From bestseller lists to runways, gaming’s influence is all-powerful.
The story of two friends brought together by a shared love of video games: that is the premise of summer 2023’s most popular novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. A viral word-of-mouth hit, adored by everyone from Zadie Smith to Camille Charrière, it spent 44 weeks atop The New York Times’s bestsellers list and, at the time of writing, is still at the top of the UK book chart, above the likes, even, of the unstoppable “BookTok” queen Colleen Hoover.
Still, some literary corners found its appeal and success “surprising”. Why? Because the novel has gaming at its heart. For those not familiar with, or immersed in, the universes of Roblox and Twitch, the perception of gaming as an activity that takes place in a “basement, alone and in the dark” is one that persists, says Leah Alexandra, 30, AKA Leahviathan, a Twitch streamer with 175,000 followers, on the set of Vogue’s photoshoot.
The fact is, there are an estimated 3.2 billion gamers in the world – this writer included – and by the end of last year the industry was worth a staggering £160 billion. You might not consider yourself a gamer, but there’s no getting away from gaming’s influence on our lives and culture. From prestige TV (see multi-Emmy nominated series The Last Of Us, based on the apocalyptic action-adventure game of the same name) to cinema (after Barbie, The Super Mario Bros Movie was this year’s second highest-grossing film) to the apps on your phone (Candy Crush Saga has, to date, been downloaded more than three billion times), it is, as video game executive Siobhan Reddy says, “the medium of our time”.
It is safe to say, then, that gaming is no longer the preserve of adolescent boys. Back in 1982, when the highest-grossing video game was Pac-Man, 80 per cent of arcade gamers were men. Forty years on, the gamer gender gap has narrowed to such an extent that it is almost negligible: in the UK, women now represent 47 per cent of gamers, while in the US half of gaming PCs are women-owned and more women than men own Nintendo Switch consoles.
Of course, the seven women photographed here know this already. All of them are dedicated gamers: some, such as Reddy, are veteran developers, designers and writers who have watched – and helped – the industry grow and change from the inside; others, such as Alexandra, represent a new wave of young women claiming gaming for themselves and reshaping its image in the process.
When Alexandra’s long-held dream of acting looked like it might stay that way (“I was very poor,” she says, laughing ruefully, “very much in debt and I didn’t have any ins to that sort of life”), streaming, she realised, could be “an outlet for performing”. After a couple of years spent watching YouTubers play games, she turned the camera on herself. Her chosen game? The first-person shooter Destiny. Years in the making, its highly anticipated release in 2014 coincided with an explosion in users to Twitch – the American-founded livestreaming service whose USP is live game streaming. (Launched in 2011, by early 2014 it accounted for more than 40 per cent of livestreaming traffic by volume in the US.)
“I got so lucky,” she says. “It was right place, right time.” Fellow Destiny streamers “set on growing a healthy, positive community” started noticing her, invited her to play and “took me under their wing”, she adds. It gave her her own following, one she has continued to cultivate over the past eight years to become one of the UK’s most followed women on the platform. Now, she combines near-daily streaming with presenting duties for Xbox, alongside writing fiction inspired by “the rich stories” of the games she plays. Evenings might be given over to doing improv online, using games – such as the hyperrealistic Red Dead Redemption 2, an action-adventure set in America’s Wild West – as the basis for characters and storylines. “Everyone has a full backstory,” she explains, laughing. “It’s a little bit weird. I think it’s quite underground, but it’s a very interesting way of flexing creativity in a totally different way [and another] avenue for me to do voice acting.”
Model and gamer Jasmine Asia, 23, also knows the thrill of bringing video game characters to life. Her love of dressing like digital characters (Lara Croft is “her personal It girl”) has proved catnip to brands looking to embrace the gaming aesthetic. Having been scouted by an agency after she uploaded a photo to social media of herself at Comic Con, dressed as a character from the cartoon Young Justice, she has booked campaigns with Xbox, Agent Provocateur, H&M and YSL Beauty.
Fashion has long circled the world of gaming, but the last two years have seen a boom in brands looking to get in on the action. Last year, Burberry partnered with Minecraft, creating both in-game and IRL limited-edition collections; in 2021 Balenciaga designed clothes for Fortnite’s fan-favourite characters, while Ralph Lauren went a step further and, this past August, launched the Polo P-Wing Boot, which first appeared as a digital garment in the game. On gaming platform Roblox, you’ll find Gucci Town, the luxury house’s permanent destination, where players can “connect with like-minded individuals from all over the world”.
Indeed, Asia’s interest in fashion was first sparked as a child playing Noughties online game Stardoll. “Before that, I only knew who Coco Chanel was because my mum had a Chanel perfume,” she says, laughing. “I didn’t know anything about fashion until I started getting online and playing this game.”
For Jay-Ann Lopez, an award-winning entrepreneur and founder of Black Girl Gamers, her journey into gaming, like so many millennials, started with the PC classic Doom. “I started playing when I was very young, probably around the age of six or seven,” she tells Vogue. Her mum used to present on the radio and would bring Lopez with her to the station. To entertain herself, Lopez would while away the time on the computer. “Ever since then I’ve been enamoured with this world. It’s always been a mainstay in my life.”
Dead by Daylight, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Mirror’s Edge: these were the games that cemented Lopez’s passion. She started her own gaming channel in her 20s “because everyone else was doing it”, but soon realised she needed her own community to find “other Black women who game”. “I used social media to find people, and the first women I found became the first community managers, then word of mouth grew,” she says. Now, Black Girl Gamers has more than 8,000 members around the globe, all of them working to change “the state of gaming”, Lopez explains. “We aren’t just playing games, we are trying to challenge the way that gaming is.”
As the CEO of Code Coven, that is precisely what Tara Mustapha, 42, has set out to do. “I am an agent of chaos,” she says with a smile. “I like to stir the pot.” With 20 years in game design for the likes of EA and Microsoft to her name, Mustapha has turned her eye on the studios themselves, committing to helping them become more inclusive places. As of last year, 67 per cent of people working in the games industry in Britain are men, 30 per cent are women and three per cent are non-binary. It is a sea change compared to 20 or 30 years ago, but nowhere near enough.
“The greater amount of diversity in studios means the greater opportunities there are for marginalised people to then be hired and grow,” says Mustapha. And the more diverse the creators, the more authentic representation in the games themselves and, therefore, the greater appeal to potential players. “This is what I try to point out to game studios,” she adds. “You will reap the benefits. If I can’t move you by your ethics, let me move you by your bottom line.”
Charu Desodt, 47, studio director of Interior/Night, agrees. “If you have more diverse people making games,” she says, “then you can make games that really appeal across demographics. I just see it as another media, no different to the variety that exists within films and TV for every age and every type of person.”
In her current position, she is “really lucky to be in a studio that is 45 per cent female and is female-led”, but when she was hired by Sony in 1999, fresh out of university, Desodt was the company’s first female programmer. She would go on to create the technology behind SingStar’s ability to detect players’ pitch. The original game was such a success that the franchise has now sold more than 16 million units globally.
“I don’t believe it is the industry that is inherently misogynistic,” says Reddy, 44, a Bafta fellow and the studio director of Media Molecule, a British video game company owned by Sony. “It is societal.” She knows what she’s talking about: Reddy has been working in games since the ’90s, spending several years at Criterion Games before joining her current company. “Like other industries, bad behaviour in the games industry went unchecked for a long time. We can’t fix societal issues, but we can ensure that there are accessible ways for people to report harassment, receive support, and that there are consequences for actions.”
It is desperately needed. “I’ve had emails with the n-word. I’ve had people saying, ‘Oh, look, there’s a monkey operating her PC,’” says Lopez. “A lot of gamers have, for a long time, assumed that gaming is their space.”
A study conducted this year looked into the abuse women gamers receive online and found that almost half (49 per cent) have experienced harassment, with one in 10 left feeling suicidal as a result. A quarter, meanwhile, said they would not tell anyone about the negative comments they receive.
“I do find the more you talk about it publicly, the more you make a target of yourself,” ventures Alexandra. “Twitch has worked hard on introducing tools that help reduce opportunities for people to troll and generally, at least as a streamer, the abuse I’ve got has lessened somewhat.”
As a member of the UK’s The Women in Esports Committee, one of Alexandra’s focuses is encouraging women into gaming. As such, “I haven’t been super outspoken about this issue,” she says, “because my attitude has always been: normalise it. Normalise women in gaming. Push women to game and to feel free to game. For me, that is my preferred approach to dealing with abuse, because I feel like the more women are [gaming], the more men have a woman in their life who plays and will be sympathetic to women playing.”
It helps, too, that there are many more prominent women characters in games and that they are deeply written, with “really strong images and personalities”, says Alexandra. One of her favourite games is “Valorant, which is a hardcore, competitive shooter game. And that’s got a really high population of women playing it, partly, I think, because there’s a lot of women characters in the game who are all really interesting. It’s nice to be given that connection. And I think game companies are noticing.”
As one of the first dedicated script writers for video games, Rhianna Pratchett, 46, has witnessed the way in which storytelling within games has progressed over the past two decades. A journalist by trade, she was considering a change of career when Larian Studios – who recently released the universally acclaimed Baldur’s Gate 3 – “were looking for a native English speaker to help polish up their script”. She was happy to help.
She had, after all, already spent many years playing and writing about games by that point. “My dad [author Terry Pratchett] was very into games and electronics and computers, and I’m an only child so I gravitated to what my parents were doing,” she says. “I used to play games with him a lot.”
Still, by the time she decided to join the industry, “There were very few people specialising in narrative for games. They were usually written by designers or producers, or literally anyone who had the time and inclination to do it. They never thought they needed to get writers in to do the writing.”
Now, it couldn’t be more different. “There are specific conferences for narrative in games, there are awards for narrative in games. Players can name game writers.” But, then, “We expect great stories in all our entertainment – in our films, TV and our books, right? Why should we accept less in games?”
One thing is for certain: these women never will. “As soon as you think you’ve learned it all then the next day something is announced or you see something on somebody’s screen and you’re immediately like, ‘Oh, right, OK. We’ve got a new thing to learn about here,’” says Reddy, of what keeps her excited after all these years in the business. “It’s a truly creative act.”
Ultimately, in game as in life, it all comes back to people. Community, says Desodt, “is the best part of gaming”. Not enough credit is given, in her opinion, to “the positive impact that gaming can have on the human psyche”.
For Asia, it is gaming and playing with others that allows her to truly “open up the most. When I’m around gamers we can talk for days,” she says, smiling. “My time in school was quite difficult, and I kind of carry that hurt little girl around with me, but then it heals when I talk about gaming.”
“That’s one of the things I love about the industry,” echoes Reddy, “how much people really want to talk about what they’re doing and why they’re doing, how they did it. Some people really feel like games are not for them, or they feel like the industry is not for them, but it’s just an absolutely magical place.”
As Desodt leaves the Vogue set, she is beaming: she has swapped numbers with Pratchett and Mustapha, and the WhatsApp group has already been fired up. Another story of friends brought together by a shared love of video games has begun.
Hair: Yumi Nakada Dingle. Make-up: Mattie White. Nails: Marie-Louise Coster
House Party! Actors, Models, Designers & Editors Star In A Glamorous Salute To Vogue HouseGallery25 PhotosView Gallery
