An Apology to All Female Gamers

I'm afraid I managed to reinforce some of the not so nice stereotypes about girls and games over the last few nights.

I didn't mean to, I swear!

See, here's how it happened:

YALSA came up with the idea to start a new annual teen event called Teen Tech Week and being a YA librarian and all (yeah, yeah, I'm technically just a "library assistant") it was my job to come up with stuff for the teens to do. Besides, I thought it was a pretty cool idea anyway.

However, since I was never cool even when I was a teenager, and since I'm still getting to know the teens from my area, I put out a survey asking them to rate some ideas that I had...well, ok, some ideas I got from YALSA's wiki and site.

The overwhelming winner was...well, it was actually a movie night, but we couldn't get the license in time, so we opted for a Teen Game Night, which came in a pretty strong second. So, I borrowed my brother's Playstation, hauled my teeny tiny TV up the mountain, ordered some pizza, and told the the kids they were welcome to bring any of their own games and game systems. Several brought in games and handhelds, and we left the computers on and provided board games as well, so there was plenty for everyone to do. One of the teens actually brought in a big huge TV*, so we were able to set up another station with yet another kid's XBox.

Overall it was a HUGE success. I saw lots of faces I had yet to see ever in my entire four months working there and I know several of the kids came in because their friends told them about it. Dude, I'm getting word of mouth advertising!

However, I haven't played anything other than puzzle games on my computer for, well, several years. Not since my brother and I shared an apartment and a Playstation, I'm ashamed to say. (A different brother and Playsation.) So...I sucked. Plus, I was only half paying attention to the game (for the whole two minutes I played any) because it was my job to keep an eye on things.

It also didn't help that I was all nostalgic about all the old games, or that I had to keep asking "so how do we do this?", or that I just tried laughing my miserable failure off as if it were a joke.

Grrrr...

Well, I may be able to keep the Playstation for a while, so I might see about practising some so I am less of an embarrassment to my gender the next time around.

Of course, that probably means I should pick something up besides Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts 2....


*yeah, so, there's lots of obvious potential problems with letting them do this, but the kid who brought the TV in is 17 and is leaving for Boot Camp and then Iraq in less than 6 months, so I kinda figured he was old enough to make his own decisions about such things. And all the other kids had carrying cases for their gear and games, so it was quite obvious that they do this often, and that their parents know they do.