A few years ago, I won a research award for junior faculty at my university. I was very excited. I got a thousand dollars and a crystal trophy plaque thing. But then I looked closely at the engraving: “presented to Carly Kocurek in recognition of his Outstanding Accomplishments in Research and Scholarship.” Although the university replaced the thing when I complained, I kept it. The new one, the one that genders me properly, it rests in its plastic. The one with the mistake that demonstrates so absurdly that “woman” is a marked category in so many of the contexts I exist in? It sits on my desk, shining away, a clear reminder of something I could not possibly forget.

Would you ask a man that question?

Over the past two weeks in the archive, I’ve looked through thousands of pages of gaming magazines from the 1990s. Photographing page after page, I chose a few images to share on Twitter. Some of those images show interesting interviews or sharp letters to the editor. But, many just show how aggressive and hostile gaming could be. I grew up playing video games–many on my Game Boy, a handful on friends’ NES and SNES consoles, and later more on the family Macintosh. I don’t want to go into some legitimating personal narrative about all the games I played and play.

I’m tired of being asked about whether or not I play games in interviews with journalists, and I’ve started pushing back. “Do you ask literature professors if they read books?” I’ve asked a few times. But, I often think, “Would you ask a man that question?” In both cases, I doubt it. However, this grinding aggravation is an aside, a small example of how often and to what degree I am assumed to be someone who stumbled into a career based on a medium of which I lack even basic familiarity.

The point is that I grew up playing video games. I loved them. I got lost in them. My brother and I fought over the computer for years in part because of them. But, I always knew that video games didn’t love me.

Worth less than pixels

Video games as popularly conceived in the 1990s were not me sitting up all night puzzling through Myst for too much of one summer; or my mother diligently defeating my Tetris high score, over and over, as we engaged in a years-long effort at one-upmanship; or me obsessively training on Mario Kart until I could best my friend’s little brother and then lose interest in the game entirely. Video games were shooters I found both stressful and boring and MMORPGs I couldn’t afford to play. They were advertisements that reveled in the grotesque and made explicit that women were worth nothing if they weren’t fuckable, and even when fuckable were worth less than video games. They were a pack of boys convinced they were smarter than me and the biology teacher that enjoyed convincing them so (he also told us condoms don’t work, which is, well, sex ed in Texas!).

In the archive, sneezing my way through dozens of issues of magazines I am reminded of that profound sense that I did not belong. Critics review dozens of simulators in detail, but Chop Suey gets a half page, and while summarized in glowing terms, it is never covered again. Myst and Tetris, two of my absolute favorites, receive extensive attention and praise in multiple magazines, but they are anomalies, their very difference highlighted over and over (except in Computer Gaming World, where they make sure to rip on Myst over and over).

Just like the other girls

And I knew that already, of course. I knew those games were different and loved them for it. And, I remember thinking, vaguely, that these magazines and the games they covered weren’t for me when I picked them up at Hasting’s or flipped through the copies my brother bought, but memories are misty, they make things soft. I did not remember how much the magazines reveled in how stupid and bad and pointless my very existence was. All girls were pointless, except perhaps for sex, and I was never going to be one of those particular girls, who, realistically, do not exist. There’s no neat binary of girls, of women — the ones who play video games, the ones who don’t; the ones who like “good” music, the ones who don’t. “I’m not like the other girls” is a trap. The lucky escape.

But, I grew up in a place and time where, so often, the misogyny was coming from inside the house. Misogyny kept me out of much of computer and gaming culture, but it also shaped my tastes in music, film, and literature.

I read literary fiction, because that’s what serious people did — nevermind that Charles Bukowski was a bozo and John Updike doesn’t know how peeing works. At the video store, I rented from the directors wall, because directors mentioned by name were best. The clerk made fun of me when I said they should add more women and gave Kathryn Bigelow as an example. Imagine, for a moment, my satisfaction when she won the Oscar a couple years later.

Mind expanding

I learned about popular music from reading Rolling Stone carefully, watching MTV, and falling asleep to the radio every night. I would ask the clerks at Hasting’s to order albums they didn’t have in stock. My parents’ old records served as cross reference. If X, then Y. If you like the Velvet Underground, you should listen to Yo La Tengo. Pop culture messaging is everywhere. Even at 6, I knew better than to like New Kids on the Block because they didn’t write their own music, they weren’t serious. At the time, I failed to see how the things I saw as legitimate were things vetted by men.

There are writers, filmmakers, musicians I followed in my very early adulthood and still love, but there are also many I’ve rediscovered because I looped back to what I missed: fantasy and science fiction; whatever big, dumb action movie is freshly released; pop music and country radio; and almost any horror film that isn’t related to Saw or Human Centipede. Also, musicals. Musicals are real fun. I finally read all the Harry Potter books. A couple years ago, my best friend and I got to see Britney Spears in Vegas; that show was great.

You have to please yourself

Some of this is, simply, getting older: my give a damn is busted. Some of it, though, made obvious by the thousands of pages of magazine advertisements and articles, is that the needle has moved. Still, there are too few women in decision-making positions in the media industry as a whole. And still, there is too little racial diversity among decision makers as well. But, I started watching Dawson’s Creek (mistake) while I was in Wilmington, NC, and I was struck by just how awful the narratives I came of age to were to women (and also how jampacked they were with casual homophobia).

Some girls got to be prizes; some of us didn’t get to be anything. I found freedom in that. With nobody to please but myself, I chose to please myself. When I got a facial piercing (which I still have, because whatever, I like it), I remember my mother lamenting: “I just don’t know who you’re trying to attract.” I tried to answer her, but the reality was, I wasn’t trying to attract anyone at all.

What expertise means to me

Growing up knowing you do not quite count, that you are not quite legitimate is painful. Being excluded from the communities and cultural institutions you might have hoped to find a home in is, too. I have spent now most of my adulthood researching and writing about games and gaming culture. My friend John Cline told me his master’s adviser had an old truism that your first book is about who you wish you were. It’s a bit of a joke, but not entirely.

The type of sustained research that drives graduate education and academic research is fundamentally the cultivation of mastery–of expertise. Expertise is legitimacy; it is armor, too. The late, controversial Tony Hoagland wrote a poem about fellow poet Dean Young, called “When Dean Young Talks About Wine.” The whole piece is cutting and lovely and sad, but the part that sticks with me is the gut punch of the thing:

When a beast is hurt it roars in incomprehension.
When a bird is hurt it huddles in its nest.

But when a man is hurt,
he makes himself an expert.

Tony Hoagland, “When Dean Young Talks About Wine”

I am a man, I suppose, in the sense of the animal called man. And, hurt, I have made myself an expert. I am not supposed to be here, but I am.