Have you ever witnessed something so utterly terrible you couldn’t look away from it?
A few weeks ago, I went to one of the few cons I attend. I’m not really a panel person—I’m more the type to hang out in the game room as much as possible with a few forays into the dealer’s room—but there was a panel this year that caught my eye. It was called “Girls and Gaming”. Come on, how could I resist seeing what that was about? Before the panel even started, I had already began visualizing some PowerPoint about the problems girls face in the realm of gamers, or games featuring more female-centric stories. Needless to say, I was pretty hyped—this kind of panel really isn’t tackled in general, or at least not at the smaller cons I tend to go to, and definitely not usually run by a fellow girl gamer. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for me to realize that this was not what this panel was about. Soon enough, insults were being hurled, from “sluts” to the barely-even-an-insult “gamer girl” (gamers’ equivalent to the “fake geek girl”, which we’ve discussed before here), simply because the speaker didn’t approve of the way these other girls they encountered were gaming. By this point, I couldn’t pull myself away from the wreckage: this panel was set to crash and burn and I could only watch on in horrified awe.
Lady Geek Girl and Friends 