How did it get into video game journalism?
I've always liked writing. In my teenage years, at my college in Malaga, a friend and I created a magazine that was proud of it. I liked journalism, but I was a very good student, and my parents wanted to do scientific studies. I studied then Environmental Sciences and Marine Sciences. They're really nice studies, in fact, but they didn't agree with me. I was interested in culture, and especially cinema. So I started collaborating in the media about film. I also had a personal blog, and I started writing video games. I wasn't an expert in video games, but I really liked some games, and as I was discovering new games through others, on the blog I would give more and more space to video games. And one more year, everything exploded.

A lot of people were interested in what I was doing, I was called from many specialized video game sites, and I made a lot of collaborations to my surprise until I got to run the AnaitGames website. And fortunately or unfortunately, I'm now one of the few who earns a steady salary for writing about video games.

What drew you from video games to start writing about them? Their
relationship with narrative. The possibility of creating diverse narratives, beyond mere technique, and the ways of crossing narrative with art. I also like literature a lot, I also like film, but I suddenly saw that in video games, they were doing things that I didn't find in one or the other, simple, but brilliant, and so I started writing about it. My career as a player was short, but from my notions of cinema and literature, I related video games to the rest of pop culture, and that was -- and it is -- my contribution, I think.

What has been your experience as a player?
When I was a kid, I played video games. Like many 10-year-olds, I liked graphic adventures. I had a lot on my computer and I shared them with my brother. When I got into adolescence, I started playing with guys in my class, and suddenly I started playing online. That was something else. A community. And then I realized that that wasn't my place. Because I was a girl, they played differently with me. He was suspicious. What did I do there? Was I trying to bind? That has happened to many of us. It seems that if you're a girl, you can't like video games by nature. You are obliged to draw someone's attention. Attract the kids. Yours is a misrepresentation and not a real interest. At that time, I completely stopped playing video games.

Then I realized that this was the case for most girls. To prepare the documentary we interviewed 21 girls, all from very different trajectories, who told us that in childhood there was no problem, they played with friends or family and it was over, but when in adolescence they jumped into the online world they felt very alone.
When I approached this world again as a journalist, I felt the same machismo. When a man writes about video games, people think they know what they're talking about. They don’t ask him what he’s learned, if he’s always been playing video games… No. They like it or not, but they don't question their knowledge. I'm constantly asked if I really like video games. Do you think if I wasn't really interested in this world I would be here in my constant effort?

What's different about playing video games as a woman or a man?
In a lot of things. You just have to look at the characters. In our documentary, one of the interviewees tells how small the Pokemon game they gave him was. It was his first video game, and he himself asked his name, and he wrote his name, of course. At the beginning of the first game he realized that the game named a male character who was his abatar. In view of this, he erased the party, retired and called himself a male. These kinds of identification problems are constant in video games. There are few female characters and there are those who are.

Sexualization is also a problem. To me, for example, it caused a huge setback when I was small. Those breasts, those bodies, those clothes… As a woman, I found it difficult to identify with that. And I was playing with male characters. In short, they were not characters created by women for us to represent ourselves. They were characters that responded to the sexual fantasies of heterogeneous men. Since then the issue has changed a little, but not enough. In recent months a new game has been launched for the Play Station 5, the Returnal, which has women as its protagonist. And what's been most talked about in the networks is that women are ugly. Ugly no, the woman is mature and has wrinkles. Men can be tall, low, thick, strong, weak -- but women must be beautiful in the eyes of a heterogeneous white man. There are exceptions, of course, but you can count on the fingers of one hand.

And in addition to sexualization, you usually work less on female characters. In combat games, for example, it's not just that the female characters have less fan motion or are weaker, but the character's later story tends to be weaker. The reasons other characters wrestle are usually treated, while in girls this character wrestles because her father was a martial arts teacher. Or investigate the apocalypse of these kinds of zombie characters, due to the disappearance of your brother. The Lara Croft of the Tomb Raider game itself is an archaeologist because her father was an archaeologist… All this is changing, but only in adult games. In games aimed at children you can still see stereotypes of the 1960s.

But identification with characters isn't necessary to be good at the game, right?
No, of course. But there is also the lack of referents. Only 5% of professional players are women, for example. And also those who reach the highest level have more difficulty than men. That is the case of Geguri, for example. This Korean woman in the game Overwatch is incredibly good if she's not the best. When it became popular, the Gamer community couldn't believe that that woman could be so good, and a controversy emerged. He was considered a cheat, they said he was using bots, and he had to demonstrate it publicly, as the cameras recorded his fingers before three judges, that he was the one who was playing and that he was really so good. That has also happened with the writers. Many authors have not been recognized as authorship of their works. And many others have taken books with the signing of their husbands, siblings, or parents. Many players use nick or aliases neutral or masculine online to reduce problems. If you are perceived as a woman, caresses or mocks are constant...

Video game makers are also mostly men…

And the lack of diversity cannot generate diversity. It is true that very few women work in the production of video games. As an explanation, it is said that few women opt for technical studies, and one could also discuss their reasons, but the issue goes further. Creating video games is interdisciplinary work. You need programmers, but you also need people who are in charge of art, who write stories, who do localization work, who compose music, who take care of production, who do marketing tasks... There are few women in video game production companies, because it is a very masculinized and endogamic world. In production companies, work is achieved through well-known people. Because you've been asked to make graphs of a new game, or a musical collaboration in other games… Mutual knowledge is given in tragic after-game games and events. And creating labor relationships in these spaces is even more difficult for women.

The barrier is impressive. Otherwise, the statistical anomaly cannot be explained. Not just because we're half the population, but because most of the multiprofessional studies needed to create video games are women. In fine arts, in translation, in advertising… The difference is huge. And it's also no coincidence that there are no more women in the programming. Women were voluntarily dismissed from the sector.

How to expel it?When
computer programming was created as a profession, it was interpreted that mathematics and algorithms corresponded to men, and that all this could be carried out by women to a language understandable by the computer. It was compared with typing transcription. Secretariat with work. It had no value, and it was a totally feminized sector at its origin. But as computing developed, it was observed that programming required not only high mathematical knowledge, but also creativity, and that in the future it was a profession that could be important. Then they started firing women and hiring men. And programming went from a mere technical career to a university career. Commissioning of the crazy wheel. As women did not study at the university, men became owners of the sector. As in many other areas. The truth is that prestige is accompanied by a male presence. An area is filled with men as they gain prestige. At the same time, the absence of women gives prestige to a field. And women's access to a prestigious field is always more difficult.

It also occurs in the distribution of areas within the sector. The best example of this is the music of Japanese video games. At first, the music of video games was without instruments, game compositions that were made with small piii of different shades. And in the video game music of the 1980s, women were a global benchmark. Subsequently, the possibility of including other music in video games was expanded. More developed and complex. And all those women who until then were in the composition disappeared from the video game industry. Many of us remember the music of the video games back then, and that's because they were good! Their compositional capacity was huge, but it ran out.

He says that even when innovations emerge from the hands of women, resistance
emerges… Yes, many creative women are creating other kinds of video games. Anna Anthropy, for example, created the genre of memory and biography with her video game Dys4ia. Through very simple mechanisms, the game allowed you to feel virtually the experiences of a transgender person. Because video games also work for that. The U.S. military has created video games to train soldiers, but also to treat war trauma, and that's because of something. Video games allow you to put yourself on someone else's skin in many ways, which has enormous potential. In this sense, some experimental lines have been very successful, such as those that address biography and memory issues. But it tends to be considered marginal. Let it be considered political, because, of course, the Call of Duty war game is not political. They're not considered real video games. And in cases of success, they've also given rise to very violent reactions. There is no more to see the #GamerGate.

What was the #GamerGate?
It happened in 2014. The cyberbullying campaign against several women in the video game industry was huge. Zoλ started everything with Quinn. Quinn's ex-boyfriend wrote a fake post about him saying he had sex with a journalist to write good reviews about his video game. Quinn had just created an autobiographical video game and was having a great success. The truth is that this journalist never mentioned Quinn's video game. But in the networks where a fire occurred, there was a rape and a massive death threat against Quinn and others. On Quinn the addresses of both the house and its parents were published, the photos that appeared naked were made public... life was horrified. It wasn't the only one. The women were persecuted one after the other. Feminist critique Anita Sarkeesian was also particularly attacked. It was sold by #GamerGate supporters as a campaign against the unethical alliance between the press and feminists. But it's become clear that in the world of video games, it was nothing more than an assault on women with feminist ideas who wanted to explore other avenues.

Fortunately, this conflict showed the differences suffered by women in this industry. Many women took the floor to make their experiences public and, through the reaction, our alliances also emerged and strengthened. Today, creating more and better female characters, women producing more and more video games, and that I'm here is no coincidence.