnot, but it is still a crazy social network of blogging. WoW Ladies is where I’ve found many like-minded WoW-playing women and I’m glad for it. It is where I even found some people who I consider my close friends – including Metaneira. Having access to such a large audience of other women (and women-friendly men) has made me value maintaining more close relationships with women in-game. It is has proven quite rewarding and is one of the places that inspired me to start keeping a blog in the first place. We’ve helped a lot of mages on there and they still are the biggest chunk of our readers.

2.) Kyth of StratFu -

Meta and I are ridiculous Kyth fangirls. We both consistently look at her spec and advice and she’s definitely a paragon of smart mage players at the top of the raid game and deeply understands the mechanics of the game. It is wonderful to see someone so consistently intelligent about the craft of end-game and explain it in such an easy-to-understand way. Having someone to look up to who also plays the same class we do and is a female is really nice sometimes. Not bagging on Manly, Euripedes or Ataxus, but having the mage field not be entirely dominated by men is cool to see.

3.) The Women of Guild of Guilds -

These are the women I see every day, raid with, PVP with, and even roleplay with sometimes! My guild and our expanded guild collective are definitely friendly to everyone, but it is nice some days to be on a raid team that has a significant female portion. Not just healers, either. Our raid has historically always had this too – even back in the old 40man raid days. Our old main tank and raid leader (also one of my real life friends now) was female and one of the best tanks I’ve ever had the pleasure of standing behind as a caster. Over the years, we’ve had female tanks, female healers of all flavors, and definitely female DPS – including enhancement shaman, warlocks, hunters and mages. There’s all sorts of hardcore and casual female players in our little group and I’m proud to know all of them. Because of them and because of the maturity and female-friendliness in general, I have never once felt the sting of misogyny or harassment from other players while raiding or in guild chat.

4.) The Female WoW Blogosphere

From Hots and Dots, to Troll Bouquet, Tank Like a Girl, Borderhouse Blog, and Too Many Annas – the blogging world is filled with intelligent, verbose women who wish to share their gaming experience with the rest of us. I have quite a lot of fun reading all of their words and feel that have given me the inspiration and the support for us to continue what we’re doing with this little blog here. Another shout-out to Latoya Peterson from Jezebel (also Racialicious) who has written some of the most nerd-friendly, Warcraft-related gaming posts I’ve seen from a major non-gaming blog in a while.

5.) Evelyn Fredickson and Christie Golden

These are two women who have helped shape the Warcraft Universe alongside the Supreme Lore-Being Chris Metzen. If you haven’t heard of Evelyn, she is the Creative Development Historian and helps catalogue, shape and maintain the lore of Azeroth in media and in the game. She writes articles for the main site and has also published printed work for Blizzard as well. Her contributions to how the stories of our gaming world are presented are everywhere, even if you didn’t know who she is. Christie Golden is the author of the Arthas novel – one of the few pieces of Warcraft writing I’ve actually enjoyed (no thanks to you, Knaak) and a really interesting treatment of WoW’s own prodigal son. Both women have had a direct impact on the characters and World of Warcraft in such unique ways. Without both of them, we wouldn’t have as much lore to drool over.

There are many, many more women I could mention that have made up the entire population of Warcraft games, community and gaming but these were the ones I felt like mentioning today. Maybe you will do the same on your own blog or here in the comments. Celebrate the women in your life and the world today.

Tags: christie-golden, evelyn-fredrickson, female-bloggers, female-mages, guild-of-guilds, internation-womens-day, kyth, stratfu, wow-ladies