Girl Gamer Team Frag Dolls Help Industry Grow Up(ward)

Authored by Scott Goldberg on October 24, 2006 - 11:48am.

First there were the 007 games on Nintendo 64, which I played extensively in my senior year of high school. The benchmark on video game quality was set during that period: if I play a game 6 hours a day, I'm addicted in the worst, most hopeless way. There are few other addictions that occupy your time as relentlessly as video gaming. You suffer sleepless nights and the fabled “Video Game Eyes” – a state of appearance that falls somewhere between a 3-night bender in Vegas and reconstructive surgery.

Bond’s greatest asset was the multiplayer feature. The last time I can remember caring so much about a game was when Nintendo released Super TECMO Bowl. Far and away the most dominant character of all time came out of that game: Lawrence Taylor. He was unstoppable, the fastest man on the field. TECMO’s strength was that it logged stats. My record with Lawrence Taylor was 85 sacks in one season. The second ranked player had 14. It goes down as one of my three biggest achievements in life.

But then there was a gap where nothing important seemed to come from game developers. Things were relegated to Hollywood-like desperation moves: re-releases of old games like Donkey Kong, the omnipresent Super Mario, perhaps a Madden game or two, some interesting FIFA soccer games. I played quite a bit of the EA Sports library, but I don’t remember feeling the Video Game Eyes to the extent I did with Bond.

By my senior year of college the Bond franchise had taken a step back. The first game was considered overly graphic (pistol shots to the head splattered a disturbingly realistic amount of blood on the wall behind the character) and isolated younger audiences. Soccer moms didn't allow their kids to play, so the game developers compensated by releasing a new Bond game, one drastically less graphic and, therefore, less enjoyable. The problem became the game's sterility. It lacked the aggression (and blood) of its predecessor, so I only played for an hour a day, if that. The developers believed the multiplayer feature was strong enough to compensate for a G-rated experience. I assure you, it did not.

I had no fear, though, because tremendous talent had been bestowed on the developers at Rockstar Games, and they produced the most deliciously ludicrous, inconceivable gaming franchise we've ever seen, Grand Theft Auto. That kicked my habit up several hours to the point that I can say with a straight face I played a minimum of 8 hours per day, mesmerized by the evolving plot that included healthy doses of prostitution, car jacking, drive-by shootings, drug deals, club hopping, police chases, pedestrian lawn mowing...I could go on forever...there was no limit to the mischief.

Yet despite its incomparable level of hooliganism, each Grand Theft Auto game fell short because it was a single-player effort. It lacked Bond’s social factor, and the ability to demonstrate one’s superiority over other players. Teamwork is nice in video gaming, but it’s far more satisfying to completely dominate your peers instead. It feeds one of our basic urges in life to live like a despot.

Near the end of my senior year, a friend purchased an Xbox, and soon thereafter acquired Halo. I was skeptical because I’d never been a huge sci-fi fan, but it took little time for Halo to shatter all of my game-playing records. I feel lucky to have graduated from college. Video Game Eyes was nothing compared to Halo Face (a look of blank surprise, eyes wide open, jaw dropped, and a sickly, pale complexion).

Halo reintroduced the importance of the multiplayer feature, but the game was only halfway to its destination. The day I played Xbox Live for the first time, which not-so-coincidentally arrived with the release of Halo 2 in the late autumn of 2004, and found myself in combat with 15 other individuals, all wearing headsets and shouting profanities through my speakers, I had arrived in video game Shangri-la. My entire social life, as I knew it, changed. I refuse to say it was worse, because I’ve never had so many friends at one time. Everyone played; age was no factor. My greatest nemesis of that period was a 12-year-old from Connecticut named Brian. The best player I knew was a 27-year-old teacher from New Jersey named Dave.

Now, all of that said, at no time in my entire gaming life had I considered for even a tenth of a second that any females were playing video games. Of course there had to be some, but I didn’t personally know any. I have two sisters who never cared to play, and none of the girls in my school, as far as I knew, wasted 6 hours a day playing Bond. I was unsurprised to hear petulant female huffs at the thought of grown men waging battle on an alien planet called Halo, and once had to convince my girlfriend that Sim City was a worthwhile use of brain functions because the economy I had “built” was really humming with the new sports stadium I added.

But as gentlemen often are, I was sorely mistaken. Not only were girls playing video games, they were doing it well. That was another benefit of the Bond games: sure, other video games allowed for the display of skill, but no game had as wide a talent spectrum as Bond. Halo 2 on Xbox Live took that to another level. If sixteen people played a game 100 times, the finishing order would be more or less the same throughout. Skill in video games is like skill in anything: Some people have a lot of it, some people have less, and some people have none at all. It turns out there was a group of girls who had lots of skill, and they made Halo Face look like a Shakira video. Some of those girls even got together and formed a hit squad, laying claim to some serious gaming muscle. That group: The Frag Dolls.

One of the original Frag Dolls, Morgan “Rhoulette” Romine, was gracious enough to spend time chatting with an inferior player like myself. She’s been asked too many times how The Frag Dolls began, but as a video gamer who never had the good fortune to play with a crew like hers, I couldn’t help myself. “Girls would go to tournaments,” she told me, “and be asked over and over if they were actually serious gamers. There were a lot of questions about females playing video games. Then they’d see we had skills and that was that. So we thought, ‘You know, there’s a lot of boys playing video games, and they’re really interested in the girls that play video games, so why don’t we, you know, put the two together and form a team?’ It just made sense.”

Here’s something else the average person probably doesn’t know about video gaming: it’s a huge business, and some people, like The Frag Dolls, are able to do it professionally full time. It’s not yet to the point where a full time gaming life is common among professionals, but the popularity and money surrounding the sport has helped it to grow enormously each year, and more and more professionals are able to practice around the clock. “There aren’t many female gamers,” Romine said, “but that’s changing as well.”

The Frag Dolls do more than draw attention to Ubisoft’s games, though that’s obviously a primary function. The video gaming industry is old in some ways, dating back to the early 1970s, but it’s only beginning to explore the concept of a professional sport. “The biggest issue,” said Romine, “is how to make video gaming a better spectator sport. The key is attracting an audience, and when that happens, I think yes, it could be very successful.”

With most young females deterred from playing video games for the typical reasons (older brothers, parents who’d rather see their daughters playing with dolls, social expectations), and because of the level playing field gaming naturally provides, Romine and The Frag Dolls represent a revolution of sorts, one that implies the gaming industry, with a market size of $30 billion dollars according to RocSearch, has barely tapped 50% of its potential consumer base.

Another consideration for the potential boom in video gaming is the state of the sport in Korea, where professionals are among the most famous faces in the country, and audiences of 100,000 people frequently attend events. The professional circuit in North America is nowhere near as successful, though among its fan base, the intensity of the interest is often surprising. “In Canada, the reception we got was pretty amazing,” Romine said. “It was pretty cute.”

With any group like The Frag Dolls, the question is initially whether the girls are really serious gamers. The basic concept, a group of attractive females playing video games, could only be successful if the girls were at an elite gaming level. “We knew that we needed to be legitimate gamers or nobody would take us seriously.”

Still, although several of The Frag Dolls were previously known in gaming communities, uninformed skeptics were quick to pounce on what appeared to be a dirty marketing scheme. “When you put yourself in that position and you’re under that kind of criticism, the first wave of it is still shocking, even if you anticipated it. The first thing people were saying was, ‘Oh gosh, it’s this insidious marketing ploy where they’re hiding their connection to Ubisoft.’ We weren’t trying to hide our connection to Ubisoft. We had their logos on our site, and now we try to be even clearer about the fact that we’re backed by Ubisoft.

“There were a lot people who didn’t think we were serious gamers, but it was mostly people who didn’t do their research. There was the unflattering ‘Booth Babe’ reference (attractive females who are hired to market games, but don’t play them), which we’ve had to fight a lot since the beginning. We’re not Booth Babes, we play the games.”

The question every professional gamer gets at one time or another is how their parents feel about their career choice. For Morgan Romine, her parents were initially pleased that she could earn a living from the sport, but challenged her to make a positive social impact as well. The first and foremost social objective of The Frag Dolls is to tear down the stereotypes about female gamers, let alone attractive, athletic ones. Romine played basketball at Cal-Berkley and continues to snowboard, among other pursuits. Most recently she has tried to do her part in changing the conception that video gaming is a major cause of obesity in kids. In a forum on The Frag Dolls website, a topic titled “The perfect soda?” began with a post: “So everyday pretty much, I stand in front of the pop machine debating: Is it a diet Coke day or diet Pepsi day? Am I in the mood for the heavier bubbly-ness of the DC, or do I want the sweeter, more palette pleasing DP?”

Romine joined in after many similar posts, and wrote, “Soda is evil. It's easily one of the top causes of the American obesity epidemic. It's full of the worst kind of sugar possible. Not to be a nutrition Nazi or anything, it's more that I'm a foodie. I love GOOD food and I don't want good food and eating to be anything but good for me so when I eat things that are high in calories, I eat stuff that is really worth it and yummy instead of just super-injected with handfuls of sodium, MSG, or chemical sugars. When you pay attention to what you eat you start to realize that the stuff that is more wholesome is not only better for you, it tastes better too. Better food also makes you FEEL better. Too rarely do we realize how much our mood can be determined by what we eat, but I promise those of you who are regular soda and fast food consumers, if you cut those out of your diet for a couple weeks you will notice a HUGE difference.”

Talking to Romine demonstrates an interesting strength of the video gaming industry, one that many outsiders have failed to grasp: to succeed as a gamer, to join the ranks of the elite, the brain is the most important muscle. It’s no different than chess in that way, and perhaps is more important because hand-eye coordination plays a large role in nearly every game. It could be argued, in fact, that no sport requires as high a level of intelligence quite as extensively as video gaming. That means if there is a sport adequately prepared to handle its own size, to explore its limitless potential, to solve the problem of becoming a spectator sport in a unique way, it’s video gaming. What’s clear about Morgan Romine is that her interest in video gaming goes beyond a simple entertainment source. She and The Frag Dolls are considered among their peers to be some of the sport’s best ambassadors. It seems inevitable that mainstream recognition is not far away.

Scott Goldberg

Millennial Modes, a weekly column that covers the trends, attitudes, and tastes of the millennial generation, is made possible by Cdigix.

Related Links:
The Frag Dolls' Website
Rhoulette's Blog
Ubisoft Corporate Website