Welcome back to Player Profiles, Brig’s interview series exploring the diversity that exists in gaming. Bree Vante is a 36-year-old homesteader and mother of two who splits her time between gaming and chasing chickens and goats around her farm.
Bree, who is also known by her online handle Dominca, started out gaming as a child. She was influenced and encouraged by her dad who was “a kind of nerdy dad who I appreciate very much”. Bree’s grandparents also contributed by introducing her to the Magnavox Odyssey, a dedicated gaming console similar to the more popular Atari.
Soon, Bree’s dad got a home computer, “which was like one of the first computers of anyone that we knew who had them. Not ‘cause we had money but because my dad was a nerd,” Bree said. Before long, the family also had a Sega Genesis and a PlayStation, but Bree’s heart was taken by PC gaming.
Returning to the present day, I asked Bree how she balanced being a homesteader, a mother, and a gamer. She currently grows crops that feed her family, has nearly 20 chickens and four goats, with expansion plans coming soon. She said it’s all about prioritising. “If my kid’s screaming and I’m going to die in a game, I get up from my computer and I just accept that, like, that’s the deal.”
As a result, she tends to favour games with a slower pace that allows her to tend to anything that comes up, calling them ‘interruptible games’.
“Animal Crossing, Palia, The Sims (if you remember to pause it). Honestly, if you forget to pause The Sims, it’s just funny that they kind of keep themselves alive, and then they do what they need to do. So, interruptible games are very important.
“The homesteading stuff, I have to strike a balance between my work time and my lifetime, just like anyone who works a job. So, I mostly do that based on the weather. I wish that I could do it based on 40-hour weeks or whatever, but it’s based on the weather and when I’m physically capable of getting out there and getting the work done that I need to get done.” Bree continued, “And then the times [when] it’s raining or too cold or too hot. Like, oh no, I have to stay inside and play The Sims,” she said with a laugh.
The conversation turned to gaming communities. Bree said she found certain subsections of The Sims community to be extremely inclusive and welcoming, but the community more broadly can be quite harsh. The Stardew Valley subreddit is also somewhere she finds “wholesome, […] it makes me want to play Stardew all the time.”
“If my kid’s screaming and I’m going to die in a game, I get up from my computer and I just accept that, like, that’s the deal.”
Bree Vante
Unfortunately, welcoming and wholesome isn’t always the norm. While Bree is a keen enjoyer of survival games, she has found those communities to be more hostile. “I love survival games, but I feel like the community is so hit or miss, and it feeds into feeling unwelcome. There have been so many times where I’ve had to be like, sir, I love survival games, I’m very good at them.”
Having to assert their place in these communities again and again is tiring. Nobody should feel the need to ‘earn’ their place in a community but it’s a challenge faced by Bree and many women and people of marginalised genders frequently.
“I’ve felt like I’m unwelcome or weird for playing them as a female character or as a woman. I’ve been not super into being on voice because I don’t want them to know that I’m a ‘real woman’, which is what they call you. It’s not great. Oh, and I also have felt isolated from multiplayer combat games until I found a community that I felt comfortable with.”
Bree brought up Fortnite, which is a game she could “never play on [her] own” but loves playing with a group of friends. This echoes her experience with a lot of large multiplayer combat-focused games.
They “can be really toxic without people who you resonate with” but if you can find a group you enjoy playing with that allows you to play the game in a way you enjoy, they are much more accessible and enjoyable. Like most people, gaming for Bree is intended as a fun, sometimes social, activity and the right group of people is vital.
We discussed how her identity as a woman and a mother forms part of her gaming experience.
“I have a really hard time in a lot of gaming spaces because of that,” she said with a sigh.
“I like a lot of different types of games that aren’t necessarily ‘feminine’ – I like survival games that have unique mechanics and I feel like those are very male-dominated. As a mother oh, God. I don’t even often tell people that I’m a mother because people just assume that you’re some sort of different person or you’re some sort of less educated, or competent, or worldly person when you’re a mother, though not when you’re a father. I think that that doesn’t work the same way somehow.”
The conversation naturally turned to the topic of representation in games. Bree noted that women and children are frequently used as “trauma fodder” in games, which she finds off-putting. “I would love to stop seeing women as trauma fodder in video games, particularly story-based video games because I love them and also, they can do better,” she said.
Bree expressed that she would love to see women, children, and families used in different ways in games – they don’t have to be there to motivate the main character through their deaths or abuse.
“I would love for there to be more use for them as someone who is going to continue the storyline forward, as though they are the people that continue the human race forward because that’s how that works, and that’s what children do.”
Bree said that she does understand the added challenges when it comes to adding children to games, both in terms of work for developers creating new models and animations and for real child labour laws for voice actors.
“The way that children are used is that you go through all of that work and then you use it to make people sad about them instead of treating them like people, which I think is kind of a weird thing that we’ve done with children in video games.”
Bree Vante
I asked Bree how she thought this could be improved, and it’s an answer which has come up before.
“Employ women and people who have children who actually give a shit about them. Employ them. Pay them with your money. That’s the number one thing that I think that the gaming world could do is pay the people whose voices need to be heard with money, because you can’t just manufacture that. All you can do is let people give you their experience and hopefully compensate them fairly for it.”
We chatted for a while about Bree’s family. She lives in Kansas with her husband Kel, and two children. “My husband and I have been playing games together forever. That was one of the bases of our relationship. They introduced me to Oblivion on the Xbox 360, and we played the shit out of Guild Wars 1.
“So, we’ve always played games together, and that’s always been something that’s kind of been a fun thing that we do together and a priority. We don’t always play the same types of games, but there’s always certain intersections where we enjoy things. Today, we play a lot of survival and medieval games. We’re playing Medieval Dynasty right now. Medieval Dynasty has been taking up a lot of my brain. We’ve been playing a lot of Baldur’s Gate too.”
As for their children, Bree and Kel have started early with fun, family-friendly games like Mario Kart and Mario Party – games that are accessible to kids but still fun for adults has become a larger market as gaming has moved into the mainstream and become a family activity, which is something Bree is keen to see more of.
Naturally, I couldn’t end the interview without finding out Bree’s favourite games. “The Sims, The Sims, The Sims, The Sims. I have been playing The Sims since the first one [released]. It’s my safe space. It’s my comfort place. I love it so much. I also play Life is Feudal a lot. Dragon Age: Origins is the best RPG of all time, and I’ll give a shout-out to Skyrim, though I hope whatever comes after Skyrim can replace it. I like to fight for my life and/or make silly little people I create fight for their life.”
Featured image credit: Bree Vante
Student journalist & freelance writer. Check out Quick Play, where I review video games that are 10 hours or less.
