You may have noticed that our sister site, Guild Launch is hosting the annual Dragon Slayer Awards right now. There are five excellent nominees in the Best Gaming Personality category, and here’s your chance to learn more about one of them: Felicia Day.
You may be familiar with Ms. Day from the web-series The Guild, her guest appearances on Eureka and Supernatural, her cameo in the Dragon Age II DLC “Mark of the Assassin” or even her appearance as the love interest of Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion in Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.
Or you might be familiar with her because she cut her hair once, which caused the internet to explode with criticism and misinformation.
More recently, Felicia day runs the commerical YouTube channel, Geek and Sundry which produces several original web-series including gaming-focused shows Table Top, Unplugged, and Co-Optitude.
Felicia stars in Co-Optitude where she and her brother, Ryon Day, play retro games. For anyone who grew up playing games with their siblings, the series re-captures the youthful glory of gaming with some of the best titles released in the past twenty years.
Felicia Day has been vocal about actively scaling back her creative gaming content due to the massive amounts of harassment she has received over the years as a prominent female in gaming.
An example of this is the campaign Ryan Perez, ex-Destructoid writer ripped on her in 2012 after the release of Felicia’s music video, Gamer Girl and Country Boy.
Does Felicia Day matter at all? I mean does she actually contribute anything useful to this industry, besides retaining a geek persona?
— Ryan Perez (@OfGloriousLife) June 30, 2012
He also goes on to call her nothing more than a “glorified booth babe.” Burn.
The problem stemmed from her portrayal of a “Gaming Girl,” which can be a derogative term in the gaming community referring to girls who only game for male attention. While fans and friends like Wil Wheaton and Veronica Belmont vocally defended Felicia, she had a few choice words in her own defense.
At roughly 2:30 Felicia Day begins to defend herself, telling anyone accusing her of being a “fake” or “casual” gamer that they “just don’t know jack shit about me.”
To clarify the issue once and for all (but really just re-iterate Felicia’s accomplishments) here are just a few of her contributions to gaming and gamer culture.
- “Mark of the Assassin” DLC for Dragon Age II
- The Guild, a web-series that followed the lives of a guild of MMO players.
- Geek and Sundry, a YouTube channel dedicated to nerds with three separate shows based on gaming.
- An unlockable character in Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff
- This awesome shirt.
- A defense of the “casual gamer”
- “Dragon Age: Redemption” web-series
- An excellent episode of “Gaming the Brain” with George Takei
- The Geek and Sundry Lounge at SDCC. People (not me) got to hang out with BioWare devs, see the Dragon Age: Inquisition demo, among other awesome gaming-related events.
- An inspiring role model for women in gaming
So, in addition to being a positive, fun, light-hearted personality in gaming, Felicia Day also knocks our socks off with her vast resume of game-related productions, and her no-tolerance policy for trolls. How could you vote for anyone else for Best Gaming Personality of the Dragon Slayer Awards?
Published: Jul 29, 2014 07:45 am