Female gamers aren't a new thing, we have always been here; we have always been fitting in. This has always been our turf. I don't care for the new wave of femme gamers that claim to speak for me about how I am slighted, sexualized, or discounted because of being a female in gaming. I've been here since Atari.

Some of Keri Thomas's gaming memorabilia from Final Fantasy and Pokemon are displayed at her home on Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2016, in East Ridge, Tenn. A recent study found that even though the numbers of male and female gamers are evenly split, most Americans think the majority of gamers are men.

Timeline of heroines The following characters are among the most famous female characters — whether heroine or villainess — in video gaming: › Princess Peach: “Super Mario” series (various games 1985-present) › Princess Zelda/Sheik/Tetra: “Legend of Zelda” series (various games 1986-present) › Samus Aran: “Metroid” series (various games 1986-2010) › Chun-Li: “Street Fighter” series (various games 1991-present) › Kitana: “Mortal Kombat” series (various games 1993-present) › Jill Valentine: “Resident Evil” series (various games 1996-present) › Lara Croft: “Tomb Raider” series (1996-present) › Aeris and Tifa Lockhart: “Final Fantasy VII” (1997) › Meryl Silverburgh: “Metal Gear Solid” (1998) and “Metal Gear Solid 4” (2008) › Aya Brea: “Parasite Eve” trilogy (1998-2010) › Sarah Kerrigan: “Starcraft” series (1998-present) › Cortana: “Halo” series (2001-2015) › Cate Archer: “No One Lives Forever” (2000) and “No One Lives Forever 2” (2003) › Jade: “Beyond Good & Evil” (2003) › Alyx Vance: “Half-Life 2” (2004), “Half-Life 2: Episode 1” (2006) and “Half-Life 2: Episode 2” (2007) › Amaterasu: “Okami” (2006) › Nariko: “Heavenly Sword” (2007) › Chell: “Portal” (2007) and “Portal 2” (2011) › Liara T’Soni: “Mass Effect” trilogy (2007-2012) › Elena Fisher: “Uncharted” series (2007-present) › Faith: “Mirror’s Edge” (2008) and “Mirror’s Edge Catalyst” (2016) › Lilith: “Borderlands” (2009) and “Borderlands 2” (2012) › Lightning: “Final Fantasy XIII” (2010), “Final Fantasy XIII-2” (2012) and “Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII” (2014) › Bonnie MacFarlane: “Red Dead Redemption” (2010) › Bayonetta: “Bayonetta” (2009) and “Bayonetta 2” (2014) › Anya Stroud: “Gears of War 3” (2011) › Aveline de Grandpré: “Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation” (2012)

When she was growing up, there was no one Keri Thomas wanted to be more than Lara Croft.

Now 26, Thomas remembers playing the video game "Tomb Raider" at age 7 and falling pistols over bootheels in love with the game's fearless, globe-trotting, puzzle-solving heroine.

"Just because of her, I wanted to be an archaeologist," the East Ridge resident recalls. "I was going to the library because of 'Tomb Raider' to look up tombs and artifacts and to learn about them."

As an adult, Thomas says she's put her dreams of following Croft into forgotten temples on the back burner — she now runs Vamp Valley Vixens, a local burlesque dance troupe — but she readily admits that her love of video games has stuck around.

And she wears a permanent badge to her gaming passion on her left hip, which bears a tattoo based on the logo to the legendary role-playing game "Final Fantasy VII," a game she has beaten so many times she laughingly describes herself as its "human strategy guide."

Based on the findings of a December 2015 study, however, readily declaring her status as a gamer makes Thomas unusual among female video-game fans.

According to the Pew Research Center's report, "Gaming and Gamers," 49 percent of Americans now say they play video games, whether on a computer, game console or a portable device. Although gaming has long been perceived as — and marketed as — an activity for men, the report finds that the gaming community is split nearly evenly between men (50 percent) and women (48 percent).

Despite the gender balance among gamers, the Pew report finds that 60 percent of American adults — including 57 percent of women who report that they play video games — think more men are holding controllers than women. And according to the study, the percentage of men ages 18 to 29 years old who describe themselves as dedicated "gamers" outnumber female "gamers" in the same age range by more than three to one.

'A girl on our team'

Local women who describe themselves as gamers say the results of the Pew study are unsurprising. Although video-gaming culture, as a whole, has become more inclusive in recent years, they say, many of them can recall times when they were singled out as rarities and oddities by other gamers, male and female alike.

"I have been in a position where, as far as I knew, I was the only girl in the group, and when I spoke [in-game], two guys said, 'Oh crap, we have a girl on our team,'" recalls 25-year-old Mary Tanner of Atlanta. "They did not judge me by my ability to play; they judged me by my gender.

"I know I'm not the only one this has happened to, and I believe that's why women think they are outnumbered in the gaming community."

Tanner and Ooltewah resident and fellow gamer Shellina Blevins, 37, co-founded the Facebook group Tomboyz in High Heels, where they list their collective interests as "video games, cosplay, shoes, action figures comics" and more.

Growing up, Tanner says, she fell in love with video games when she was 10 and used to sneak into her older brother's room to use his Playstation. The sense of escapism she felt being able to take the reins of digital characters is partly what drew her into the hobby, she says, but gaming wasn't a passion she felt she could readily share with other girls at school.

"While most of [them] were worried about learning how to put make up on or [wondering if] they look cute in what they were wearing that day, I had no interest in any of it," Tanner says. "I kind of did think something was wrong with me for awhile.

"Lucky for me, I had a best friend who would play 'Mario' with me and go with me to comic book stores, but now that I think about it, neither one of us talked about gaming or comics at school. It was like our secret we kept between us."

Gender swap

That women should prefer not to describe themselves as gamers is to be expected, Blevins says. All too often, she says, female gamers are treated differently than their male counterparts, who often wrongly assume they want or need help.

"I never really thought of [gaming] as something that had anything to do with gender until consoles and PC started using [voice-chat software for] in-game talking on Xbox Live and Playstation Network," Blevins says. "Sometimes I had to work past the whole, 'I am a girl, give me free things' stigma that other girls and men playing as girl characters had started. I like making my way myself."

The expectation that male gamers playing as female characters behave differently or will expect to be treated with favoritism was the subject of a 2013 report published in the academic journal Information, Communication & Society.

During the study, researchers from five universities analyzed communication and in-game behavior of 375 male and female players as they worked through a custom-designed quest in the online roleplaying game "World of Warcraft." Researchers found that male participants in the study were more than three times as likely as female participants to create a character of a gender different than their biological one. Those who did exhibited odd behavior compared to male participants controlling male avatars.

Despite a few telling masculine quirks in the way they moved, such as jumping more often and positioning themselves farther from the rest of their group, the study found that men who chose to digitally swap genders tended to create stereotypically attractive avatars and played in ways that seemed to conform with perceived gender norms — how they assume women act and speak.

"Our findings support feminist theories suggesting that although gender is a powerful social category, there is a range of ways it can be performed," reads a statement in a news release by Mia Consalvo, one of the study's co-authors and a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Montreal's Concordia University.

"Men may not necessarily try to mask their offline gender when they use a female avatar, but our study shows they do reinforce idealized notions of feminine appearance and communication," she says.

Avoiding labels

Many girl gamers say choosing not to announce their gender to others is not contrary to gaming's nearly equal gender balance but rather because of it. Labeling themselves as a "girl gamer" just reinforces the notion that it sets them apart, they say.

"I'm a proud female, but if someone was going to call me a 'gamer girl,' I wouldn't like it," Thomas says. "I just want to be called a gamer."

For those few girls who do claim the title, however, appearing to stand out can be appealing, says Alexis Hughes, a 31-year-old gamer from Lookout Valley.

"I think female gamers like to think of themselves as a minority because that gives them 'unicorn' status in the community, but the fact of the matter is that there are just as many female gamers as male. Period," she says.

Hughes spends many evenings broadcasting gameplay for various online games from her PC to her followers on the game streaming service Twitch. That she's a woman is obvious — her face is clearly visible in a window superimposed over the gameplay — but Hughes says she doesn't go out of her way to make gender a factor in the interactions she has with others.

"I'm pretty dedicated to '[World of] Warcraft,' " she says, "but I don't scream from the rooftops that I am a gamer."

St. Elmo resident Stephanie Clark, 31, was still in kindergarten when her older sister taught her to play "Pac-Man" and "Keystone Capers" on an Atari game console. That introduction to gaming sparked an interest that has persisted through every subsequent hardware generation, she says, and gaming now serves as one of the primary activities she engages in with her friends, both male and female.

Clark says she didn't have any female friends who gamed growing up and, despite the hobby being more inclusive now than in the past, she still rejoices at seeing other women taking part.

"I wouldn't be being totally honest with myself if I didn't admit that I get excited when I meet another girl who is as crazy about playing video games as I am," she says. "In my experience, it is rare to find."

A distorted mirror

That gaming historically targeted males is practically undisputed among female gamers, and some of them suggest other girls may have been turned off gaming thanks to the overtly sexualized depiction of many female characters in games, whether in supporting roles or leading ladies like Thomas' tomb-raiding idol, Lara Croft, who was portrayed by Angelina Jolie in a pair of films.

"Video games in the '90s and '00s were geared towards boys and men," says Stephanie Shelton, a 25-year-old art student at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga who spent a year studying video game design at the Atlanta campus of the Southern College of Art and Design.

"While it was obviously very possible for women to enjoy these games, they were underrepresented in them," Shelton adds. "If there were female characters, they were likely to be hyper-sexualized, and therefore many women wouldn't take as much interest in them."

Last year, Feminist Frequency, a video Web series that "explores the representations of women in pop culture narratives," attended the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles on a mission to analyze the representation of women in video games. Their findings suggest that, while the gaming industry has made some headway in diversifying, it is far from reflecting that as many women now play as men.

Researchers looked at 76 upcoming titles from major publishers featured at the conference. Of those, 35 (46 percent) allowed players to choose their avatar's gender, including new entries in long-standing male-dominated series such as "FIFA" and "Call of Duty." Only seven titles (9 percent) featured exclusively female protagonists, however, compared to 24 (32 percent) which featured exclusively male protagonists.

"One reason why we need more games that are fronted exclusively by female characters is that it works to counter the long-established, long-reinforced cultural notion that heroes are male by default," a Feminist Frequency news release reads. "By and large, girls and women are expected to project themselves onto male characters, but boys and men are not encouraged to project themselves onto or identify with female characters.

"When players are given the opportunity to see a game universe exclusively through the eyes of a female character with her own unique story, it helps challenge the idea that men can't or shouldn't identify with women, their lives, and their struggles," the release says. "As long as games continue to give us significantly more stories centered on men than on women, they will continue to reinforce the idea that female experiences are secondary to male ones."

Many girls who game, however, say they resent the notion that representation of women in certain titles is maligning or marginalizing them. If they're enjoying those same games, they say, why does it matter?

"As a female, I am told I can't like games that supposedly exploit women, and I don't think that is right," Blevins says. "I should be able to play any game. If it is fun to play, it shouldn't matter if I am a boy or a girl.

"I think, as a society, we need to accept that people are people first and their gender comes second. If something makes me happy, whether is is a typical girly thing like shopping or plowing through zombies in 'Lollipop Chainsaw,' I am going to do it, and I want others to feel comfortable doing it as well."

Contact Casey Phillips at cphillips@timesfree press.com or 423-757-6205. Follow him on Twitter at @PhillipsCTFP.