More British women now play video games than men. Jenn Frank, who has played since childhood and even ended up working in the industry, explains why she loves them

Female gamers: ‘The concept of gamers as a community was new to me – to all of us’

My earliest childhood memory is pointing and crying at a kitchen cabinet that presumably contained apple sauce. In my next earliest memory, in the same apartment, my birth father is playing Mountain King on the Atari 2600.

There were other games in our family library: Berzerk, Asteroids, Haunted House, Adventure. But Mountain King, released in 1983, was mystical. It is also often cited, 30 years on, as the toughest game for the Atari system.

As the “Intrepid Explorer” my father would deftly manoeuvre up the mountainside, collecting gems and hunting the elusive Flame Spirit, which appears onscreen as a dancing shadow. (Once the Flame Spirit is captured, it encircles the Intrepid Explorer’s head like a flickering, ghostly wreath.)

Then my father would venture down the treacherous peaks towards the Throne Room, which is guarded by the ominous Skull Spirit. He would kneel at the Skull, offer the Flame, be granted safe passage into the Throne Room where the crown rests. As soon as the crown was settled on my father’s head, the music – a violent but strangely energetic rendition of In the Hall of the Mountain King – would play. My father would clamber back up the mountain, in a ballet of arcing leaps. (There is also a gigantic green spider that trawls along the mountain’s base, which is ever so much more frightening to a child than grey bats are. Even with the Atari 2600’s limited sound capabilities, the spider made this awful skritching sound as he approached.)

Sometimes my father made it to the top of the mountain but often he didn’t. This was when I’d usually hear him swear a little bit.

In many ways, Mountain King was my first bedtime story. And like any child with a favourite bedtime story, I wanted my father to tell it to me again and again. Only, my father told it to me with quick, dexterous bends of the 2600’s joystick, with a cartridge and a television set. He was in his late 20s then.

Anyway, I think this is how I fell in love with video games.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Watching her father play Mountain King on the Atari 2600 made Jenn Frank fall in love with video games.

A year after my father’s death, my adoptive parents gave me a computer, a Packard Bell 486-33. Of course, I never asked for a computer – I wanted a Super Nintendo or, God help me, some sort of Sega thing – but my elderly parents had decided that video games corrupt young minds and that computer games are so much more intellectual. (For whatever reason, Game Boys were fine.)

I was thrilled nonetheless, and by Christmas 1993 I was online for the first time. My piano teacher – an older neighbour with a bright-red dye job and a penchant for floral muumuus – taught me how to navigate file directories in MS-DOS. Soon my piano lessons had turned into me, an obstinate 11-year old, demanding that my neighbour teach me ever-more intricate DOS commands.

It never once struck me as odd that my piano teacher – a politically conservative retired nurse with cats – was also a computer whiz. I don’t think kids ever really notice that kind of thing.

Or maybe kids do. When I was around 12, my adoptive mother encouraged me to tell a family friend what I wanted to be when I grew up. “I want to write computer games!” I told her triumphantly. “I’m going to be a designer!”

“Well, then,” the woman warned, “you won’t be able to have children.”

“I won’t,” I promised her in a serious voice. Right around the time I demanded my parents let me choose my own clothes – being dressed like Patty McCormack from The Bad Seed does little good for your social standing – I began picking out my own games, too. I played a lot of adventure games during the next five years. These games were heavy on text and story-driven, and they took a long time to complete.

And while I won’t defend it as a classic game, I remember loving Myst when I first played it in 1993. Superficially, the game is about walking around, getting lost and clicking on things; at its heart, though, it is very much like Mountain King. Both are about a sort of video game gnosticism; about learning an esoteric mechanical vocabulary and, from there, intuiting how to actually play.

My parents had a policy stipulating I wasn’t allowed to have a new computer game until I’d completed the last one. After months of being stuck in Myst, I finally lied. I remember it, because it was my first real lie. I hated Myst.

By 1996, most of my female classmates had stopped playing video games. I think some of this had to do with societal pressures but the rest of it had to do with the Nintendo 64. Even now its controller is nonsense; in 1996 it was outright galling. Where had all these buttons come from? Why was it shaped like that? Why was there an analogue stick stuck in the middle of it?

Meanwhile, beloved franchises such as Mario and Zelda had shifted from two dimensions to three, and not every girl was readily able to adapt to these new spatial challenges. For the first time, a lot of us started to think of console gaming as “boys’ toys”. I did, too, and I began to regard my own regular after-school computer gaming as my secret shame.

I think 1998 marked one of video games’ hugest upheavals. The Sega Dreamcast – which would go on to become a commercial failure – offered interesting arcade experiences (Crazy Taxi) for players at home. Adventure games were also trying to adapt, and failing. Sierra’s King’s Quest franchise, for instance, chose that year to alienate its mostly female audience with 3D platforming and hack-and-slash combat (which was mechanically clever but ultimately did not work. That attempt, King’s Quest VIII, would be the last entry in the series). The equally maligned Gabriel Knight 3 has gone down in history as incorporating the dumbest puzzle of all time .

But that same year, Sierra published a first-person shooter called Half-Life, which instantly became the industry’s gold standard for quality. The marketplace had been flooded with innovative ideas, most of which failed, but Half-Life seemed to stick. And the marketplace, in turn, narrowed its focus and became more homogenised in its offerings. A lot of genres died that year.

In 1998, my own tastes – which are thankfully flexible, thankfully – adapted to this climate shift. The two CD-ROMs I took to university were Half-Life and American McGee’s Alice. Every day after lunch, my subwoofer boomed in time with the subwoofers up on the third floor of our residential college, where the boys lived. Perhaps not coincidentally, my roommate transferred to another college.

I loved multiplayer games. Playing video games had always been such a lonely endeavour; I’d finally found others. I stopped being shy about games, started evangelising about them.

The concept of gamers as a unified community was new to me – to all of us. It felt like when someone suddenly turns up the lights in a darkened bar and you realise there are a lot of people in the same room, all jostling for space and they all look different to what you expected (and many of them, to my great relief, were women). I think that moment must be very jarring or frightening for certain people and perhaps makes them feel even more alone.

But I never wanted to go back to the darkness. I never again wanted to feel like a 13-year-old girl, hopelessly alone and disconnected, cross-legged in front of a TV or sitting at a computer, hiding.

In 2005, fresh out of college, I took on freelance work reviewing games for a magazine called Electronic Gaming Monthly. I welcomed this work specifically to annoy my mother. But I also took on the job because I supposed there would be 13-year-old girls like I had been, who might flip through the magazine and feel relief to see my byline.

It wasn’t easy work. I remember thinking that EGM were probably giving me reviews because a salaried writer couldn’t finish them. I often received games only days before the reviews were due. Once, I fell asleep during a longwinded Suikoden cutscene (a sequence where the player has limited control). Each of those reviews paid about £37. And I am describing the industry when pay was at its best.

In 2006, I started work as 1UP.com’s community manager, an editorial role that worked with fellow writers, PR, developers, the marketing department and “user retention” teams. I was not very good at that job and I had never purported to be. I never worked well in a team. I often wish I could have remembered that about myself on my way in.

But the role opened my eyes to certain aspects of online gaming, such as harassment, abuse, threats and even stalking, and in many ways, it is an unhappy experience that I wish I could undo. After that job, I spent a year in therapy.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a 500-word opinion piece in the Guardian, titled “How to attack a woman who works in video gaming”. I used my pulpit to condemn abuse, which is rampant in my industry. I have long witnessed online abuse firsthand, and I believe the mainstream games industry’s silence tacitly condones it. I don’t care who the targets are or what harassers may believe they have done. It is unacceptable. It is always unacceptable.

But finally saying so was by no means my “dream article”. When I, aged 12, told that woman I dreamed of being a computer games designer, I was not dreaming of eventually writing an opinion piece denouncing abuse. But acknowledging that abuse exists is – unfortunately – enough to encourage it. Days after the publication, I retired from writing about games.

Then an editor at the Guardian asked me if I would venture out of my two-week retirement and explain why I love video games. It’s easy to be coaxed out of retirement when you have loved video games for 30 years and written professionally about them for nine.

And so I had to accept because I absolutely do love games. Oh my God, I cherish them, down to my fabric, down to the crude, fundamental Lego bricks that made me. I love what they are, and what they can be. And I wholeheartedly love everyone else who plays them, everyone who would call themselves a “gamer”.

Being a gamer, though, means you fundamentally must believe in belonging: believe that people of all attitudes, from all walks of life, can peaceably coexist. And while I would never define myself entirely by just one pastime or characteristic – whether it’s reading comic books, collecting toys, playing video games or simply being female – I do believe that a few rare things in life, like loving video games, defy all boundaries.