Slashdot Mirror

If you haven't seen it, you should take a loot at seanbaby's NES page. I'd recommend the this page to, be sure to watch the video. Pretty hilarious.

If you haven't seen it, you should take a loot at seanbaby's NES page. I'd recommend the this page to, be sure to watch the video. Pretty hilarious.

I too spent many hours playing on my NES in my formative years. But it was true then and it is even more apparent in hindsight: the NES perpetuated negative stereotypes of women (and minorities too --dear lord, look at Superdodgeball and Double Dragon and we'll chat -- but that's a different rant).

And I'm not just talking about mere passive bias of exclusion. The videogame market was directed at boys, and naturally, it was the boys who purchased the lion's share of games produced. Naturally, we'd expect to find a disproportionate number of shoot'em-up games and sidescrollers where the sole objective is to kill everything in one's path and save the planet. I understand the economic pressures driving such a situation, and I can cope (though I'll be critical of whatever games I'll be buying my own kids, when I have them some day).

What I'm complaining about is the actual stereotypes perpetuated by games by girls' and women's inclusion in games, not their mere exclusion. Often, they are comoditized and positioned as a prize to be won, the princess to save from the dragon, and other things consistent with anglo-american literary heritage going back to Camelot. But it got no better once they stepped off their pedestals and entered the actual gameplay itself. Remember Super Mario 2? Remember who the weakest character was? It wasn't the mushroom -- it was the girl. Remember Gunsmoke? The hostages were disproportionately 'helpless women'. Oh save me! Please. And don't even get me started on the whole Barbie videogame franchise.

For a time, there was an attempt to cater to the grrrl's market theretofore ignored by gaming companies. And do you know what the results were? Do you remember the pinnacle of girl-targeted gaming was? Athena , that's what. Finally, a game where girls could play a true female lead-role and save the world, but alas, the game was complete crap. Did they give her a menacing weapon? No, girls can't be trusted with real weapons, so we'll give her a stupid blue mallet thing. Does she engage in fast-paced adrenalin-rushing heart-pounding combat with fierce and fearsome enemies? No, she just wanders around the screen until you get bored and turn the stupid thing off.

I wouldn't be so bitter if I saw any real change in the industry in the years since. But no, the industry is still caught up in some sexist notion that women are different, that girls think differently from boys, and while it may all be true, it's irrelevent here. Girls were robbed of their freedom and denied their equal share and place in the childhood of boys. And now that we're grown up, we're pissed.

Every NES fan should take a look at Seanbaby's NES Page.

http://seanbaby.com/nes.htm

It has features like the 20 worst NES games of all time and the 10 worst things to base a game on. Lots of other funny stuff on there for any child of the 80s.

sure. it's right here.

Five elementary-school kids were suspended for *pretending* to play with guns last month. Here's an insightful, if not exactly fact-filled summary:


http://www.seanbaby.com/news/gunkids.htm

Best quote - "If you get someone in trouble for nothing, that's like giving them a Slaughter the School Free Card. You've already been punished for it, you might as well finally kill that kid that puts gum on your chair."

Think that's crazy? How 'bout this one -- Tuesday, a teacher in an Arizona school shot herself in an attempt to make a point about safety at her school:

http://dailynews.ya hoo.com/h/ap/20000411/us/teacher_shot_5.html

I believe we've officially reached the point of hysteria, folks.

Incidentally, if there was one argument which I think might have swayed the Pinkerton folks, it would be this: "When some Microsoft millionaire's computer-geek kid gets harassed and branded "dangerous" by his peers and teachers at school because some jackass first-string football player passed on a bogus tip on your system, who, exactly, do you think is going to be first on the list of people getting sued?"


--
perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,

Point taken, but misplaced.

Java development is growing daily. The speed with which Java applications and servlets can be developed is unprecedented. The speed issues with Java are decreasing with each release, and 1.2.2 is pretty quick. The 1.3 early-release 1.3 JRE is quite a bit faster, and Blackdown is already working on the port.

This is very good news for Linux, which, as you may have noticed, a few /. readers seem to care about. If you wanna bitch, try posting at http://dev.null.com.