Episode #26 – “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”

Justice Points

Our twenty-sixth features Tzufit and Apple Cider talking to Dysmorphia of Games and Trips about her experiences with progression raiding, doing PVE content with mostly-male teams, and the baggage of playing WoW while female.

Links:

• Girly Power Theme clip courtesy of @Boddi_
• Best Unique Podcast clip courtesy of Rho at Realm Maintenance, Episode #75
• Dysmorphic Samophlange of Discontinuity

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Below the cut is a full transcript of Episode 26, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” Many thanks to @IviaRelle for transcribing this episode.

Apple Cider: Welcome back everybody! It is once again Justice Points. We are back from all of our awesome holiday fun times, and we’re getting right back into the swing of things. We’re going to be talking about a very awesome topic that we actually have been wanting to cover for quite a long time. We’re gonna be talking about women in progression raiding, experiences, some of the problems, some of the overarching topics that kinda go into that, what it means to be a woman in progression raiding. And we have an amazing guest for this discussion. I- I’m so excited.

Tzufit: (Laughing)

Apple Cider: We have with us, this week, as you know her, Dysmorphia from the Twitter. We have her on the show this week. So if everybody wants to say hello.

Dysmorphia: Hello, I’m from the Twitter.

Tzufit: We imagine you’re probably from a few other things too, right?

Dysmorphia: Yeah, so, well I also play WoW, obviously, on Mal’Ganis where my character is named Dysmorphia, so that’s my original Twitter handle, and I have a blog called Games and Trips which talks about women in gaming and nerd culture, though honestly I probably update it, like, once every couple of months now.

Apple Cider: Yeah, I noticed it’s hard for updating blogs, especially right now, ‘cause WoW’s a little dead at the moment. (Laughing)

Dysmorphia: Yeah, and I have this kind of private rule for my blog where I feel like if the topic has been well-covered by someone else then I don’t write about it. I don’t feel the need to be like, “And here’s my take which is exactly like fifty other smart people’s takes.”

Tzufit: (Laughing)

Dysmorphia: So I try to only write about things that no-one has said yet, and you know actually things are pretty well covered so I don’t end up having that much to say.

Apple Cider: You know, it kinda comes down to what’s more important, the content or the- kind of, your individual take on it, although I will say that I think that Games and Trips was- made quite a substantial impact on how I conceptualize being a nerd gamer lady person sort of thing, so big big props to that.

Dysmorphia: Oh! Thank you, that’s so awesome to hear! Yeah, one of the things that made me happiest was when people would send me messages and be like, “I never thought about this before,” and I’m all, “Well I thought it was really obvious but I guess I’m glad I wrote it down.

Tzufit: (Laughing)

Apple Cider: (Laughing)

Tzufit: Yeah, I think that’s always the- I think it’s good to not recover content, as you said, that somebody else has already covered well, because sometimes it’s nice to just point and say, “Go read this article, it was really well written, I agree with it,” and kind of support somebody that way, but on the other hand, it’s always interesting when you have a take that maybe other people haven’t quite hit on yet.

Dysmorphia: Yeah, and I think sometimes people would come and read my blog who wouldn’t read something else because for some reason, and I don’t understand why, people think I’m really nice and they think I’m not, like, an angry feminist?

Apple Cider: (Laughing)

Tzufit: (Chuckling)

Dysmorphia: They’re wrong, I’m really angry, I just don’t have time for arguments, so it’s kind of funny but I mean, hey, that’s good if people are gonna get an idea they wouldn’t otherwise because of that, OK, but I’m really baffled why people think that.

Apple Cider: (Laughing)

Tzufit: (Laughing)

Apple Cider: Yeah, it’s been kind of interesting ‘cause- I mean, I know you outside of just the blogging and Twitter sort of stuff, and it’s very interesting how people will perceive me as being very angry and nasty all the time, and then will perceive you as being kind and sweet and nice, and that’s not always really the case. (Laughing)

Dysmorphia: Yeah, it’s really funny! Someone at some point was like, “Oh, well, I’m really worried, I don’t want you to become mean like SHE is,” talking about you, and I’m like, “You know that we actually agree on everything?”

Apple Cider: (Laughing)

Tzufit: (Chuckling)

Dysmorphia: Like, pretty much everything. So, yeah, it’s baffling, but, whatever, hey. It’s all about opening ideas and minds and about making people change how they behave and, you know, that’s sort of what it comes down to for me. I don’t care that much about people’s soul and if they’re happy or sad about what they’re doing or if they’re sorry, I don’t care about that, I just care what they do and how it affects other people materially in reality, or in, you know, virtual reality, but actually affects other people, I care about their actions ultimately.

Apple Cider: So, let’s get into some of the WoW stuff. Is- how long have you been playing World of Warcraft, and what have you been doing in the game over the years?

Dysmorphia: So, I started playing World of Warcraft in 2008 in the summer, and I was just- so this is a little funny. So I had- I was experiencing dysmenorrhea, you know that feeling that you feel crappy because you’re about to get your period or just getting your period?

Apple Cider: Yes.

Dysmorphia: So I wanted to name my character that, but I got the word wrong.

Tzufit: (Laughing) Oh really? I thought you were gonna tell us that somebody made you change it!

Dysmorphia: Oh no! No, I just got it wrong.

Tzufit: (Laughing)

Apple Cider: (Laughing hard)

Dysmorphia: But then I was like, hey that’s actually a cool word and then- I made a druid because I wanted- so I play a druid, and I’ve been playing it for the whole time, and I made a druid because I thought, you know, I wanted an elf, it seemed like elves were cool, but I didn’t have BC, so I was like, I can’t be a Blood Elf, and I was like, OK, I’ll be an elf, and I want to be a magic-y elf, oh and look this thing can heal and I had played a lot of JRPGs where healers are super powerful, so I’m like, OK, I definitely want a character that can heal ‘cause that’s the [edited], healing is the best. So I made this elf and I didn’t know that druids shape changed when I made a druid, and then when they changed I was like, OH, great, I have the word morph in my name, that’s awesome, that actually works! So I stuck with it and for a long time I was playing on this super low pop server, just cruising around taking my time leveling, and then, I hit level cap, it was still BC, and I wanted to play, and I thought, well, OK, what role can I play? Hey cool, I’m a druid, I can play any role! This is awesome! And I sort of looked around and what people were looking for were healers, and I was like, OK, I’ll do that! So I got into healing and then I outgrew my little server, and I moved to a bigger server, and I joined a group there and slowly played with them for a bit, got a little better, played with a more intense group, then things sort of fell apart there and I was feeling bleh about it. This was Cataclysm, the beginning of Cataclysm where a lot of guilds were going down the tubes, and I met some friends in real life who played on Mal’Ganis so I was like, “I’ll just go to Mal’Ganis!” And at that point you could change to Horde from Alliance or vice versa, so I became a Troll and then I started playing on Mal’Ganis with some friends, and that’s where I’ve been raiding for the last… two years, I wanna say? And that’s been really fun.

Tzufit: So has your main always been a resto druid?

Dysmorphia: Yes! There was a really short period in Cataclysm where I played- where I raided on a resto shaman because we had the rotating door of shaman. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this-

Tzufit: Oh yes! (Laughing)

Dysmorphia: But there’s this thing that happens-

Apple Cider: Absolutely!

Dysmorphia: Where you need a shaman, and you recruit a shaman, and the shaman is great, and then they’re like, “I’m quitting the game.” And this happened over and over.

Apple Cider: (Laughing)

Tzufit: Yup!

Dysmorphia: And after a couple of times I’m like, “Look, this is Cataclysm,” and you know how mad I was then, I was like, “We need that mana tide, and I have a resto shaman alt that I enjoy playing, so I’m just going to be this person,” and I was that person, and you know what? Within three months of switching names, I was like, yeah, I’m gonna quit.

Tzufit: (Laughing)

Apple Cider: (Laughing)

Dysmorphia: And I’m just gonna go, I’m just gonna cruise around on Mal’Ganis on my druid instead. And I was like, “Yeah sure, I’ll definitely, you know, I’ll still raid with you guys sometimes!” Never showed up again.

Apple Cider: (Laughing)

Tzufit: Oh no!

Dysmorphia: So that’s the curse of being a resto shaman!

Apple Cider: It’s- yeah, for Cataclysm, when we actually got our ten-man going, I had to step in as a healer instead of my mage, because we were full on DPS but low on healers, so I stepped in as a resto shaman, too. Although, I really didn’t get the opportunity to quit at any point, so. (Laughing)

Tzufit: I know, I’d forgotten about- a very similar thing has happened in my guild over the years, and I’d kind of forgotten about it until you brought it up now and now I’m very worried because our fantastic moonkin, when we need a third healer for fights, he’s recently been playing resto on his shaman, and I’m thinking, “Oh no, I should probably not let him do that anymore, he’s gonna leave us!”

Dysmorphia: Yeah, just make him be a resto druid, resto druids are great right night.

Tzufit: Yeah, he bounces back and forth depending.

Dysmorphia: Though actually the gear between moonkin and resto is really annoying, so we have, in our raid, two resto druids and one of them is a really good moonkin but he’s like, “Oh man, having two sets of gear is so annoying, can we just make the paladin go ret for this fight?

Apple Cider: (Laughing)

Dysmorphia: And then we have two resto druids and the ret paladin and it’s like, OK.

Tzufit: (Laughing)

Dysmorphia: It actually works fine, but it’s kind of funny.

Apple Cider: So you do ten-man progression stuff instead of twenty-fives?

Dysmorphia: Yes, I only do tens right now.

Apple Cider: That’s- I- like, I feel like that was a move that a lot of people made at a certain point, especially in Cataclysm and going forward into Mists of Pandaria, because it just- like, as somebody who used to do twenty-fives up until Firelands, basically, and then jumped to tens, it just felt like the content just became easier to herd cats into if you did tens, and some of the fights were a little bit different, a little bit more fun if you did it with the smaller group.

Dysmorphia: Yeah, I always enjoyed the social aspect of ten-man raiding more, but I wanted to be a Real Raider, so of course I did twenty-fives when that was the only Real Raider option.

Apple Cider: Yeah.

Tzufit: Yeah, I know that we found, as well, that especially in Cataclysm, and then to a slightly lesser extend but on into Mists of Pandaria, it also got more and more difficult to- and I don’t like the term “carry” but for lack of a better word, to carry people who are a little behind on gear, or a little behind on awareness or DPS or whatever the case may be. In Wrath, it was very possible to bring along a couple of people who maybe weren’t quite at the level of the rest of the raid team to a twenty-five-man and still have that be OK, and still down fights, and that became progressively- it just became completely not true in Cataclysm at some point.

Dysmorphia: Yeah, I remember that, when I was just like, “I can’t heal through your [edited] anymore.” And I used to enjoy that! I was like, “Hey, I’m so powerful, I’m going to HoT all the things and you can screw up, that’s fine. Yeah, stand in the fire if it increases your DPS, I don’t care!” but not anymore, so it just became frustrating. I think actually that’s why a lot of healers quit in Cataclysm, it’s not that healing wasn’t fun, it’s that mistakes were less forgiving, so healing couldn’t save everybody’s mistakes anymore.

Apple Cider: Yeah.

Tzufit: Well, and I’ve heard a lot of people talk about Cataclysm healing, too, as- just like you said, in Wrath there really was this feeling of, “I can save anybody, my heals are that fast, my heals are that strong that if I already have a rejuv up on a target and my swiftmend is ready to go, you’re not dying, you’re fine.” You know?

Dysmorphia: Pretty much.

Tzufit: And when that no longer was the case, in Cataclysm, it lost a lot of appeal for people because that is- it was a very cool feeling in Wrath to be able to just stand there and be like, nourish, nourish, nourish, nourish, nourish.

Dysmorphia: Yeah, and I mean, I really like the triage game, so I liked Cataclysm healing, I just realized I didn’t like Cataclysm healing with the people I was playing with.

Apple Cider: Yeah.

Tzufit: Yeah, and that’s a good point. It was hard, it was definitely hard stepping out of Wrath, going into Cataclysm healing, but, you know, doing those five-man heroics when they were incredibly difficult the first couple of weeks was both something that made me wanna bang my head off my desk but also really challenging and rewarding and fun because I was doing them with four other people in my guild who I knew very well and we were working as a team.

Dysmorphia: Yeah, I unfortunately found out a lot of the people I had been playing with were not as good as we all thought they were.

Tzufit: (Laughing)

Apple Cider: (Laughing) I think that’s the- I feel like that’s the case in a lot of times, and I feel like that’s kind of what happens to my twenty-five-man team at the end of the day, but I think a lot of it also had to do with burnout, just people were tired of doing that format.

Dysmorphia: Yeah, so then when I switched to my current team, which is on Mal’Ganis, and these are all amazing people, I’ll talk about that more later, but suddenly healing was a lot easier, and I’m like-

Tzufit: It’s amazing!

Dysmorphia: -Either I’m a lot better or these guys, and it was all guys, are not standing in the fire as much! Huh.

Tzufit: Yeah, it’s funny to see your healing numbers actually start to go down because there’s less effective healing for you to do, people are doing the fight correctly.

Apple Cider: So, we’re gonna actually get into the meat of the discussion which is- it’s one thing to do progression raiding, but- so, we kinda got a little bit of a background into how you got into progression raiding in the first place, and healing, but what has it been like, in your experience, progression raiding as a woman? Have you been in experiences that are largely male-dominated? What has that been like for you?

Dysmorphia: Hmm, so, well, it’s funny because sometimes I’ll just be there and I forget that I’m a woman. I know that sounds funny, ‘cause how can you forget, but I just, you know, I’m a Troll right now, not a woman, and so playing around and it’s fun and everything is going well, and then someone is like, “Oh yeah watch out ‘cause those adds are going to totally rape you,” and I’m like, “I certainly hope that’s not what they’re going to do.” And it’s kind of awkward and I feel like, “Hmm, OK, I guess I won’t say anything because I don’t wanna make things awkward for everybody else,” and actually the one time I did say something, things got SUPER awkward and then for two weeks no-one said that, but then they went back to it, and I was like, “I can’t have this fight over and over.”

Apple Cider: Yeah.

Tzufit: Yeah, see, I have had that experience only twice in my current guild, but I have the luxury of being GM so if I say, “Don’t say that,” they stop saying that.

Dysmorphia: Yeah, I’m definitely not in charge, so it’s sort of like-

Apple Cider: (Chuckling)

Tzufit: (Chuckling)

Dysmorphia: OK, whatever, but you know it’s one of those things where I’m like, I don’t know quite how to explain it to people, I’m like, I’m not offended, I don’t hate you, it’s just, you know, one time out of ten times when you say that, I kind of twitch, and actually that’s what I said, I’m like, “It’s not even like that, it just kind of makes me jump a little, and it’s not offense,” and nine times out of ten it just rolls right off me because I’ve been around this thing for a while and I’ve raided with some pretty salty people, but sometimes it just kind of gets under your skin a little.

Tzufit: The thing that always concerns me is that- you know, and this is not necessarily the case if you’re in a ten-man team with the same people week after week because you know who they are, but you know, you really never know who the people are on the other side of the screen from you. You don’t know what they’ve been through, so it just seems like, you know, if you’re gonna say something like that that could potentially trigger a person- and I’m sure most of the time the people saying these things don’t even have the slightest clue what trigger means, you know, but if you’re gonna say something like that that has the potential to be really harmful for another person, you know, even if that’s not an experience I’ve had or I’ve had to worry about, I don’t- I feel guilty, I guess, about letting you go on saying that thing knowing the damage you could do. It’s like, I’m walking past an armed bomb and not doing anything about it.

Dysmorphia: Yeah, I know what you mean.

Apple Cider: Yeah, but it’s like- I feel really weird because it’s like- I was talking in the pre-shows, most of my raiding experiences have not been with a majority-guy group or with a group that has enough women that that has never really been a problem? There’s been off-colour comments, there’s been jokes that I didn’t approve of, especially because I really got into feminism in a really big way right before I quit twenty-five-man raiding, and then I did ten-man raiding with my uber feminist guild that is awesome, so it’s like, I can only imagine that being in a situation where you are an actual minority in a group, as far as either politics or things like gender goes, I can imagine that that augments how you always can respond to that sort of thing, as well. Especially if it’s somebody you have to be with on a weekly basis.

Dysmorphia: Right, I mean, that’s the thing, you’re like, I like these people, I like playing with them, they just do one thing that annoys me, but on the other hand- so actually, I can sort of dive into this, is part of what’s kept me out of being more hardcore about my raiding, aside from the fact that I’m just not that good and not that dedicated and I started playing WoW at kind of an old age for a gamer, is that I’m very picky about who I play with, so I want to play with people that will make me feel good and if people say crappy things and they’re crapfest 24/7 in the raid, it’s not worth it to me. So, I would rather play with people who can be generally more mature and nicer and calmer and not yell at you- well, not yell at you in a mean way.

Tzufit: (Laughing)

Dysmorphia: Yeah, so that’s kind of funny, one of the things that I’ve experienced, especially with my current team but sometimes with some others too, is, like, what is male camaraderie like? Cause it’s like, I get this amazing window into, like, what are dudes like when they think there’s no women? Especially when I’m PuGing and they haven’t heard my voice yet, like, is this what they’re like? It’s like a secret view into their world.

Tzufit: (Chuckling)

Dysmorphia: And you know, some of it is pretty cool, like there’s this kind of way of [edited]-talking that dudes do that I feel like women don’t do that much? It’s like, either you’re nice or you’re mean but there isn’t this kind of friendly ribbing as much?

Tzufit: Mm-hmm.

Apple Cider: Yeah.

Dysmorphia: So when I actually first joined my current group, I knew that they had finally decided I was OK, so we have this one tank who is just super ragey, he’s just kind of like the archetypal warrior who’s ragey but actually underneath it’s like, love, I wanna say?

Tzufit: (Laughing)

Dysmorphia: Like, seriously, because the thing is as he’s raging he’s narrating what he’s doing, so it’s really communicative, it’s really great as a healer, you’re like, I know exactly what he’s doing, and he’s talking to the other tank and he’s yelling at people and you can tell he’s really watching things. So anyway, this was- actually, in Cataclysm, when druid healing was a little weak, so I would try to pre-HoT as much as possible before a difficult pull, and I was used to having the Night Elf fade thingy- I forgot what it’s called now-

Apple Cider: Shadowmeld.

Tzufit: Shadowmeld.

Dysmorphia: (Chuckling) Well, I didn’t have that, so actually when you hit that button on a Troll you just get an angry face.

Tzufit: (Laughing)

Apple Cider: (Laughing)

Dysmorphia: You’re now really angry, it increases your haste, but the animation for it is a giant angry Troll face. So I pre-HoT the tank, and then I hit the button that I’m used to, and suddenly I’m like, I’m an angry Troll and everything is running at me.

Tzufit: (Gasp) Oh no.

Dysmorphia: Yeah. It was really funny, and then he was like, “Why are you doing this?” He just sort of completely went off on me about pre-HoTing, and I’m like, “I’m a druid, this is how I heal you, I have to pre-HoT you,” and he’s like, “Well I’d rather die,” or whatever. It was hilarious and funny, like, even though it’s- like, if you had heard it on the street out of context you probably would have thought that it was really hostile, but I knew at that point, I was like, in.

Tzufit: (Chuckling)

Apple Cider: (Laughing)

Dysmorphia: Cause he was comfortable enough with me to yell at me like he was at his other tank and everybody else, and, you know, berating druids in general and Trolls in specific and people used to play Alliance, and so on and so forth.

Tzufit: (Laughing) I know that Apple Cider kind of had a learning curve with how my raid leader and I talk to each other (chuckling)-

Apple Cider: (Laughing) Yeah…

Tzufit: Because she’s come along on a couple of flex raids with us, and my raid leader is an older guy and he’s- he was GM before I was, and is our raid leader still now, and he is my other healer, so the two of us have a lot of good natured, you know, competition-ribbing that goes back and forth between each other because we’ve been healing together for a really long time at this point and that’s sort of how we interact with each other, but I’ve heard (chuckling) from other guild members, and then I heard from Apple Cider that it’s hard to tell (laughing) that it’s a joke initially.

Dysmorphia: Yeah, I think that’s that camaraderie thing, where you’re like- I mean, I think that’s part of the fun where you can say these things to each other that normally you just wouldn’t, or maybe you would, but I dunno.

Tzufit: I would never call anybody out on healing numbers, but I do it to him after every other fight because that’s what we do, you know?

Dysmorphia: Yeah. So, actually, this is the thing I love about my- you know, everybody will first say exactly what they did wrong after a wipe, and this-

Tzufit: Yes!

Dysmorphia: So, the people I raid with are intimidating. They are pretty much all former hardcore progression raiders. I think my raid leader used to be in a top-two guild, others are top-fifty, then I’m just a person who, I’m like, “Hey, hi guys, this is the most progressed I’ve ever been.”

Apple Cider: (Laughing)

Dysmorphia: So I often feel like- I’m like, you know, that impostor syndrome thing. It’s kind of for real there, like, I’m with guys who, this is like their retirement raid after elitist jerks and whatever else, and I’m just like, “Hi, I’m just here for fun, you know,” and I mean obviously I’m also here to progress, because otherwise I wouldn’t be doing that, but it’s- it can be kind of intimidating and you’re around all these people and they’re way more situationally aware than I’ll ever be. Like, they know more classes and, you know, these are people who’ve literally written the book on how to resto druid, right? And I’m like, “Oh, hi, I’m raiding with the person whose guide I’m following as I’m raiding.”

Tzufit: (Laughing)

Dysmorphia: And that’s cool, because actually it turns out in person these people- they’re like, they’ve been in that really intense situation and they’ve chosen not to be in it anymore, so they’re actually really mellow. Way more mellow than some of the casual raiders I’ve raided with who are so angry and they’re ready to, like, blame everybody else, and they’ll sit there like, “OK, here’s what I did. OK, here’s a mistake,” and everyone is totally accountable. And the thing is though, normally or previously it’s always been like, whose fault was this wipe? And you’re looking for someone else. And here, it’s like, “Oh no, it was me, oh no, it was my fault, oh you know what I was distracted, oh I sneezed so my swiftmend was off, oh no sorry I was in the wrong place, oh actually I turned my back for a second,” and it gets so crazy, we started this tradition called “roll for blame”, so it just-

Apple Cider: (Laughing)

Tzufit: (Chuckling)

Dysmorphia: So everybody will /random and whoever gets the highest number, that’s their fault.

Tzufit: Yeah, that’s one of the things, I’m certainly on nowhere near as talented of a raid team as you are, but we consider ourselves progression raiders, and for us (chuckling) there really is that moment where you realize you’re in a team where, when you wipe, every single person is looking through their combat log to look at their death and to see what killed them, and the immediate reaction is, “What went wrong? What could I do better?” and like you said, everybody speaks up immediately and says, “OK, well here’s what I should’ve done, here’s what I should’ve done,” and sometimes it’s people, like, you know, as a healer you’re usually pretty aware of what went wrong (laughing) and I will occasionally have people speak up and say, “Oh, yeah, I did x, y, and z wrong,” and I’m thinking, you weren’t even a third or fourth cause of the wipe that just happened, but thanks for letting us know!

Dysmorphia: Yeah, I mean, it’s- that’s the thing actually that I love about progression raiding with good people, fun to play with and good at the game, is it just- I mean, it raised my own game, cause I could tell when I joined this team that I was not playing as well as I could be, and just by being with people who are so much better than you, it’s like, I gotta bring it! Like, I really do!

Apple Cider: (Laughing)

Tzufit: Yeah.

Dysmorphia: And I really improved my play just by simply feeling like I was accountable. No-one was yelling at me, in fact, people were totally nice- except, of course, for the tank, but he yells at everyone so it doesn’t count, and he’s not even the raid leader, he just yells. That’s just kinda his thing. Actually, for a couple of months he stopped yelling and we were all super worried that he was gonna quit the game, like, “What’s wrong with him? He’s not yelling. Is he ill?”

Tzufit: (Laughing) So, out of curiosity, just knowing- I guess- bleh. So, did you know in advance, when you were thinking about getting into a progression style guild or getting into progression raiding, that it was heavily male-dominated and if you did know that, did it give you any qualms about applying or looking into that stuff?

Dysmorphia: I didn’t know. I remember looking at rankings, and that some servers were more progressed than others, and I was like, “Are you kidding me? People keep track of who killed a thing in a videogame first?”

Apple Cider: (Laughing)

Tzufit: (Laughing)

Dysmorphia: Like, what? What is this? Like that matters to people? And then of course, as I got sucked into it, I was like, “Of course it matters. Of course it matters!” and now I’m kind of in a more mellow place where I’m like, you know, I wanna do challenging content with my friends at a pace that it comes out, but I really, I never look at the rankings anymore, and actually I couldn’t even look at the rankings because my group is spread across so many different guilds that we don’t have a ranking. So.

Apple Cider: Oh, yeah, it’s- they really didn’t like teams that were atypical and raided outside of a guild after Wrath ended, basically.

Dysmorphia: Yeah, so I mean, we’re basically outside of that normal ranking. I mean, we can tell when we killed a thing, how many pulls it took, and then you know people always do that thing where they’re like, “Well, yes, we’re only on this but we barely raid six hours a week,” and you’re like, “Well, OK.” I mean, that’s actually what we do, we raid only six hours a week, but- so then, I can’t really compare myself in that sense, but on the other hand, it’s like, no, we’re not that dedicated in terms of time, we don’t have that much time, most of the people I play with work full-time, actually a lot of them in really challenging professions, which is- yeah, that’s just how it’s gonna be. So it’s about, you know, it’s progression but it’s not what I would consider hardcore progression, because it’s like, when we’re there we’re there, we’re really dedicated, we’re working our hardest, but we never extend a raid. Raid ends at raid time, ‘cause people have important meetings in the morning, you know?

Tzufit: Right.

Apple Cider: Yeah.

Tzufit: And for me, that’s one of the things that I’ve really found helpful with the team that I’m on, is the age range of people on the team. I’m on the lower end of the age range on our team, and we have people who are mostly in their mid-to-late thirties, and then we have people on into their forties, and as you said, pretty much everybody there has a full-time job, they need to wake up early in the morning, at least half the raid has kids, and as Apple Cider can attest, sometimes the kids are sitting right next to their dads at the computer. (Laughing)

Apple Cider: Yeah…

Tzufit: And they get really sad when we wipe, mostly because then there’s this boring period of us running back in where they don’t get to watch things, or they get to watch boring things. So, yeah, I think having an older crew has been very helpful in terms of people who are just kind of- they don’t care about loot drama, that’s so far away from what we’re thinking, it’s just very pragmatic and it gets the job done and that’s something I’ve really appreciated over the years.

Dysmorphia: Yeah, I find actually- so, my raid is similarly kind of older, mostly people in their late-20s, 30s, I think a couple in their 40s, and it’s really just- what people value above all is their time. Like, you will get called out for wasting time on trash for going afk, for like- that’s the one thing people will actually get mad about, is you’re wasting our time, and they only have six hours a week of this time, so do not. But, nothing else is really a big deal. It’s just the time. Loot is nice because it helps us progress. Progression is nice, obviously, that’s what we’re there for, but ultimately it’s like, are we having a fun time, are we using our time well? But yeah, to go back to what you said, I had no idea what I was getting into, honestly. I just thought, yeah, I’m just gonna go inside dungeons. You know, the other thing I didn’t get because I was playing jRPGs before is that you do a dungeon more than once.

Apple Cider: (Laughing)

Tzufit: (Laughing) Oh!

Dysmorphia: Why would you- like, you beat it, you’re done, right? Like, I was very confused by that whole concept. So I thought, you know, I’ll become a healer and then I can go inside these cool dungeons cause I knew they were small dungeons ‘cause I’d been doing a lot of five-mans, I love doing five-mans, I love PuGing them, especially before the out-of-grouping thing on a small server if you got a reputation as a good five-man healer, I could log on in the evening and immediately have a group. People were waiting for me, it was really awesome, and then I was- OK, I’ll do the same thing except with bigger dungeons, so I really wanted to go inside these big dungeons, and see what was there, and then slowly I realized what I liked about it, and I liked the challenge and it sort of slowly amped up what I was wanting to do, and I really didn’t have a concept of that it would be mostly guys. In fact, I thought that- so, this is so naive, but I really felt that half the people I was playing with were women, ‘cause that’s half the world, right?

Apple Cider: Yeah.

Dysmorphia: And then it just- you know? I just sort of assumed, like, if you have a female character, you’re probably a woman. I mean, you might not be, ‘cause obviously people like to play different things, my first character that I made was a male Tauren ‘cause I thought they looked incredibly badass, but they run so slow.

Tzufit: (Laughing)

Apple Cider: (Laughing)

Dysmorphia: So, I had to stop, but- yeah, I didn’t know what I was getting into. I just, you know, and I do this a lot, where I’ll get into a hobby and I’m like, this is so much fun, I love this, and then someday I realize, oh, I’m the only lady here. Huh.

Apple Cider: (Laughing)

Tzufit: So once you did start to realize that, did you have any reactions to it? Did it change the way you felt about raiding at all?

Dysmorphia: You know, not really. It made me- well, I suppose it changed it a little bit, it made me more careful about when I would let people know who I was or that I was female. Like, if I was PuGing and I didn’t have to be on voice chat, I would just not talk, but then I knew, you know, the moment that you start Vent and then people hear your voice, and obviously I have a super feminine voice, I could pretend I guess I was a twelve-year-old boy but it wouldn’t be very realistic.

Tzufit: (Chuckling)

Apple Cider: (Chuckling)

Dysmorphia: Actually, so I’m considering getting into League of Legends, and I’m thinking my plan is I’ll just pretend I’m a really young boy. So, I mean, WoW did have a little bit of a reputation as being kind of like a dangerous place for women just sort of in general, and then after I’d been leveling for a while and playing dungeons and it was fine, it didn’t occur to me that raiding and especially progression raiding would be such a different world. And yeah, it’s just- you know, it’s weird, a lot of the time I forget about it, and then something will suddenly just draw it out, like people will say something really sexist and you’re like, wait a minute, hold on a second, and then you wonder, wait, do they just assume that there’s no women here, and then sometimes I feel really obligated to speak up and be like, “Hi, yes, I’m here,” like when people say women don’t play WoW, that’s when I queue up voice chat, and I’m like, “Hello! Yes! In fact, I do.”

Apple Cider: (Laughing)

Tzufit: (Laughing) Yeah, it’s always-

Dysmorphia: It’s that kind of contrariness in my spirit, when someone says something [edited] I feel like I have to say something, even if it gets me into a fight or whatever. So that’s more like PuGing, obviously once they know who I am I don’t hide- like, I’m not going to raid with people and not let them know who I am.

Apple Cider: Yeah.

Dysmorphia: But I used to do a lot of PuGing, and that was the thing, where people would just assume everyone in the group was male, and the funny thing that would happen, especially in a bigger PuG, is someone would say, “Of course there’s no women who play WoW,” or some other [edited] thing, and I would be like, “No, actually, I’m female.” And you know, a lot of the time, someone else would say, “Yeah, so am I, so screw you.”

Tzufit: (Laughing)

Apple Cider: (Laughing)

Dysmorphia: But someone would need to say it first, and I’m pretty OK with being the person who says it first. And you know, I feel like sometimes when you’re in that situation, it doesn’t even matter that you’re saying anything feminist or progressive or anything like that at all, just being there, just stepping in and being there and just playing the game in the normal fashion, that somehow is this kind of revolutionary act, which is weird! Like, I just wanna play a game, I’m just doing this to relax, this is what I do to get away from the [edited], but somehow just showing up is enough to push people’s buttons.

Apple Cider: Yeah, it’s- it doesn’t have to be super radical, it’s just breaking into a space that does get painted as way more male than anything else, like, I feel that the acceptance of World of Warcraft as being a fairly diverse group to some degree is gaining more ground, because of- and I think this is a little bit odd, but you know, gaining more ground is having a very diverse crowd, because there’s many women who talk about playing WoW, it’s such a big game, there’s no way that it could not be diverse, and that there’s a lot more casual aspects and I use that with air quotes, “casual” aspects to the game, and I think that’s where people think that all the women are, and then when you still get to things that have a considerable high level to them, like raiding, PvP, you know, arenas and things like that, I think that’s where people still think that all the women have vanished from, so being in a raid and being a woman and doing jobs and things like that still is kind of viewed as- like you’re a unicorn or something.

Tzufit: (Chuckling)

Dysmorphia: Yeah, a little bit, and that’s kind of- I mean, that’s weird, ‘cause I mean, I’ve raided- when I raided twenty-fives, there were always other women on my team. I think the only reason I’m the only one right now is it’s a ten-person group, so, you know, odds are lower.

Apple Cider: Yeah.

Tzufit: I think it’s interesting because you see that divide even in content creation within the WoW community. Like, if you think about WoW bloggers, there are a LOT of women WoW bloggers out there, but, to Apple Cider’s point, a lot of them do tend to cover the stuff that people kind of unfairly label as “casual” and therefore lesser, versus when you think about your theorycrafters, not universally but a lot of them, when you think about the big streamers, the big names out there, most of them tend to be men, still.

Dysmorphia: Yeah, that’s true. Certainly with the theorycrafters, I don’t know that much about the streamers. Actually, someone asked about that on Twitter, about-

Tzufit: Yeah!

Dysmorphia: About streamers.

Tzufit: This is from ashveridian on Twitter, asked, “How does Dysmorphia feel about the lack of women streaming high-end play on the same level as-” and then they list several male streamers here who have very large personally loyal fanbases, despite them being present that content. I’m not sure exactly what that was supposed to say.

Dysmorphia: Yeah, so I don’t really watch that much raid streaming, so I can’t speak about it that much. The one person I used to watch regularly was this woman who played with Juggernaut, Ryoushii? I- uh, OK, I’m probably saying this wrong.

Apple Cider: Ryoushii?

Dysmorphia: She went by Koush, like, [Koushirou] was her streamer name, and that stream was awesome because Juggernaut was a pretty progressive guild, and she made these amazing snark comments throughout, where she just would comment on everybody, and in the meantime you also have Sebudai who is sort of famous for being the asshole raid leader, you know, there’s that whole meme with him saying mean things, like, “OK, we have to go back to ubers because you people don’t know anything.”

Apple Cider: Yeah, it’s not rocket surgery, basically.

Dysmorphia: Exactly!

Apple Cider: For people that don’t know.

Dysmorphia: It’s the not rocket surgery guy, and you know, that was an amazing stream to watch and to listen to, but then Juggernaut shut its doors and the next guild that she was with didn’t let her stream the voice chat, and honestly I watch a stream if I’m going to watch it to see how they play together, not to watch other people play a videogame but to actually see how they communicate, so without the voice stream I’m like, “Meh.” So, my experience is that the one streamer I ever followed was a woman, so I don’t know.

Tzufit: (Laughing)

Apple Cider: (Laughing) It’s cool- I think that’s a good thing to maybe poke at. Let’s talk about that. Is- there still is an absence of high end content. theorycrafters, streamers, and I wanna say that I don’t wanna say that there are none, because there are, there are quite a few women that are doing high level streaming pvp, raiding, raid streams, but also I wanna say that there really are not a lot of women theorycrafters, though. That is a place- and, I mean, that is pretty much the domain of raiding is, you know, raiding was very heavily tied to theorycrafting communities. Absence of women there, and I (sigh) I wanna say that there’s maybe some definite reasons for that, and it’s not because women are terrible at math. (Chuckles)

Tzufit: Yeah. (Chuckles) I know, from a streaming perspective, I mean I can speak to that a little bit as somebody who’s kind of been dabbling in streaming recently, and I’m not exactly sure where I wanna go with it, but I’ve spoken to my guild, they’re fine with me streaming, they’re fine with me streaming our vent chat, you know, as long as I give them the heads up that we’re doing it, but I really hesitate to stream our progression raid nights or anything, because I just don’t wanna deal with what I feel like would kind of be the inevitable criticism that could potentially go along with that, and some of it is just not wanting to deal with that criticism in general while I’m sitting there trying to do progression raiding, but some of it is specifically, I will start talking, they’ll know I’m a woman, and then do I really need to deal with that whole thing while I’m trying to do this too?

Dysmorphia: Yeah, and that makes sense. I mean, I’ve seen enough people reacting to women streamers on Twitch and so on to be like, do I ever wanna put up with that [edited]? No! I do not.

Tzufit: Mmhmm. Why aren’t you using a webcam, just, you know, any of these things.

Apple Cider: Oh yeah.

Dysmorphia: I just don’t wanna. And then it’s weird because when a man does something [edited], you’re just like, you’re doing a [edited] thing, here’s [edited] thing x that you’re doing, blah blah blah. If you’re a woman and you’re doing a [edited] thing, immediately the gendered slurs start.

Tzufit: Mmhmm!

Apple Cider: Yeah.

Dysmorphia: It’s like, if I’m a bad player, if I’m doing something shitty, if I’m sub-optimally clipped, like, sure, sing it, but don’t, you know, start using- that’s a thing that gets me, and that’s why I don’t really wanna go there.

Apple Cider: Yeah. It’s- I think that this is really- this really gross expectation for if you’re putting out anything out there publicly, that as a woman that’s the sort of criticism you’re always going to get, and always is that you’re reflecting on your gender badly if you [edited] up, whereas if you do good, it’s remarkable. It doesn’t reflect on the gender as a whole, it’s an anomaly.

Tzufit: Yeah!

Dysmorphia: You’re the exception. If you’re good you’re the exception, if you’re bad then you’re just proving the rule that everybody is bad.

Apple Cider: Yeah, and I feel that that feeling, that gatekeeping, that exceptional double-street sort of criticism is also maybe why there are fewer streamers, fewer high-end theorycrafting women, because it just feels like a community that has kept a lot of women out because of that criticism, and I feel like- and I’ve had brushes with it, even as somebody who is not a high level player, like, I started doing streaming, right? I started doing streaming very recently because I finally- you know, my computer stopped being terrible, so I could actually do streaming, and I’m not doing anything particularly exciting, like, all I’m doing is soloing stuff as a death knight, that’s all I’m doing, and people will just kind of come in and demand things on you, like, why are you doing this, why are you not- like Tzufit said, why are you not using a camera, and just condescending you, and I feel like that’s kind of also what you get if you decide to put yourself out there as a voice of authority, which again-

Tzufit: Yeah, absolutely.

Apple Cider: Which is again maybe why a lot of women never got involved in theorycrafting, it’s not because I don’t think women are not intellectually capable enough, because I definitely don’t think that’s the case, it’s just, how are you going to break into a community that has so long prided itself on being factually accurate and then not have to deal with that constant and unending stream of people checking you for having the audacity to be an authority on something as a woman in gaming.

Dysmorphia: Yeah, that’s true. But, you know, I was just thinking as you were talking about this, like, what- are there any women theorycrafters I can think of, and right now two came to mind, one is Vixsin who does the resto shaman stuff, and I remember when I was playing a resto shaman, I’m like, “Holy crap, there isn’t enough resto shaman theorycraft!” So there was her and then theres also Beruthiel who does a bunch of resto druid stuff. Coincidentally, both doing healing things, and I think you guys covered that in a previous episode.

Apple Cider: Yeah.

Dysmorphia: Women gravitating towards healing.

Tzufit: Mmhmm.

Dysmorphia: But, I mean, that’s the only two I can think of, and I’m pretty involved in the theorycrafting community as a sort of consumer of theorycrafting, so yeah. That’s just two, out of- I don’t know, dozens.

Apple Cider: Yeah.

Tzufit: I think- you know, for me, too, anytime I’ve published a post that borders on theorycrafting or borders on saying, “You should play this class this way,” I am like- my defenses are immediately raised, you know? I hit that publish button and I’m not excited about finishing a post or really happy to put it out there. It’s like, I’m gonna hit this button and then I’m gonna wait for the criticism to roll in, because-

Dysmorphia: Because you know it will!

Tzufit: Yeah! And I think that a lot of times, women’s content is scrutinized at a different level anyway, so if there’s a minor error, I mean, the problem is, this is the internet so anytime anybody catches a minor error about anything, they’re gonna tell you about it, but I think that the scrutiny is a little bit harsher or a little more thorough a lot of the time if you know that it’s a woman who produced the content, because your immediate reaction is, well she probably doesn’t know what she’s talking about anyway.

Dysmorphia: Yeah, I think you’re right about that. So it’s just like- I mean, it’s just not- I don’t want to say the theorycrafting community’s mean, because it’s not mean, but it’s definitely very nitpicky. I mean, these are the people who, before you had the proper combat logging, would sit there and look at their little dummy numbers for hours, so it takes a certain kind of mind like a steel trap to even get into it in the first place, but then you’re right, I think that there is an additional level of scrutiny if you’re a woman writing about it.

Apple Cider: Yeah.

Dysmorphia: Like, how dare you? Which is weird, but OK.

Apple Cider: Yeah, exactly. (Laughing) Well, and I feel like that has a detrimental effect, like, the one time that I really kind of stepped up to the plate to give advice to mages about their play- and I’m, I mean, I’m not a noob to mage playing. I’ve been playing a mage for nine years, I’m not somebody that is exceptionally [edited] about the class. But, you know, I made a post about what were good times to use heroism, just from common sense rules that I had sort of always followed, and I got checked by two very prominent theorycrafters, despite the fact that I was using information that was contrary to what they had come up with regards to perfect and optimal heroism/time warp/bloodlust use, despite the fact that that information had not been publicly released to the non-theorycrafting, non-high-end-raiding community on the virtue that it was not information that they considered that we needed to have. So I was wrong, because I was giving out the wrong information, but I didn’t have the actual right information that they had decided prior to this, so it was like this weird catch-22 but I had a lot of nerd guys coming up on my doorstep to yell at me for giving out inaccurate information that I hadn’t been provided prior to, and it very much felt like any other conversation that I have with angry men on the internet. It was no different than a feminism conversation where men come to tell me that I’m wrong, and they’re operating with a very different set of expectations and lived experiences and it was- I never did anything like that ever again. I didn’t want to deal with it. I didn’t want to deal with them again, and I didn’t want to deal with that kind of hubris and arrogance because I think a lot of the high-end play community, being considered so homogeneously full of dudes, they do get this idea that they’re always right and that their perspectives are always correct in every instance, and somebody who is a double outsider could not possibly have anything of merit to say on the subject, whether it be raiding or pvp or theorycrafting, anything like that. It’s- and it- that sort of stuff, you carry that with you on top of every other thing that you carry with you as a woman playing a video game, especially World of Warcraft, and it starts to become this matched set of baggage that you frequently don’t get into that stuff because you have to deal with the criticism, you have to deal with the double standards, you have to deal with dealing with men that think they’re always right and then you have, on top of that, the matters of, are they going to respect me? Are they going to talk about sexist stuff, are they gonna make rape jokes that further degrade me? And then on top of that you have whatever else you’ve been carrying around in your psyche for however many years before you even got into videogames.

Dysmorphia: Actually, that’s how I got into following theorycrafting, is I had this sense of profound inadequacy ‘cause I didn’t start playing WoW until I think I was- I wanna say thirty or twenty-nine, but you know, old by gamer standards, so I figured, “I’ll never have the reflexes these dudes do, never! Cause I’m old!” Like, it’s not gonna happen, so I have to work on my theory knowledge. So I started reading a lot of theorycrafting thinking, I’m just gonna make my gear as good as possible and make my spell spread correct, use the right thing in the right time, because I’m not going to get out of the fire quite as timely as these other people, but I can get the theory! So that’s how I got into the theorycraft part of progression raiding, but I never did the theorycraft myself ‘cause I’m not really a math person. I’m pretty analytical, but I’m not a math person.

Tzufit: I think that’s one of the things that’s interesting about theorycrafting is that there’s so little thought or concern or value given to the delivery. Like, if you’re telling somebody that they’re wrong, it’s always extraordinarily blunt, a lot of the time it’s, if not blunt, then mean, you know? There’s no finesse to it at all, and there’s sometimes, depending on who you speak to, certainly not all theorycrafters are like this, but a lot of people don’t really appreciate questions where they kind of ask you to expand a little bit or explain on a slightly lower level so that you can get, “OK, I know that they made it to C, but how did they get past A and B to get there?” And sometimes that’s really treated very condescendingly or as a waste of time, and I do- I think I can understand that point of view because I can see how it feels like an attack because, “I’ve done all the math to get past A and B and C is clearly the answer and I can’t help you if you don’t understand how to do the math,” but when that’s the automatic reaction, and when it’s delivered in a very blunt or

condescending way it is extraordinarily alienating and really does turn people away who maybe would be writing more, would be asking more, would be doing better if they had received a slightly different tone of response.

Dysmorphia: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s part of the gatekeeping of raiding, ‘cause I feel like raiding used to be a lot more exclusive than it is now, so it was like, if you’re even raiding, you’re already top dog. If you’re raiding well enough that you’re reading theorycrafting, you’re already kind of like a nerd lord, and so you already have enough arrogance that no matter how arrogant someone is being, you’re like, whatever, or at least that’s what’s expected. I think that’s the thing, is that they expect that everyone else has this super thick shell, and if you’re an actual squishy human you’re squished.

Apple Cider: Yeah. Well, I think that kind of goes back to maybe that there’s- I feel like people are operating on different pages and it comes to their psychological on-ramp to this sort of stuff, ‘cause I think that women coming into gaming have a far different set of baggage that they’re coming in with, and that it clashes a lot when you are dealing with a largely analytical group of people, where it comes off as blunt ‘cause they’re dealing with numbers and it’s not about feelings and you’re coming into it with perhaps feelings and maybe some of the things that go on when you are dealing with gaming, which can be feeling inadequate, feeling like you’re just faking it, like you’re not good enough or will never be good enough, or you just don’t get it or you’re too [edited] or that sort of thing.

Dysmorphia: You know, what this also reminds me of is there’s this tendency when people are talking about the difficulty of a game to really underplay it. They’ll just be like, oh yeah, this is trivial, shouldn’t be a problem, and I know when I hear that from certain people, I’m just like, this is not information. They’re just saying that.

Apple Cider: (Laughing)

Tzufit: (Laughing)

Dysmorphia: Like, I in fact don’t know the difficulty of what they just played, and then sometimes when you talk to them and you find out what they mean by trivial, like when I was talking about the druid- the healer trial thingy that they put in now? Where you can do gold and then endless and whatever.

Tzufit: Mmhmm.

Apple Cider: Oh yeah, proving grounds.

Dysmorphia: Proving grounds! That’s the thing, which I loved, I did them until I got the title “proving healer” which I wore until the first time I caused a healing wipe and I was like, well.

Tzufit: (Laughing)

Apple Cider: (Laughing)

Dysmorphia: So, now I’m champion of Orgrimmar or whatever it is, defender of Orgrimmar. So, I was talking to one of these people about, like, oh hey, how hard is this? And they were like, you know, it’s not that bad, it’s pretty easy, it only took me about four hours of wiping. And I’m like, oh, OK, that’s a really great calibration. Like, now I know when you say “easy” you have a REALLY different idea about what is easy.

Tzufit: Yeah! (Chuckling)

Dysmorphia: Cause if you say it’s easy, I’m like, you got it in two or three tries, right? And you say it’s easy because it only took four hours, and some analysis. So I’m like, OK, alright, so it’s kind of funny ‘cause I’m like, is this machismo talking, or is this just people expecting a different level? And I don’t know. I just don’t know.

Apple Cider: (Laughing)

Tzufit: I don’t know either. My inclination is that it’s probably a little bit of both, but yeah, I certainly- if someone told me trivial, four hours would not be anywhere on my radar.

Dysmorphia: Right? Cause trivial is like, I could do it in a day.

Tzufit: Yeah!

Dysmorphia: Oh, OK! Alright, then!

Apple Cider: (Chuckling) Well, OK, so here’s a question from me to you, is, have you ever run into a situation where- I mean, I feel like a lot of our discussion on this show has- and this is kind of very funny, is that I think even in the course of this episode that all of us have been self-deprecating to some degree? Despite the fact that I think that we’re all pretty confident players. Have you ever run into a situation where it was something that you felt accomplished about or felt confident about, and you had somebody assume that you weren’t actually confident or good at what you did or just assumed that you were just a noob about it?

Dysmorphia: Hmm, like in WoW?

Apple Cider: Yeah.

Dysmorphia: Uh..

Apple Cider: (Laughing)

Tzufit: (Chuckling) I was trying to think, I don’t really think I have either.

Dysmorphia: So I mean, yeah, I’m kind of self-deprecating and stuff, but I feel like I’m realistic, I know where I stand, you know? Like, I remember when I used to play in a more casual guild with more casual people, and they would talk about how badass they were, and I looked at my numbers, I looked at my spell spread, I looked at progression, and I was like, guys, we’re ranked four-thousandth. Like, it’s fine, but don’t be an ass. Or do you feel like you’re amazing, I’m like, no, I’m fine. I know what amazing is, I’ve watched the stream, I’ve looked at logs, I know what the potential is, and I’m not amazing, I’m fine. You’re fine. We’re all fine. Get over yourself.

Apple Cider: (Laughing)