Cracks me up
posted in General |A Girl on the Intarweb!!1 cracks me up. And then I get thoughtful.
Yeah, so I got lucky- I married a real live woman who likes playing computer games. She’s more comfortable with nethack than with monopoly. In MMORPGs– like World of Warcraft or Everquest (1 or 2), there seems to be more female characters than male characters- in fact, most, well, ok, many female characters are played by boys. Heck, my main EQ2 character, Eddison, is a girl. It seems to be an accepted fact that most girls and “girls” on the Internet are, in fact, guys (and some of the people who believe that have their own little reasons for it).
But my daughters are growing up in a computer-centric world, and I have to believe that when they get online (Miss B is already online, playing EQ2 with supervision; she seems to like arranging furniture more than killing goblins 
), that other players won’t believe they’re really girls. I have to wonder how that’s going to affect their sense of self, as they move through childhood, into the fragile adolescent realm, teenager-ness. Eventually I hope that they will understand that other people’s perceptions of them don’t define them, but there’s that whole puberty thing to get through.
I trust my girls on the Internet, and I believe that good parenting skills will get around the violence presented by computer games and the seductions presented by online communities, but how do I handle this visions of “omg no pics? u r not a girl” that Teleios gives us?
