The time had come. My mother’s worst nightmare: I had lice. I had lice at the ripe old age of 12, posing two questions: First, can middle schoolers even get lice? And second, how did this even happen?
At the time, we’d been stuck in COVID quarantine for a month. I was placed in double
isolation, walking around my house with a hairnet, looking like Chris Farley in SNL’s “Lunch
Lady” skit, preventing any jumping joys from springing onto my mother while she plucked
through my hair like a chimpanzee looking for a sweet treat.
Despite this situation, there was an upside: nobody from school knew I was cursed, and no anonymous alarm was sent out to the parents of my peers that “so and so” had lice. I was saved from the embarrassment and the shunning. However, I was not saved from countless hours in front of piercing white lights, sitting on the floor in the bathroom while my mom rooted out my infestation. To prevent my squiggling, an iPod Touch was thrown into my hands. An iPod Touch with three worthy apps: Subway Surfers, Bitlife, and YouTube.
I’ve always adored video games: Sims, Animal Crossing, Sonic, Pokemon, Hello Kitty Island Adventure, you name it. Cute animals and a fun house to decorate? I was drawn to gaming like a toddler with millennial parents glued to the iPads at Olive Garden. Through these games, I
developed a further sense of creativity. I made stories about my villagers in Minecraft and
mapped out my Animal Crossing island on the big poster board intended for my pre-COVID
science project. Despite being stuck indoors, my world was large as my imagination ran
rampant.
My mother, who was a survivor of Sims addiction back in her day, was hands-off regarding what I played. Working from home, she had priorities, and her daughter’s screen time was not one of them. As much as I wanted to explain to her my Mario Odyssey speedrunning strategies, there was a generational and situational disconnect; she was always preoccupied with her job and the world being on fire.
At the time, the fear of being judged by my real-life friends over the lice situation was immense. Despite that, I wanted a community; I wanted a frequent force in my life I could admire, whom I could share a common interest with. I turned to YouTube to find those figures.
Female gamers on online platforms get a horrible reputation. On account of a few bad apples, a stereotype is perpetuated that all women who play video games are money-hungry, overly sexual, clout chasers. I, and many others my age, found comfort in a specific group of women who knocked down these assertions and provided safe spaces.
These spaces were uplifting to awkward tweenage girls, embracing different backgrounds, interests, and various levels of weirdness. Watching YouTubers such as IHasCupquake, LaurenZside, LDShadowlady, and StacyPlays provided millions with warmth equivalent to a hug in a time where the closest physical interaction one could have was waving at the UPS driver dropping off a package at the top of the driveway.
These women fostered motherlike admiration from their fans, proving that women could be their most authentic selves in male-dominated spaces. Mai Lantz, a sophomore at Traverse City West Senior High, grew up watching these women and continues to incorporate their messages of originality and resilience in how she sees the world.
“There was a lot of guardianship that they provided when I was looking for a figure like that,” Lantz says.
“They were parental figures to me. I wanted to be as strong and creative and as funny as they were. They showed me possibilities through my screen. These women, I always thought they were just extremely strong because it takes a lot to put yourself out there, especially on the internet, especially as a woman. But they put themselves out there and were relentlessly harassed because of it. ”
According to womeningames.org, “Some 59% of gamers who are women and girls have
experienced some form of toxicity from male gamers, with 28% saying that they experience this
regularly online.”
That’s not the only dark side to gaming. Online video games, despite immersive storytelling and visual elements, despite the community they build, despite the creativity that lurches out of it, function as one sole thing: a diversion.
“It’s a whole different thing when you’re depending on a video game solely for your happiness. It puts a dent in how you learn, how you see things, and how you interact with people. Some people start depending so much on these games. Especially when it’s the only thing you have, and it’s the only thing you have to live through. It can be a positive and a negative; It’s a way for people to distract themselves from what they’re going through,” Lantz says.
Even though video games provide dopamine to doomscrollers and dungeon dwellers alike, finding a balance between Call of Duty lobbies and the outside world is key. For me, life is a lice-permeated highway; therefore, if shutting down your brain and escaping to the world of the top ten best Minecraft mods while an incandescent lightbulb bleaches your
eyeballs amidst a pest pilgrimage on your scalp, go for it. Said highway is full of roadblocks,
ranging from mite-sized to a pandemic seizing the globe, shriveling it to a crisp. In moments like
those, where the world is so unbearable it feels like a simulation, it’s important to stay grounded
in your present reality, instead of playing Papa’s Pizzeria alone in the dark until 4 AM, losing
yourself in your phony nine-to-five.
The communities these female gamers assembled, while helping mold middle school girls into independent and eccentric young women, provided a safety net that preserved certain
“chronically online” behaviors. After being forcefully exposed into the world after the first initial
lockdown, these quirks shifted into a universal language of love in normal life, tying the string
between those who were similarly drawn to these role models, role models who exhibited
strength and spunk and passed it down to their viewers. Viewers who developed their own
trademark moxie through their personal mettle and transitioned into their own idols, sharing traits passed through their communities and embracing reality standing up, parallel to the women we doted on from our bathroom floors.
