"If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you challenge us, will we not pwn you? Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go bring some hurt to my Halo multiplayer friends, and after that, maybe I'll go enjoy a spa treatment!"
With the assumption that Most Gamers Are Male, fiction involving video games (and, to a lesser extent, card and tabletop games) have this tendency to always incorporate at least one female character that is into the same sort of games as the male characters. Going beyond just Token Minority, this character type has her own genetics that tend to show up more often than not. She's usually very tomboyish (but because she is brought in for fanservice, she usually looks exceptionally feminine and well-kempt), confrontational, and always self-aware of her gender (with the need to mention it more often than she should). If she's in a relationship, she'll usually be a Tsundere as well.
Also common is for this character to have high skill in games (or at least higher than the misogynistic characters so she can promptly destroy them). A form of Positive Discrimination, it was probably originally meant as a subversion (similar to sports, game "pros" often regarded women as inherently inferior), but has become so overused that it's now a subversion when the character doesn't have significantly better than average skill.
One thing worthy of note is that a female character playing games doesn't automatically make her a gamer chick as per the mold. In order to qualify, she should have at least one of the traits mentioned above and have the fact that she plays games be a major character trait. If heavy emphasis is given to both the fact that she plays games and that she's female, it probably counts.
This has become a Discredited Trope as of recently. With recent trends showing females actually outnumber male gamers (though it is mostly due to the surge in social media games such as FarmVille), it has become almost offensive to portray female gamers in this fashion. It doesn't help that this trope often tends to evoke Straw Feminism both in the character's actions and the implications of their presence. As such, most modern fiction won't play this trope completely straight any more. This carries over to online fora, where real-life girl gamers attempting to attract attention by referring to their gender is generally met with a disinterested eye-roll except in the most socially maladjusted fora where it is met with both excitement by some and a LOT of hostility by others.
Almost guaranteed to show up in a Two Gamers on a Couch series. In fact, you can probably have a "Start to Gamer Chick" scale for measuring how cliche a series is (which is funny, considering the definitive series of this type, Penny Arcade, went to great lengths to avoid this).
Compare Otaku Surrogate. Contrast Dungeonmaster's Girlfriend, Nerd Nanny.
Examples:
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Advertising
A commercial for the Nintendo 3DS shows a trio of grown men getting soundly beaten in Mario Kart 7's online multiplayer mode. As they speculate on who these mystery guys are, we cut to a pair of Japanese schoolgirls, who briefly wonder if they should show mercy on their opponents for once before laughing and returning to their game.
EXCITE! A Hentai-doujin, is about a guy who finds out the popular, quiet girl in his school is a gamer chick.
Hayate the Combat Butler: Sanzenin Nagi is very much this on top of being a loli Tsundere and pretty much a Hikikomori - basically, every waking moment she's not either harassing or fawning over Hayate or trying to draw a manga, she's playing a variety of RPGs, racing games or fighting games, and is generally uninterested on more "feminine" stuff. She doesn't seem to have as much skill as is the norm for this trope, though.
Koe de Oshigoto!: Kotori, Kanna's friend, is one of these, but doesn't play eroge so she didn't know that Kanna got into voice acting.
Lucky Star: Konata. Kagami too, to a lesser extent.
The Gamers 2: The female newbie on her first session comes up with a feat combo that allows her a crit range of 13-20 with a spear and lets her take an extra attack every time she does. That means 40% of the time, she gets to deal double her normal damage and take an extra attack. Meanwhile, the men in the group are all depicted as powergaming assholes, but for some reason, despite being veteran DND players and played through this campaign twice before, never thought of this combo.
They are powergamers, they just are not any good at it.
Or she's dug it out of some third party sourcebook, given that it's not in any of the official ones. Not that we were pathetic enough to scour the 3.5 library from top to bottom hunting for the requisite feats, of course. That would be pathetic.
Third party or not, the key could have been her "thinking outside the box" approach to gaming (she's never gamed, so she has a fresh perspective). She plays a warrior-type, but the aforementioned feat combo is based on intelligence and other unconventional feats for fighters to take, so the other players, who typecast a lot (warrior HAS to be big and strong, etc.) never even thought of such a combo, because it is not conventional for a fighter to be anything but a big brute.
I Could Never Be Your Woman has this as a minor plot point. Rosie (Michelle Pfeiffer) comes across her daughter, Izzie (Saoirse Ronan), playing Ape Escape. Izzie reveals it's her crush's favorite game, and she's trying to get good at it, so she'll have something in common with him. She's seen playing it several times during the movie, and at the end, when she's sitting with her crush, he asks if she likes games, and if she likes "Ape Escape". She lies and says, "No, but maybe you could teach me."
The Wizard had one appear as early as 1989. A bratty tween tomboy (played by Jenny Lewis, who's now the frontwoman of the indie band Rilo Kiley) joins Fred Savage and Withdrawn Kid for their trek to California.
Best Player has Chris Sanders aka Prodigy, played by Jennette McCurdy. She's a serious gamer that she's able to defeat Jerry Trainor's character.
Kirby in Project X is seen whooping Costa's ass on the 360.
The focus of the adult film Geek Girls: The Gamers. To quote a comment on the trailer:
"Frankly, after watching the trailer, I am disgusted. That one lady keeps licking a NES Zapper. Those came out in 1985, it's an antique damn it. Show some respect."
Literature
Nuklear Age Brian Clevinger's novel. Rachel, Atomic Lad's girlfriend, is also a notable example. Mildly subverts the normal gamer chick template in that she is portrayed as being very attractive and feminine, with a wide variety of creative interests and quirky mannerisms. In short, the perfect woman for about 90% of the book's target audience. Which makes what happens to her all the more gut-wrenching to witness.
Live Action TV
The Big Bang Theory S1 Ep07, "The Dumpling Paradox." Penny isn't a gamer chick, but the first time she picks up an Xbox controller for the guys' Halo night, she manages to outclass all of them on her first try. And yes, the guys are 30-year-old geeks who play Halo religiously. However, considering Penny's more rounded characterization, this is surely less Positive Discrimination and more Rule of Funny.
Sheldon clearly doesn't believe in this trope.
Sheldon: I don't know how, but she is cheating. Nobody can be that attractive and this skilled at a video game.
S2 Ep03, "The Barbarian Sublimation," also has Penny getting addicted to Age Of Conan.
S6 Ep23, "The Love Spell Potential" has Penny, Amy and Bernadette joining the guys on a game of Dungeons & Dragons after a trip to Las Vegas falls apart. They approach it as a game of craps.
CSI: Miami. The infamous episode "Urban Hellraisers" (which revolved around a group of gamers going around recreating crimes from the titular GTA-esque game) had this as its final "twist": that the best gamer (and most brutal killer) was a woman, and that she did this both to get attention (!) from the male gamers as well as prove she was "better" than any man.
Dollhouse: Topher once imprinted Sierra as one of these as part of a "diagnostic". She beat him at a Quasar-style game.
Good Luck Charlie: Jo, and she takes it very seriously. She ends up dislocating Gabe's shoulder when she thinks he's cheating at the game they're playing.
iCarly: Sasha Striker from the episode iStage An Intervention.
Kyle XY: Andi started out as a tough-talking tomboy who Josh first encountered in a Halo-like game. However, her love of video games was barely ever mentioned after her debut episode.
Martin: While it may not involve video games, one episode has the title character so badly hustled by a female pool player that he goes home in his underwear.
Veronica Mars: In the episode "The Wrath of Con", Veronica disguises herself as an anime geek/gamer in order to track down a group of nerds who are running a 419 scam. She winds up sucking when playing a multiplayer shooter... but this is actually a ruse designed to get the scammer to reveal himself (she repeatedly team-killed him in order to get his attention, the reason why she was doing so poorly).
NCIS: Max, Tim McGee's love interest from the eighth season episode "Kill Screen."
In Buffy the Vampire Slayer when Faith works for The Mayor he gives her a Playstation. We don't know if she actually plays it but she does Squee over it.
FoxTrot Eileen Jacobson becomes one of these in order to facilitate some plots, but never seems to retain it otherwise.
There were a few instances where Paige, oddly enough, gave off this vibe.
In one strip she complains to Roger that Jason is playing an extremely violent game, PrimalInstinct. Roger first thinks she wants him to tell Jason he's too young for it, but instead Paige demands that he tell Jason to let her play too.
When Andy complained about the violence in Jason's Doomathon 2 game, Jason convinced her to try the game herself. Andy becomes so addicted to the game Jason gets rid of it to get his computer back.
Professional Wrestling
AJ Lee from NXT. As a double whammy she loves X-Box and Playstation and put out her gamer tag in a promo.
Michelle McCool states that she plays video games with her nephews and trains on the side to beat them.
Video Games
Ritz from Final Fantasy Tactics Advanceknows that people will stereotype her into being smarter. She outright states that she prefers games to books. (Obvious, considering the game is an escapist fantasy based on video games, specifically Final Fantasy).
Kagetsu Tohya, the sequel fandisc to Tsukihime. In an optional scene, it is revealed that Kohaku is an avid gamer and capable of kicking Shiki's butt in every genre they play.
Tokimeki Memorial Yuuko Asahina from the Dating Sim is implied to be one. A more straight example is Yumi Saotome.
Touhou. Thanks to a liberal application of Post Modern Magik and Schizo Tech, it has a few odd mismatches. "Traditional Reporter" Aya Shyamemaru uses an old-style camera like one you would expect out of the 1950s, as she presumably salvaged it from the "normal world". Her new rival, Hatate, however, is a tech junkie who uses a cell phone camera, Google websearches for stories, and spends most of her time at her computer whenever she isn't trying to out-report Aya.
Kaguya gained notoriety as the "NEET-Hime" (NEET being the Japanese acronym that functionally means "unemployed slacker" and hime meaning princess... basically a royal that doesn't do anything), and is frequently shown as playing in her room. Fan interpretation almost universally assumes she's actually a massive gamer nerd, and often is shown being willing to game anyone in anything better than them if there is a storyline with some character being introduced to video games from the outside world involved.
Patchouli as well, as according to fan opinion she cannot be reading books all day in that dusty library. In some fics and doujins she even plays together with Kaguya.
And Marvel Vs Capcom Clash Of The Superheroes has her accepting Ryu's challenge in Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. Unfortunately, we never get to see the result of this battle.
Ai from Neo Geo Battle Coliseum not only collects and plays video games, but has attacks themed after various Neo Geo games. Yeah, Neo Geo stuff isn't that popular, but hey, it still counts.
In Persona 3, "Maya" from the Hermit social link if you play as the male protagonist. She's a girl who he plays a MMO with... who later turns out to be his homeroom teacher.
The social link was replaced in the female protagonist's route, but she herself might qualify as well—if the player so chooses, she can spend her free time at the arcade, either alone or with a social link such as Junpei.
Webcomics
Cheer! Lita differs from the stereotype in that she's a highly competitive D&D fanatic cheerleader who actually glories in being a girl because it allows her to use her "feminine wiles" to manipulate herfellow gamers.
Ctrl+Alt+Del Lilah fits this perfectly. The more stereotypically extreme traits have been softened over time, at least, but she's still a tomboy (her father even mentions this in the polite way), still highly confrontational, and still self-aware of being female on the tournament level. She even regularly defeats Ethan at several games.
5 Color Control has Jules. When she beats Elf Kid in Magic: The Gathering, he assumes she must be a guy after all, because girls don't play Magic.
The dreadful webcomic Gamer Chicks is all about this trope, if you couldn't figure it out from the title.
Garnet And Gure is something of an inversion. Though there is little evidence regarding the actual skill of the titular gamer girl, she often acts as a noobish foil to her traditionalist roommate. Any evocation of her sexuality is met with comically inversive results as well, notably in this strip.
Gender Swapped Eddy sort of plays with this trope a little bit. Formally a girl, 'she' is the best gamer in the comic. Another good example would be Morgan. A video game tournament in book 2 showcased a number of other gamer girls, the number of which, actually exceeded the males
In fact, every round of the tournament was won by a girl
MegaTokyo Miho has some elements of this (amongst a ton of others), but she plays male characters and her staggering gaming prowess is due much in part to lying, cheating, backstabbing her party members, and misuse of her powers and knowledge to this effect.
Narbonic Parodied when Dave's tabletop gaming buddies treat him differently after his Gender Bender.
Penny Arcade Even though it avoided this trope for years, they still played with it in the form of Annarchy (who is partially based on a real person). Even her introduction is memorable ("No, on the Famicom. In the original Japanese.").
Gabe's wife Kara, however, only fits the trope in comparison to Tycho's wife Brenna.
PvP Marcy is a pretty cookie-cutter example. The same webcomic averts this trope with Jade, who both acts like a normal woman and isn't portrayed as being any more skilled at MMORPGs (which, interestingly enough, actually is one of the most popular genres amongst women) than an average person.
Slackerz Parodied. As they make a strip parodying gamer comics with one girl that's constantly complaining that the fact that she's a gamer does not make solid grounds for a relationship with a horribly incompetent male gamer.
Sluggy Freelance Gwynn has moments like this. It's not a major aspect, but there have been a couple sub-plots concerning her hogging the video game consoles and (along with Torg and Riff) becoming addicted to Fashion Rancher, a simulation game about being a supermodel's manager.
Zoe also, though she took the piss during the beginning of Years of Yarncraft, she rebounded into an avid player.
Something Positive PeeJee with tabletop gaming. The Redneck Trees were her idea.
Note that PeeJee is not a better gamer, although she is the GM more often then anyone else.
VG Cats Aeris, although at least she has some fangirl traits to balance this out. The comic also parodied this character type in one strip.
Last Res0rt introduces Jigsaw's sister, Sudoku, by having her complain about her parents throwing her "off her rythym" by pausing her game in the middle of a boss fight to watch the reality show. Granted, she doesn't know Jigsaw's on there (just Daisy), but it doesn't matter because nobody's going to die in the first episodeanyway...
Questionable Content has Marigold Farmer. Unusually, it is not a gaming webcomic and part of Marigold's Character Development is learning to come out of her shell. There is mention of girls who make a big deal out of being female World Of Warcraft players, though.
The Guild. Tinkerballa . Although she's slightly more feminine, she's even more confrontational. And there are two other, non-stereotypical females to balance it out.
Felicia Day claims she got a lot of criticism for having not one, not two but three female gamers on her show, despite the numerous female MMO players.
There's also Riley, better known as Stupid Tall Hot Girl, an FPS girl that shows up at the end of the second season. She's a lot more tomboyish then the MMO women and fits the trope much better.
And Venom, the only female member of rival guild Axis of Anarchy. Confrontational is an understatement, although it's not her gender that she mentions all the time - it's her wheelchair.
The Online Gamer Becca definitely counts. She got into an irl Flame War at dinner and used a mixture of horror and Call of Duty terminology to insult her boyfriend. see it here at [1]
Pure Pwnage Anastasia is a Worldof Warcraft player who at the start of the series is a fairly casual gamer but becomes increasingly more and more of a harcore gamer hopeless social-networking-site-with-graphics addict as the show progresses.
Of Tracer's team in We Are All Pokemon Trainers, Audrey the Lucario merits a mention, as a very avid gamer, and pretty capable given the limitations of her physiology, playing games like the in-universe analogue ofThe World Ends With You. Then there is also her teammate Teala the Druddigon, as much as a chick, not as much as a gamer.
A chart of the different types of gamers gives us The GURL Gamer ("That's right, I'm a GURL, AND I play games games") and The Gamer Girl ("Hey guys, what game are you playing?").
Western Animation
Batman Beyond: Maxine (Max) Gibson. She's featured in a lot of the videogame based eps and in one ep she gains a Stalker with a Crush when she beats him at a an action/adventure game.
Danny Phantom: Sam(antha) played this trope rather straight with Danny and Tucker uncharacteristically assuming Sam isn't a savvy gamer until she proved otherwise, and Danny even takes a shot at her about it afterward.
Also Sam said that all the girls who play the game as well are better then any boy playing.
There is some Truth in Television in how a great many female gamer do end up very frustrated with not being taken seriously by men.
Some of the more skilled female gamer use this to their advantage. One Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) article interviewed a teen girl who was a hardcore Halo player and she mentions how the guys at a tourney would always assume she wasn't good just because she was a girl and some would even go a little easy on them, thinking they would still win, only to go home with their tails between their legs when she kicked their ass hard in the game.
It got really bad at the late 1990s when female gamers began "invading" the hardcore gaming scene, particularly the Quake online multiplayer community. Reactions from detractor male gamers ranged from shrugging off, to accusations of being GIRLs, to outright harassment. A notorious example of a victim of the latter was Hellkitten, who also happened to be a model in real life. Once she made her presence known by posting her own pictures on her website, attacks came in, ranging from defacing her website, spam mails, and being sent scare pictures, such as those of her face spliced to nude females, but the worst was a picture of a mutilated dog (which absolutely frightened her because she was an animal lover).
It doesn't help that there are no small few "gamer girls" out there who suffer from the same social anxieties as their male compatriots and as soon as they figure out that boobs = power, they compensate for their own failings. Truth in Television indeed.
The controversy has spilled out into accusations of sexism in the nerd culture in general (i.e. the "fake nerd girl" stereotype).
The aforementioned Morgan Webb (also known as the "Gaming Goddess"), co-host of X-Play and source of the page quote. Since the show's premiere fans have continuously accused her of being chosen just to be eye candy and not really being a gaming fan.
There was a different female co-host during the early days of Extended Play, but for some reason nobody seems to remember her. Kate Botello was the second female host, heading to 'Extended Play' after she left 'The Screen Savers'. The first host of the show was Lauren Fielder, back when it was Gamespot TV.
IGN's Jessica Chobot.
Adult film starlet and top Unreal Tournament amateur player Jessica "Asia Carrera" Steinhauser.
A study has shown that the girls tend to be better gamers than the guys. Something about having better hand eye co-ordination and having more dexterous fingers.
Older Than the NES. One segment of VH-1's I Love The 70s discussed the introduction of Pong, and how some women proved to be so good at it that they'd scam unsuspecting men in bars, betting hard cash that they could beat the guys at this Ur-arcade game.
There's some theories and papers and whatnot that suggest men and women are better than the other (on average) at certain kinds of games. The general consensus is that men have more skill at games that involve geometry and navigating in 3D space, such as first person shooters or combat flight simulators; and women are better at 2D games and RPGs due to landmark recognition and visual patterns or somesuch. The 'better at RPGs' part could be chalked up to increased female interest in those games due to their storyline/character-driven nature. (ever notice that guys are usually all about getting Cloud to do 9999 damage, and girls are sometimes all about getting Cloud with Tifa/Aeris in the date scene?) This is all one communication student's conjecture naturally.
Actually, what made her famous was becoming Romero's hotgirlfriend after that. After they broke up, he found himself another gamer chick: in early 2004, he married Raluca Alexandra Pleşca, a fan from Romania, whom he met by email. (You could say "chick" in more than one sense: she's 18 years his junior.)
The Australian video game show Good Game on ABC (publically funded) has drawn a lot of flak for replacing one of their hosts, experienced gamer Junglist with girl-gamer Hex. ABC actually stated that the reason for Junglist's replacement was for broader mass appeal.
The flak is mostly because they simply introduced Hex and went on, not even referencing the fact that Junglist was gone is what rubbed most fans the wrong way. He'd been on it since it started and now they act like he was never there.
The show also has Rei, who was on before Hex came along. She does segments about the topical element of gaming culture such as "Art in Games" and the Childs Play charity.
The Frag Dolls, a FPS tournament team sponsored by UbiSoft. They are reportedly terrible gamers, but very pretty.
Korean Starcraft tournament queen Tossgirl. Gamer girls seem to be a bit more common and respected there than in other countries, but then again their national sport is more or less Starcraft...
Team SlayerS, pet project of legendary 'Father of Competitive RTS Gaming' Lim Yo Hwan, has a female manager. She has recently begun an effort to improve the position of females in Starcraft 2 by recruiting more girls. Reactions have been mixed so far due to her stating that looks are one of her criteria but the most prominent new addition SlayerS_Eve has achieved some success.
According to The Colbert Report, 40% of gamers are women, and 94% of girls under 18 play games. Those are, presumably, based on US estimates, rather than international. They also lampshade the GIRL aspect in the interview.
There are several demotivator posters with this theme, such as a bunch of skimpily-dressed women excitedly playing with an (unplugged) Xbox, or one with a 12th-place Mario Kart screen despite the system containing a Zelda cartridge.
Pick any girl at a game design school.
Nintendolife introduced us to Heather "Miss Gamer Girl" Cascioli. The posters in her room feature such games as Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, Kingdom Hearts 3D, Battlefield, Brink and Mass Effect 3. And she owns a Virtual Boy!
Female producers in hip-hop tend to face similar stereotypes, stigmas, and fetishizations (the most well known example probably being OFWGKTA's Syd tha Kydd).
Jessica Nigri. Being a huge Gears of War fan to the point you go to the midnight release for Gear of War 3? Not so unique. Going to the midnight release in an Anya Stroud cosplay costume you made yourself? Serious player.
(though it is mostly due to the surge in social media games such as FarmVille), it has become almost offensive to portray female gamers in this fashion. It doesn't help that this trope often tends to evoke Straw Feminism both in the character's actions and the implications of their presence. As such, most modern fiction won't play this trope completely straight any more. This carries over to online fora, where real-life girl gamers attempting to attract attention by referring to their gender is generally met with a disinterested eye-roll except in the most socially maladjusted fora where it is met with both excitement by some and a LOT of hostility by others.
Almost guaranteed to show up in a Two Gamers on a Couch series. In fact, you can probably have a "Start to Gamer Chick" scale for measuring how cliche a series is (which is funny, considering the definitive series of this type, Penny Arcade, went to great lengths to avoid this).
Compare Otaku Surrogate. Contrast Dungeonmaster's Girlfriend, Nerd Nanny.
