AMBER DALTON WITH THE PMS CLAN


THE GAME REVIEWS:  So, let’s start off.  What’s your name and what do you do?

AMBER:  My name is Amber Dalton, and I’m known in the gaming world as Athena Twin.  I’m from The PMS Clan.  I’m the clan leader and co-founder, and I make a living playing video games. 

THE GAME REVIEWS:  So, what is The PMS Clan?

AMBER:  PMS Clan stands for Pandora’s Mighty Soldiers.  We are a girl gaming group and basically our mission statement is “Provide a competitive and fun environment for women gamers”.  So we want to get more women active and involved.  It is a very male dominated sport.  We are having a lack of female competitors and we wanted to increase the visibility of women in the industry.

THE GAME REVIEWS:  Okay.  So, how long have you been gaming?

AMBER:  I’ve been gaming since I was a child.  I didn’t consider myself a gamer until I got an XBOX and was playing Halo, the original.  My sister and I, it was actually her boyfriend that got it, were soon beating all of the guys in Lan Party events and we started competing in Texas and then we started going on Game Spy, which was the only way to connect and by playing with people that way, we found that we had a talent for it.  XBOX Live came out about a year later and we ran across our first female a couple weeks into Unreal Championships, went into some games, kicked some butt with her and had fun.  We were laughing and giggling, but still boning some butt.  It was a different experience than playing with a guy, so we were like, “Let’s start a female clan.”

AMBER:  Now, it’s five years later, because we were founded in November 2002.  Five years later we are pushing 700-800 girls and we’re a global organization.  We have an international branch in the UK, an international branch in South America and our US base is, of course, our largest, because that is where we started.  We are also multi-platform on XBOX, Playstation and PC platforms.

THE GAME REVIEWS:  So what do you attribute to your success?  Specifically gaming?  I mean it takes a very certain kind of mind set to really be able to game well.

AMBER:  Yeah, absolutely.  It’s a competitive factor, so, women have that competitive drive.  It’s just fine tuning those competitive drives.  A lot of time when many women game they start off with an enmity because as soon as someone hears a female voice you can get targeted, you can be sexually harassed or just harassed in general; “You must be 300 pounds, you probably can’t get a date, that’s why you’re playing games,” so a lot of people tend to tune that out, but with games it’s about competitiveness, so I think with our girls a lot of them will even come in as casual gamers, and they find that they can be skilled and talented and when you win or when you’re doing good, of course, that can be a motivational factor as well.

THE GAME REVIEWS:  What kind of a message are you trying to get out these days?

AMBER:  Same message that has always been our mission statement since we were founded.  Actually, I will say when we first started; we didn’t realize the importance of our group at that time because that was our first experience with online play with a mic.  We were playing in lan events, which is really nice when they meet you in person, so it’s still like they are today and then we were playing on Game Spy which you can’t really hear the smack talk, or nobody knows that you’re a girl or not.


AMBER:  So when we first formed it was just out of sheer fun and playing with a girl, but we realized several months into it when the harassment type things started coming into play, more people started getting online.  We were coming across a lot more different types of personalities that trash talk that is really known in online game play.  That started coming out and then anything they could pick on, they’re going to pick on you no matter what.  If you’re a female, then that’s just one avenue that they’ll pick on you for. 


AMBER:  That’s part of trash talk, so we realized to keep women into this we needed to create that environment where women were playing in a safe environment where they were in an encouraged environment and they wouldn’t get discouraged and they didn’t have to worry about the trash talk or anything like that.  So today our message is what it was, I would say three months after we formed; just to provide a competitive and fun environment for women gamers.

THE GAME REVIEWS:  Do you have any tournaments coming up that you want to plug?

AMBER:  Tournaments are almost over for the year actually, so unfortunately World Series of Video Games closed this year.  I was actually ranked #9 in Fight Night when it closed.

THE GAME REVIEWS:  Congratulations.

AMBER:  Thank you.  There were about three guys that weren’t going to LA and all of us between sixth through tenth were in a 150-point variance.  I was almost guaranteed to be in the top eight.  I would have been the first female ever in a world final event.  So I was really disappointed.  And, again that shows lack of support of the tournaments, you know.  Like lack of support here in the show from the companies; lack of support to the tournament or bad spinning or whatever it was.  I have no idea, but obviously something was wrong when you have an event that was supposed to be televised on CBS and they’re losing funding.  Something’s going wrong somewhere.  So, that was a disappointment.  That was scary for the gamers too because we hadn’t had that really happen before, you know where something that large simply just shut down mid season. 

AMBER:  But, there are some other great tournaments out there.  You’ve got CBL Tournament.  MLG tournament is actually here on the show presence.  That is for console gamers.  You have Championship Gaming which is being highlighted over at the Fatality Booth.  That’s a great league.  They are salary.  All of their players that are on that league are salaried, 30 grand minimum and they can go up to I think 90 K with bonus opportunities. 


AMBER:  And they take care of their players which for me as a leader in the industry, which I am because of my group, I definitely want to watch what people are doing with gamers and how they’re treating them.  I think that is something we need to always be aware of especially since this is a youth market.

THE GAME REVIEWS:  You’ve got to love making money with gaming.