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Is Gaming Too Much Skin, Not Enough Good Clean Fun?
legLess writes: "Salon is carrying a thought-provoking article saying that 'The soft-porn fixation embarrassingly displayed at E3 is dooming the gaming industry to the nerd-geek ghetto.' It says that the gaming industry, in terms of sales and audience, is much closer to porn than Hollywood. Some great quotes ('[GOD] CEO Mike Wilson decided that preeminence should also involve a lot of cleavage and dwarfs'), and interesting thoughts ('Games should be treated as art, but they are becoming more and more like hamburger')."
1. Sex = $ 2. Games = $ 3. Sex + Games = $$$$$$ Why not?
Sex sells, and especially to women.
nice article. wanna fuck?
...in analogizing the porn industry and the game industry.
Similar points are:
1. both industries' products are dominantly produced by men.
2. both industries' products are dominantly consumed by men.
He goes futher to say that consuming video games is functionally equivalent to consuming porn! I disagree. Titilation is quite distinct from porn. Don't be so damn puritanical. And further, don't spin a co-incidence into a false analogy.
- J
G.O.D. is outside of E3 itself, thus they use more extreme measures to attract attention. Nothing gets attention faster than sex.
This is apparently true, although I don't remember seeing this in a slashdot article... I read about it in The Register. Also, Salon has a "Sex" section that mostly deals with white-collar liberal hookers, strippers, etc. whining about politics.
I might point out that many people are secure enough to not be bothered by those who would make false claims against their verasity. I might point out that others still aren't terribly bothered when people accurately point out an error. And still others, fewer to be sure, are genuinely greatfull for the illumination of an oversight. But these noble character traits are somehow unavailable to women, not even "on approved credit"?
I would have to at least admit my surprise should this really be, even a part of, your claim. As by in large, women, in my experience, have been the stronger. Sure, I can lift heavier boxes, and this does eventually come in handy when a relationship dissolves, but this is not the sense of which I speak. I'm pretty confident, at least in verasity, when I state I've left my relationships on poorer terms than the women I've been involved with. And finally, if you think these post are cruel or mean, you've never had a fight with a woman. Truly, hell hath no fury like a woman ired, nor heaven either. Nothing I've never read something (on anything, much less the internet) that made my cry like a little girl, in my adult life that "honor" belongs solely to women.
I would kindly submit your "protection" is missplaced, and unneeded. Furthermore, while the sentiment is nice, maybe even chivalrous, it might even be a more insidious form of bigotry than you preach against. At least those whom you advise to return to their neolithic shelter make no pretense about who they really are. In an age where everything should be presumed to be a lie, honestly like that might even, to some, be refreshing.
Just an observation.
What I didn't follow in your post was why you felt the need to protect women? You didn't take issue so much with individual points of view, but that the people, rightly or wrongly, were expressing them. "How odd", I thought. Your point of view might be most consicely expressed as, "You're all inconsiderate losers. The troll isn't right, but you're worse. Damn Billy Goats." What a cryptic point of view. Really, the statement you made was clear enough, but the purpose, or objective was inscrutable. It wasn't really illuminating. It wasn't funny. And it certainly wouldn't make anyone who didn't agree with you stop and think. But I just wonder how it something like that really comes about.
As to teams. I play for my own team. Everyone is really an individual. I'm sure there have been many times where your goals have not coincided with those of your wife. And you make trade offs, but you do so as an individual. And as such one could certainly imagine situations where you and your wife might not be able to reconcile those goals to the satisfaction of both. (Hopefully you've done a better job finding the 'right person' than that, but still the argument is still valid).
As for the Jews, they can take care of themselves. The meek might inherit the earth, but the will of Jews split the atom. Kudos, they delivered 50 years of mostly peace, at least to me and those that begot me. You may do well to recall that for the most part the rich, the prescient, and the powerful Jews escaped. Those who died, did so as much becuase of their lack of wealth as their ethnicity. Not that this is anyless disturbing. But one would do well to consider, that German or Jew the capacity for despot and serf exists with us all. To see that capacity for what it is, accept it, and strive to keep it in check, to do that one needs to be honest about it. To blindly deny it, and associate only with people who do the same, well, that's how atrocities begin.
As for standing up against racism. I might suggest that announcing everyone who doesn't agree with you is a hick, and telling them to back to their farm is something else. Words change little, words like that, well, they change nothing.
Have a nice day. :)
Stevie Case... ANd to really garner some love from people here she was also in playboy. So yeah she is a geek girl and also a playboy model. THere is your shout out that you wanted.
Yah. Every time I go to the bank to make a deposite, I'm so dissapointed it's not entirely staffed by "attractive" nympho sluts who will fuck anything at the drop of a hat, I gneter get do do a few of em in the vault, or be dominated by thebranch manager.
Maybe we can replace the handshake with intercourse.
You know, I was looking at this troll's history, and I think that, perhaps, she isn't a troll after all, just a dumb whore.
The internal story and lifestyle is consistant.. as is the stupidity. I dunno. I think it just might be a dumb bint as opposed to a troll.
Of course, that doesn't make him/her any smarter.
Brant
They read it.
Big difference.
So you're a lesbian?
As an example, my ex-girlfriend used to like both romance novels and soap operas. However, after viewing both for some time it was as though a change had come over her - she would become very demanding and really quite aggressive, wanting to know why I didn't take her to more fancy restaurants, and why we didn't go on more vacations to glamorous, exotic (and expensive) locales. She also wanted to know why I didn't look like the innumerable Fabio clones who populate these forms of entertainment. I noticed that when she had been watching General Hospital the effects were actually worse than when she had been reading Harlequin romances. Since I threw her out on her lazy ass, I have made it a condition that those I am interested in not watch soap operas or read romance novels. Both stifle the imagination whilst heightening emotions. This effect is dangerous - we should not stimulate those who cannot handle a heightened sense of awareness and can't resist their desires.
I would very much like to see both industries become more responsible. I would not like to see them banned, of course, but I would like to see them consider the consequences of their actions - it is the men of America who really pay for the rosy fantasy worlds that our womenfolk consume.
Or it's because the auto industry has noticed that women purchase a significant number of cars and the babes were losing more sales than they were gaining.
As an anonymous female coward, I can tell you that girls and women buy games. Nearly every woman I know loves the Myst series of games, including my 50 year old mother. She also loved Starship Titanic. This genre of game, where you explore a world and you solve puzzles, is very attractive to women and men. You all seem to think that women only enjoy thinking about clothes and relationships - bullshit! Women have been shown, scientifically (I read it in Scientific American years ago) to be better at small, detailed observations than men, because of differences in the way the brain develops depending on hormonal exposure in the womb.
Most women I know have also enjoyed games like Tetris, or Bust-a-Move. I can't tell you how much fun my sister and I and some female friends have had playing endless rounds of Bust-a-Move tournaments on my brother's Playstation. Then of course there are the variations on that dancing game (the playstation version was Bust a Groove, but there are other variants, are there not?) Young girls, especially, love that one, as do a lot of guys I know. All of these are games that don't involve sex or violence, just fun.
OK, then we get on to strategy games. A lot of women love Age of Empires, Warcraft, and that whole genre. More of the strategy/simulation than the roleplaying, although I've had some fun over the years with Nethack, and I've met one other woman who was the same. A lot of women have also enjoyed the Sim games from SimCity onwards. And, well, Black and White seems to have a lot of gender-neutral appeal. I love it, and I've heard of other women who love it.
There *are* women who like first person shooters, and there are men who hate them. Let's not generalise. I've played Quake a couple of times, and it wasn't a revolting experience, but I wasn't hooked. I just wanted to give you a roundup of the kinds of gaming most women I know like.
You need to get laid. This has been going on forever, in many conventions. Get over yourself, and drop by Mitchell Bros. if you need a fix.
I think you should make it a condition that those you are interested in don't rough you up during sex, rather than not play computer games or use pr0n.
I do think it's kinda icky that guys can get angry-horny from playing Quake III and the like... It makes some of the in-game banter, frankly, pretty creepy.
toot toot
Is the only reason anyone makes a game today to make money?
If you take any stock at all in Microsoft's business model (or the words of head VP Craig Mundie), it would seem to be the only reason to make software - or any product, for that matter.
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Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Oh yes, and we all know that Hollywood provides only clean, intellectual, educational entertai...
*murmurs to nearby person*
Oh, I've just been informed that *surprise* they DON'T! Well, then MAYBE people should stop pointing at Hollywood as a good example of a business that produces the "grown-up" entertainment material you're preaching about here.
_____
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Going more mainstream is not going to result in better games.
No, probably not, but then it's the same sort of story with those who howl about how Linux must "become mainstream" to succeed. Except these people, in all their whining, forgot something - mainstream means lowest common denominator. And that's what some of us want to avoid.
_____
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
And don't get me going about the vivicists at the blood bank. They're turning away vampires just because they're dead . . .
:)
hawk
> each, and the degree to which each is pandering to the audience in its
> marketing.
In other words, instead of bimbos, they should be killing people in their booths
hawk
hawk
Is that there were *far* fewer booth babes this year compared to last year. Except for the increasingly ghetto-ized world of hardcore FPS people (ie, the Dallas/Austin crews), I don't think there was terribly much skin happening at all. What skin there was looked as painfully juvenile as one would expect.
m.
"Sebastian you're in a mess. They called you King of all the Hipsters, is it true or are you still the Queen?" -- B
The most important sex organ you have is your brain. And consider the biblical word/phrase for sex: "to know" ... as in "carnal knowledge". It's a deeper concept than "to fuck". (And much more of a turn-on, too.)
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An esoteric scratched itch:
Homeworld Map Maker Tool
that is neodarwinian fascist nonsense
Huh? Can you please explain what neodarwinism and fascism have to do with each other? I thought I understood these terms, but I'm not sure what they're doing modifying the same noun. Thanks.
-- Brian
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
That isn't necessarily true. Crude language, imagery, and absurd humor have their place.
However, an obnoxious voice imploring others to eat his "mangina" in the middle of a work day is unprofessional on more than just a politically correct level. It's distracting.
That said, I agree with little the author stated, and he'd be dismissed as a whacko if he made similiar allegations about a hip-hop convention, or maybe a goddamned everyday FOOTBALL game?
Sex and violence are the most suppressed urges in Western culture, freed through gaming. Fantasy is what gaming is all about. You can't say the same about a football game--why all the cheerleaders splaying their legs willy-nilly?
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#19845
Damn' good value for $30/year. I subscribe for the articles, though...
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"I'd LOVE to be indepedent and self-sufficient
I'M A VICTIM!!!!!!"
I wish I was trolling, unfortunately that's really what I think.
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Well, chatting and the acquisition of material goods. Okay, technically immaterial, but in the world of EQ they're material.
Moof!
Could you repeat that in english, please?
> I'd hope you wouldn't pidgin hole her into something as unbelievably uninteresting as databases
Hey, I used to work in a database group that was less than a tenth of the total techies in the company, and included half the female techies. And the work was interesting.
Then I moved to a database group in another company where none of the three female techies even worked on the same floor. The work was (mostly) still interesting though.
Of course that doesn't mean there aren't lots of really really boring database jobs too.
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rant
I suspect the "average family" isn't concerned about fantasy violence nearly as much as they're concerned about fantasy sex, and I'm not talking only about parents.
Imagine Joe Q. Hacker, 35, married. Imagine now that he's playing Quake when the wife walks in. Imagine the range of reactions.
Now imagine that the game he was playing was not Quake, but in fact (the hypothetical) 3D photo-realistic 1st person "shooter", "Leisure Suit Larry, Buttman, and Max Hardcore's European Adventure" (Sierra: please don't sue me!), Now imagine the range of reactions.
-dwd-
Mine would be along the lines of "Feeling frisky, eh?" if even that. :-) No worries there. I guess I must be a lucky guy?
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Not hardwired for *anything*?
Why will babies not crawl out onto a glass-top table, then? Why do you flinch if something flicks near your face?
Obviously, one is hardwired for things.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
It's like with Tomb Raider: what was really special about the game was that Core had finally come up with a way of controlling a character in a 3D game that really worked. It was infinitely better than the "can't even walk through a doorway" control on previous games.
BUT, the lesson game companies seemed to learn was "boobs sell games."
So, probably these developers are looking at games like Tomb Raider, or even moreso the Dead or Alive series, and saying "sex sells." When, really, it's gameplay, replayability, multiplayer, etc.
Then they started trying to outdo each other, leading to the bordello atmosphere. Bleah. That kind of thing is why I STOPPED going to scifi cons.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
People who invent ways to escape reality, who are fixed enough on their own fantasies that they can create good believable games, tend not to have the greatest social skills. The most dedicated game fans aren't exactly out there polishing their schmoozing muscles either.
The computer industry is 90% male. Gaming (paper and dice) is 90% male. The primary customer base for the intersection of gaming and computers is teenage boys. Everything from cars to cell phones have "spokesmodels" sitting on them in magazine ads.
As for the computer industry, Comdex IS held in las vegas every year. (Las vegas is like the movie "showgirls", only with more plot and the boring bits don't get as much screen time.)
The article DOES have some decent points it could have made, like cross-over games (from Ms. Pac-man to The Sims), or the general failure of attempts to make "girl-centric" computer games (although not universial, the "barbie" line just about breaks even, I'm told.)
But it doesn't make them, I only know about them from other sources. The author of this article came across as a pedanitc moralist shocked by something he just noticed, and predicting dire things if his viewpoint isn't universally imposed immediately. (Clue: the game industry IS making more money than hollywood. Right now. This has been true since the 80's...)
Sigh...
Rob
Agreed. If you were there notice the number of _turnovers_ the tecmo or wolfenstein booth had. Both had prominantly displayed babes, the tecmo booth had nothing real new to show off, the wolfenstein booth was too small to accomidate the number of people who could have been there (very cool looking game though). I find another point about E3 disgusting though. The attention payed to the out-of-country developers and the smaller game houses was PATHETIC. if you read the reviews I see not one hand up to AquaNox (generalized as a GeForce3 Test), Balistics, or Duel Field, all out of Europe, or any of the Korean games such as TetraMorph, Dragon Raja, or the many other amazing, new-idea games. Even games for the Xbox like NHL Hitz or FuzionFrenzy got no 'real coverage' (ie they were mentioned in the Xbox Mag handed out at the show but nowhere else) And suprising enough, the posters that were around on all the doors, Morrowind - Elder Scrolls III, wasn't being shown in public by Bethesda... but I got to sit in on their demonstration - All I can say is this is a game that people have been waiting for since Daggerfall (also an award winner) ... But wait - soon there will be a site that will cover the 'outside' games that are worth the mention and coverage. you just wait.
--onyx--
Dammit, I didn't log in. If you'd like to remonstrate me please reply to this post.
Bite the hand.
Bite the hand.
Actually, many of those Apple ][ and C64 games did bring in millions of dollars. The videogame industry first surpassed Hollywood in revenue in around 1982, the good times lasting to the 1984 crash.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Digging on google came up with the year of 1995 as the "first" year that the gaming industry passed up Hollywood. Take it as more of an order of magnitude than a great claim.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I guess the real question is:
Do girls buy games on anywhere near the volume boys do?
I would atrribute the success of The Sims to a "crossover" appeal, but how many games do girls really buy?
If the game buying public is 80 or 90% teen male, then hey, go for the boobies. If not, clean up your act.
Seems fairly simple to me.
Who on Earth modded this up as "insightful"???
It bears pointing out that the Salon article (did you read it?) doesn't complain about Lara Croft in particular, and I don't think anyone is complaining about video games featuring attractive characters (however unrealistic) Most games feature unrealistic representations of the male body as well.
The problem is the overriding culture, which is like a frat house without the educational tie-in. Women don't have a voice in the industry, because male gamers and game developers have such hostility to anything or anyone that may spoil the party.
This reminds me of one of the sad things in the USA metal scene. Although the situation looks like it is getting much better many American headbangers have had to settle for Jack Koshick's metalfests.
There have been several quality issuess with these shows, but the on-topic one is that Koshick seems to like including weird music-unrelated shit. In addition to a bunch of bands, he likes to include a porn star and professional wrestlers. It's kinda insulting, and makes metal look cheesy by association. (Although thanks to Koshick's choice of bands, 90% of the shows tend to be cheese anyway.)
Apparently the reason for this is that he's the manager or promoter or something like that for these other .. uuh .. attractions. So since its
his show, might as well gives these other attractions some free exposure.
If he doesn't mind the lost metalfest ticket sales due to
insulted metalheads, or thinks its outweighed, that's his business.
Fine, whatever.
Anyway, I wonder if maybe there are some similar forces working at this E3 thing. Maybe the reasons for the extra cheese is just because someone just happens to have their fingers in a lot of pies, sorta like Koshick.
Or maybe not. :-)
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I have been a game player for a very long time. I enjoy computer games quite a bit.
I should say that I have played Quake, SOF, and EliteForce recently.
I also have played lots of other games. I love the realism and beauty in the computer graphics, and am constantly mazed at the advances in technology.
Here's where I get stuck: Why can't there be more games like SimCityClassic where there's not gross violence and certainly no sexuality?
Why must the games we play appeal to the more prurient parts of our lives? Being exposed to graphic violence is damaging, and the reason that I play SOF with low violence, and limit the amount of time I spend letting that feed my brain.
Certainly being exposed to pornography has an effect on people, too. It objectifies women, and lowers the value that we place on them as individuals.
I'm all for having games produced that don't glorify sex and violence, and want to be able to play them.
Please, produce more wholesome games, and you'll sell more copies!
The movie industry refuses to produce very many qholesome movies, even though they know that the ones generating the most revenue are never "R" rated. Why is that?
Regards,
Anomaly
PS - God loves you and longs for relationship with you. If you would like to know more about this, please email me at tom_cooper at bigfoot dot com.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
OK, so what have the top games of the last few years been?
Starsiege Tribes
Age of Empires
CounterStrike
Half-Life
Descent
Quake
Quake 2
Command and Conquer
If I go to Best Buy right now and look for the "game of the year" editions of the various games that won the various "game of the year" awards...how many have skimpily dressed women on them? Not as many as you'd think. Why? Mostly because...well, they're good games, and people buy them because they're good games, they have gotten good reviews, their friends are playing them.
Look at the best selling games of the last few years (in the US anyway). Deer Hunter. Who Wants to be a Millionaire. The ones usually disdained as the "average guy" games.
All that said, I think that No One Lives Forever won a few awards last year....:)
rocketscientist.
So, instead of being like the $6 billion a year hollywood film industry, it will be more like the $10 billion a year (and extremely profitable) porn industry?
This is actually one of the arguments made in the article: that the gaming industry should be compared to the porn industry, not the film industry.
The reason being is that the film industry that they are comparing the sales to is limited to only box office receipts (I believe), whilst the gaming sales takes everything in to account associated with the game. If they were to take in to account all of the toys, gadgets, cereals, shirts, etc that movies produce, then the film industry would be much larger than the gaming industry.
I didn't care much for the article, anyway, maybe because it seemed more like a rant than anything.
-Frijoles-
A blond in a G-string has got herself contorted 15 feet above this city with her ass bent so far back behind her, she can fit her head straight through.
I read this and my first thought wasn't of Q3:A or Half-Life, but of a Britney Spears concert.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Actually, I went to the recent LA Car show, and I have to say, after not going for several years, the car show (shows?) have toned down considerably. Yes, there were women present most of the cars, but they were dressed in moderate business attire and actually knew something about the products. Not the sex-charged atmosphere the E3 has been.
Anm
Like to make your under $30,000 car go fast? Hope you like seeing nekid chicks humping lightweight racing wheels and mouthing shock absorbers. It's marketing plain and simple. The Porsche/BMW mags don't have that kinda advertising, 'cause their older readers don't care for it. The Honda/Nissan/VW crowd is generally younger and gets more tits and ass than you can shake a dick at.
What's it mean? It means the things you like to do (play games) are enjoyed more often by younger people than older. Accept it. I bet Scrabble Magazine doesn't have silicon-injected women fondling the game board!* Personally, gaming mags are always behind the times...try getting your info online.
*I personally enjoy playing Scrabble and this is not meant to insult the Scrabble playing contingent of Slashdot.
Blar.
> It's our culture. Everything we do is sexualized. ... How many ads have you seen use sex to sell things?
Didn't I read here just a couple of weeks ago that Salon itself was using s0ft pr0n to lure people to their subscriber-only section?
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
one of the main points of the article; if you had bothered to read it, is that the gaming industry, by acting like a bunch of wanna-be frat boys is shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to market share.
every game publishing company out there spends millions of dollars trying to figure out why there aren't more female gamers(you know, that other 51% of the population with desposable income). and how to lure the elusive "female gamer".
here's a hint: hookers and gogo dancers might lure the Paul Steeds of the world, but they have the same chance of success as a car full of hooting gino's do at picking up a girl on the street.
So, if the interactive entertainment industry ever wants to see the kind of revenue that say Hollywood does, they have to Grow Up.
I'm sorry, but that is neodarwinian fascist nonsense. Nobody is hard wired to do *anything*. We are all humans, and we all have a choice. We are not automatons, driven by instinct.
I'm sorry, too, but that point of view doesn't pass a reality check. Yes, we are not automatons driven by instincts, but we are not abstract minds inhabiting some plane of ideas either. You cannot ignore the body, which clearly has a lot of stuff "hardwired" into it. And before you ask, no, I don't accept the popular-in-Catholicism-etc. idea that body urges are evil/sinful and should be suppressed in favor of "pure" mind.
People are hardwired for a lot of things. Some are obvious -- thirst, hunger, self-preservation, sex, protection of children. Some are more controversial -- e.g. territoriality. Some are very controversial -- e.g. aggression. But saying that no one is hardwired to do anything is just false.
Note that this does not mean that there is no personal responsibility -- there definitely is, and "uncontrollable urge" is not a justification for doing something bad. In a society people are expected to control their urges and those who break the rules, whatever they may be, are punished. That's fine. But even if the urges are controlled/suppressed you cannot deny their existence. Christianity for centuries tried to promote the idea that sex is sinful and how successful has it been? (besides keeping a whole lot of psychotherapists in business).
I do think that where people cannot be responsible for themselves, the wider sommunity should step in
That's very dangerous ground you walk on. All totalitarian regimes start from this point. The critical questions, as usual, are "Who decides?" and "Who is in control?". Should government decide whether I am addicted to Quake and place me in a special category of people who can't buy computer games and can access only special computers which report to my probation officer how much have I played today? Or maybe it will decide that I am addicted to porn and put a device on me that will give me an electric shock every time I get an erection -- that should "cure" me of porn, right?
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Just my $.02
"Perhaps most amazingly, votaries of 'diversity' insist on absolute conformity." -- Tony Snow
You're completely missing the point.
By your position, I'm assuming that you feel that female interests are underrepresented a) in the video game market in general and b) at E3 (these are not the same sets).
1) I have no issues whatsoever with people who think differently. My post was designed to encourage people to think differently, and share that expression with the world. It's not MY responsibility to express YOUR thoughts.
2) I don't have to clean up my conversations at all. If you have issues with the way some people talk, take it up with them. It might surprise you that the male population of this planet is non-homogenous, and runs the gamut from crass to urbane. I'm well towards the latter, and there are lots of people like me.
3) Maybe when I've got some free time, I will. Not that I have anything to contribute...I'm not a programmer, and I have no interest in being one. I was making a sociological comment.
4) I've never been afraid to make friends with anyone, regardless of gender. I defy you to illustrate counterexamples. Since you've never met me, or anybody I know, this will be very challenging.
5) I'm not dissatisfied with the state of the gaming hobby. I have plenty of original, interesting titles that take all my available time. I don't play all (well, any) of the myriad shooters out there. If you are dissatisfied with the gamut or quality of games, MAKE ONE. Don't cry about how hard it is to have your voice heard: start an open source gaming project and get to it. If you don't want to, or cannot, that's fine. Neither can I. But, again, don't expect anybody to make the game YOU want if nobody (yourself included) really knows what that game looks like.
PS: You use the word "your" implying that I am part of some machine that is bent on creating and maintaining the subjugation and denigration of women, particularly by keeping them out of the video game market. Not only is this worldview foolish, it's offensive and inaccurate. Repeat after me: nobody is out to get you.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Seems to me like if females want to play games oriented at females, then females ought to start writing games. I'm not trying to be crass or offensive...I'm just pointing out that telling somebody else to make a game to appeal to you isn't necessarily the best way to do it.
Think about it this way...should I try to tell Amy Tan to start writing stories that appeal to men? I'm not saying that men don't read and enjoy her books (just as many females play and enjoy video games). I keep hearing, however, that women don't feel as engaged by games as men do. OK, fine...go ahead and show us what you're talking about! Getting up on a moral high horse and painting game developers as misogynistic retards isn't productive. Explaining what you are interested in might be productive. Making a game that you would like would certainly be productive.
In other words, if nobody understands your taste, why are you surprised that nobody caters to it?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I've just been trolled, haven't I?
One day I'm just gonna snap.... Need a "ignore all posts from this troll in future" button.
--Gfunk
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Since he has left me, I have made it a condition that those I am interested in not play computer games or use pornography. Both stifle the imagination whilst heightening emotions. This effect is dangerous - we should not stimulate those who cannot handle a heightened sense of awareness and can;t resist their desires.
First of all, if your boyfriend was violent, or even just too rough, You should have left him.
Second, I find your comments offensive in the extreme. I watch porn. I play video games. I'm also a loving, caring person who would never think of being anything but gentle with my girlfriend. And I'm no freak.
Third, you will not find a man who does not watch porn. The best you're gonna have to go for is one who lies about his porn and hides it well since you're obviously very insecure if that's one of the main things you're looking for in a partner,
--Gfunk
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Exactly. So what does porn have to do with all this, and why is it at E3?
This then begs the question of what would be better.
:-)
Hypothetically, User #267435 is looking for a new boyfriend via the internet. She wishes to find a male user of internet discussion forums who enjoys neither computer games or pornography.
I foresee a potential problem here
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Well, video game programming is one of the lowest paid fields in the industry. Unless your daughter is obsessed with games, she probably wouldn't choose that sector.
I'd hope you wouldn't pidgin hole her into something as unbelievably uninteresting as databases
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Actually, I think women have a game they like - Everquest. It's all about chatting.
Hey, how bout reading the article? It states that the game industry compares itself to the "6 billion dollar movie industry" but they're only counting the box office figures against all game hardware, software, and peripheral sales. So it does closely resemble the 5 billion dollar porn industry.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Actually, Valve got the source to the Quake and Quake II engines, and Half-Life ended up being a mishmash of the best parts, with a skeletal animation system. You should check your facts. Aric
How can Salon, of all people, have any credibility complaining about this, when THEY THEMSELVES just started a premium fee service that delivers - you guessed it - NAKED PICTURES!!
Check it out:
http://www.salon.com/premium/intro/index.html
Read about the service and notice that one of their "premium" services is called Salon Sex.
My god, I can't believe that these people are complaining about this... It boggles the mind...
-davevr
Sierra, for example, which first gained prominence through family-friendly adventure games..
Like Leisure Suit Larry?
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
My wife's major reaction to Tomb Raider was: "With breasts that big, why don't they bounce around more?"
dave
One of the points in the article is that all the sex at the show doesn't do a damn thing to sell the games. All the booths have bimbos, but even the PR people couldn't be convinced to admit that they helped generate sales.
One of the other key points of the article is that the industry would like to move beyond the TeenBoy/FatLoserGeek ghetto and into the larger "mainstream" market. If that is their goal, the article asks, why do they insist on sticking with bimbo marketing that will only appeal to the TeenBoy/FatLoserGeek crowd?
- Old Man of the Mountain ---- "I want to disturb my neighbor"
Man, I've never seen one bit of cleavage while playing Netrek.
HI Mom!
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
So this stuff happens at E3. So what? I don't buy games based on what goes on there.
I'm not sure what is supposed to happen if E3 becomes more "grown up". Is that the magic step to making games into "Big Business"? Games are already big enough business. Going more mainstream is not going to result in better games.
Your on the right track. This whole thread started reminding me of Brenda Laurel, creator of Purple Moon SW which sold out to Hasbro. When they went formed up they looked for a market that has some money waiting to be tapped. Of course, what they found is the teen female demographic. They don't buy any games, so let's give them a game they want to buy. Takling to their audience so they cnn design a game proved very interesting. The game is about volleyball. Girls like VBall, fine. But, they found girls really did enjoy equivalent sports game aimed at men. An example, "What's most important about playing volleyball?" Responses: Playing on the team together and really dogging the other team; Pasta parties; it's okay to have a fight with your friend before or after the game, but not during!
So, that get's us that what teen boys and teen girls are looking for two drastically different things for gaming entertainment. Brenda's team found that while the game (playing volleyball) was important and had to be fun, the whole picture of the game had to be fun too (talking with other girls, yelling at the other team, the day of the game, after the game at school, etc). By the way, you can get more information about Brenda's current work at NNGroup and if you shell out 800, you can hear tell this story too.
So this is why you see games like the Sims taking off across many demographics. There is stuff in there that caters to quite a bunch of people, without offending too many. I also think that Q3 has the potential to appeal to teen girls. There is a huge social aspect and team spirit to it. Now, i am sure most teen girls would prefer to have different methods of achieving their fun than "fraggin." But mod developers can step in now. Paintball CTF, i think, is heading in the right direction. And, just think guys, Q3 you can play with a girl!
Sig-"Out beyond fields of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there." Jelaluddin Rumi
"A more accurate comparison would actually be to the $5 billion-plus porn industry. In terms of sales, the numbers are roughly equivalent. And in terms of audience -- to judge by the waves of young guys trudging glassy-eyed through Staples Center, sporting that same look of paralyzed stupor that is native to fans of both Quake III and "New Wave Hookers IV" -- they're almost exactly the same."
Well, if he'd tried checking out the LA Convention Center, where the show was actually being held, instead of the next-door Staples Center, which wasn't holding any events last week, he'd have found plenty of games that weren't being sold by booth babes...I guess an empty arena forces him to invent some sweeping generalizations.
"Whatever the motive, the GOD lot was packed with flesh-addled gamers gathered for the booby show -- while the GOD games themselves went almost entirely ignored."
Ah yes, that explains the line to get into the Myth 3 showroom and the crowd gathered to watch the Age of Wonders 2 demo.
Excerpt 1:
(Then again, when it comes to erotic self-delusion, the average game boy is probably their peer. "I was all flirting with her and I gave her my business card," said a chunky, fish-lipped E3 attendee, proudly reporting back to his friends. "She said she'd send me some pictures, and call me.")
Excerpt 2:
It's the dearth of women, among other things, that consigns games to their geek ghetto, with no genuine celebrities, or pop-cult recognition outside its narrow subculture. So at E3, you're treated to the sight of hot young developers swaggering across the floor, tricked out in pimp daddy raiment and boy-band hair, whose only groupies are mouth-breathing dudes in "Akira" T-shirts.
Excerpt 3:
It only takes a couple of hours of floor gossip to grasp how deep the social retardation among most game developers runs -- and how not ready for prime time they truly are.
And I won't even mention the number of times that dreaded term "mainstream" was touted as some kind of desirable trait...
When you can make an April Fool's joke on your corporate website claiming that the gold CD of TR mistakenly contained code that makes Lara's breasts too big, you might just fall into this kind of category...
<pedantic moralism>
Tomb Raider should spend less time highlighting her breasts, and more time highlighting good, clean fun like... raiding... um... raiding and desecrating tombs and cemetaries... for treasure... uh, nevvamind
</pedantic moralism>
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I think the best thing they could do was stop assuming their target audience was teenage boys, and stop pitching games in that direction. That's probably one of the biggest reasons they get so few females buying games. By treating games as belonging only to that realm, they help encourage people to feel that way, and that's a really quick way to get younger girls to avoid it entirely - and they grow up with that attitude.
I am a girl gamer. A big one. (A good selection of PC games, quite a few console systems, and not just games like "The Sims" - Diablo II, Quake 1-3, Civ II, Black & White, Sim City 3k, Pro Pinball series, etc) And I feel like I have to put up with a lot of crap to continue on. (Though to be fair, a lot of the crap is from the teenage boys themselves, at least when I play online, but we've all ranted about those people before) There's a reason why I'd never even consider looking at a gaming magazine - because they're just as targetted to that crowd.
I think this article makes a very, very good point. They're helping define their industry in a way that excludes very large amounts of people from the potential customer base. And doing things the same except making occasional "girl" games featuring Barbie will do little except alienate even more people.
---
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Ummmm.... that didn't make any sense.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
"EAT MY FUCKING MANGINA, BITCH"
Why is it that everybody assumes that anything a man says might offend ONLY women? I'd think that some homophobic male might get way more upset at being told to eat a mangina than I ever would. The P.C. weenie phenomenon knows no gender.
Por ejemplo: There's a small group of very Catholic men where I work, and it's not hard to cross a line with them just in conversation, never mind gaming.
"Smear'd with gumms of glutenous heat, I touch..." - Comus, John Milton
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
I was at the chicago art institute a weekend ago and they had a display of swords and armor. How is this related to this thread? At one point, everything used to be art. Everything was about creating something interesting and unique, even weapons. Not anymore. The only things that matter now are those that make millions for their publishers. Movies, music, books, etc. And games. Almost every screenshot I see these days is a first person POV holding a gun. The graphics get prettier, but nothing else matters it seems. doom III, return to wolfstein, unreal II, etc. Who cares? THEY ARE ALL THE SAME GAME
--
Deepak Saxena
Deepak Saxena
"Computers are useless, they can only give you answers" - Picasso
You got a million dollars of funding by a games publisher to make a game about flowers and fluffy kittens?
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
I've noticed that at each E3 event, the number of boothbabes (and amount of clothing they are (or aren't) wearing) at a given booth is inversely proportional to the level of anticipation a game has.
For example, a game like "Space Bunnies Must Die" had TONS of boothbabes, because nobody gave a crap about the game. =)
---
The original Dead or Alive, I think. Never played it (don't like fighting games all that much) but I've heard that about it.
Nerds/Geeks are not the only ones who like to see a little skin, ever heard of teenage boys? Perhaps if games contained half-naked images they would stop wasting their time at church bake-sales and play.
It is obvious games are targeted at teenagers as they already have most of the nerd/geek market.
Thanks for the link. This was the most funniest post in weeks. Even thinking about to make it my .sig.
We aim all sorts of games at you by giving them female characters! Just look at the Tomb Raider games!
Come on folks, it's the perfect combination! Lets see, we have an extremely grizzly new game like Soldier of Fortune 2. How should we market it...
I know! Sex! Sex and Violence are the two great advertisers that send right wingers running for senate sub-committies! I'm sure it's all some plot to piss off congress-critters. And journalists I might add...
-Ted
All right. It's a troll, but I'll bite anyway. As both a geek and a member of a fraternity, I have to say that you're being far too general. You're letting the experiences of a few bad apples spoil your conception of what fraternities are about. Let me tell you about some of the things my fraternity does: We sponsor a buffolo wing eating contest to benefit various charities. We, as part of the larger greek community, put on a broadway show as a fundraiser for the local children's hospital. For our school's spring carnival, we spent thousands of dollars and thousands of man-hours of work to build a booth which had little kids lining up for forty minutes to get in, and still leaving with a grin on their face. We throw parties. But all of our parties are dry. No one has ever passed out at one of our parties. Our basement doesn't smell like beer and vomit. We certianly don't include rapists amoung our brothers; we wouldn't allow anyone to join who is disrespectful to women, or disrespectful in general. In short, we take the concept of a fraternity as a brotherhood of men who care about each other and the community seriously. And yet, by your classification, we are "mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging rapists" and "motherfuckers [who] exhibit all the moral judgment and respect for others you'd witness with a pack of wild, snarling dogs." Stop over generalizing, and go out and actually meet some fraternity members. Don't turn your nose up and greek letters. You might be surprised. I certainly was. -Aaron Hertz
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized. -AC
Just as society has become desensitized (inarguably to a degree) to violence through movies, news, etc. (media), I think now we're beginning to become greatly desensitized to sex. Sex in advertising is like a drug addiction. As we begin to see and tolerate more of it, it requires nakeder people doing more outlandish things to attract our attention. Eventually it will hit a wall, as humans can only get so naked and provocative.
However, with the glut of sexuality in advertising and media these days, truly good advertisements stand out more. I was recently driving down a road that I know is generally littered with billboards of suggestive women promoting products. From a recent trip, I remember only one advertisement, for the Philadelphia Daily News. It just had white text on a red background saying, "The truth hurts. And we're sadists." Now, about a week later, that is the only advertisement that sticks in my mind. A couple decades ago, sex was the next big shocker, the next big thing, but now it's passe.
Yes! That guy!
Yep, there is a ways to go until we hit the wall, but ti's there nonetheless. It's not a technological barrier to be broken, it's just a barrier that's there. After the hypothetical ad you described, the only place to go would be fetishes, but one fetish may delight one person while totally disgusting another, making it stupid for advertisers to use them.
Yes! That guy!
I agree ... was this guy aggressive because he played games and watched pr0n, or did he play games and watch pr0n because he was aggressive? Blaming either for this ex-boyfriend's problems is a tad misguided. I have little doubt you could find someone even more aggressive who played/watched neither.
It's kinda like saying you'd never go out with someone who watched Star Trek, because they must be a nerd. Wiser to judge people as individuals, rather than pidgeonhole them like that.
The funny thing about this comment is that the whole point of the booths are not to attract the "nerd-geek" gamers, but to attract buyers from retail chains to check out your game. So the sex is directed towards getting those guys in your booth. The marketing people who put up booths could care less if Joe Gamer pays them a visit. They just distract from the real target audience.
Also, the amount of booth babes present at this years E3 was markedly lower than last years. No Space Channel 5 girls on raised platforms.
-marsh
Seeing the GOD games lot at E3, the lone woman in our group remarked, "I am so not the game makers target demographic."
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
Is Gaming Too Much Skin, Not Enough Good Clean Fun?
Maybe.
And if it is? So?
Game developers seem to have a hard time coming to terms with the whole "FUN" aspect, much less good CLEAN fun. In the absense of the prefered, give me something else I like.
Oh, and Sex will do nicely, thanks.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
And they do it with tables..
Geez, you'd think even a 90lb Oracle weenie with white socks, wingtips and a nose-picking turn-on could get a hooker.. But no, he has to start in on the inanimate objects....
Truly depraved..
.sig: Now legally binding!
If I ever have a daughter who's a programmer, she's going into databases
Database geeks are worse..
.sig: Now legally binding!
Dude, Half Life doesn't use the Quake 2 engine. It uses the Quake 1 engine, modded a lot in the terms of AI. B4 u tr0ll, chek y0ur f4cts
Mod this guys UP!!!
Hey, that that's just not fair! I'll bet 10% of the Salon-reading men actually get a testosterone rush from watching the other 90% of the Salon-reading men hormonally castrate themselves. They probably also like watching the bull-dykes trying convince technologists who are having trouble finding a mate in a 5:1 male:female industry that it is more honorable to have sex with other males and/or hormonally castrate themselves than it is to masturbate.
Those are probably also the men who got the first Salon stock at IPO and sold it as soon as the rush was over.
Ain't government-subsidized capitalism grand?
Worship the uber-parasites!
Seastead this.
If Salon is so distressed at the market gap in first-person 3D interactive media targeting girly-men and just plain girls as their customers, they have a more than ample supply of the aforementioned primates with which to pursue said market. And as for capital -- didn't Salon go IPO? (snark snark snark)
Seastead this.
I read through pretty much all of the comments as of when I clicked the link (which was a while ago), and AFAIK nobody has brought this up yet.
What about the point in the article where it mentions that the most packed booths at E3 weren't the ones with lots of skin showing, but ones like Blizzard's. Ones that had actual interesting games.
Could it be that the game makers mistakenly think that sex sells? In actuality the best selling games out there are games like Starcraft and The Sims, neither of which has any real sex appeal. They're just flat out good games.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Double Vaginal/Double anal is too art!
"I have made it a condition that those I am interested in not play computer games or use pornography."
Women like you drive men like me to homosexuality. I would SO much rather spend all of my time with my hard drinking, game playing, violent guy buddies, and fuck them as well, than to date a waste of flesh like yourself. And unfortunately, far too many women's views are just like yours.
To the contrary. Because he has balls he isn't letting himself get pushed around by silly soft porn pushing companies.
Pity you don't have the guts to stand up against women getting turned into sexual objects.
Do you think that you could step back for a second out of your elitest cocoon and realize that sex has allways been a part of videogames. Since the big boom that was the famicom 20 years ago, the japanese have paraded half naked girls in front of thier video game booths at shows like these. But now its different isnt it?? You watch a few Barbara Walters specials on the terrible terrible industry, easily forgeting that the only reason they market games the way they do is because that is what you, Mr. Imtoogoodfortitties, wants. If you think otherwise, reply. But seeing as how you won't do so untill after that episode of Murphy Brown you have on tape ends, I'll entertain myself with a game of Quake 3 Arena.....or is that too violent?
The / in
Pornography and games are astonishingly similar
And astonishingly dissimilar as well. What they have in common as forms of entertainment is actually a different issue from that of the original article, which seems to be more about the people and culture surrounding them.
They both appeal to the basal emotions, and encourage the user to imagine himself doing thing unnacceptable in real life. In games it is violence, and in porn it is sex (and often violence too). The differences are minimal
A glib and shallow comparson. Games are by nature interactive and competitive. Winning is a process of skill. Pornography is passive, and any eleven-year old boy is capable of exactly the same 'result' with the lingerie section of a mail order catalog. People don't play games because it is unacceptable to be violent in real life; they play games because there is a challenge involved.
Oh and quit the 'himself' stuff. Women buy and watch pornography as well, in case you forgot.
it is the women of America who really pay for the porn and violence that our menfolk consume.
Substantiate or retract. For example, if your statement has anything more than surface rhetoric, explain why more violence is committed against young adult males than against women.
Pax,
White Rabbit +++ Divide by Cucumber Error ++
free experimental electronic music netlabel at www.viablehybrid.com
Ugh. I just wrote up an interesting idea I had for "booth babes" on Unhelpful.org. I'll just paste it here:
"Now, if I had my own game company, I would hire post-op transsexuals to be my "booth babes." After each lonely, horny geekboy comes up to have his picture taken, I'd have the girls hand each one a card that says, "Congratulations! You have just had your picture taken with a transsexual!"
For maximum enjoyment, I would have to video tape their reactions upon reading the card, of course."
I don't know, I think it would be funny.
Americans are so puritanical about sex when we're so forgiving of graphic violence.
I don't think we actually are puritanical - we (by this I mean Americans in general) just pretend to be that way so we can claim the moral high ground. Because everyone does like sex [OK - very rare exceptions], it's a weapon that can be used against virtually anyone.
No kidding. They've got all these ideas about one-to-many relationships... sinful, I tell ya!
Hmm...off the top of my head:
Total bikini babe count: zero. Perhaps you were referring only to industries aimed at and/or run by 20ish males? Gee, that's a very inclusive world view you have. Perhaps you should go outside more often.
It doesn't take a freakin' genious to figure this out. Look at the games today. To sum them up in a few words: steep learning curve, acrobatic fingers, overly system heavy, buggy. It's sad when somebody pays 40 dollars for a game that is buggier than an emulator that can play 500+ games faster.
Yes, the point the article made was dead on-target: Who is going to take the booth babe into consideration when deciding to plunk down $50 for a game?
NOBODY.
Sex is not selling in this case; it's only a cheap trick to get a crowd around your booth when you've got a crap game, so you can say to your investors, "Yeah, we had a lot of interest in Xtreme Paintball 2!!!"
Okay, like a lot of you folks are saying, there's nothing wrong with sex. But there's sex for grownups and there's sex for adolescents.
And E3 booth babes in butt babes is the latter kind of sex. The frat boy / pimply loser wet fantasy kind of sex. The juvenile, embarrassing, and oftentimes offensive kind of sex.
So let's grow up, already.
How about using sex to sell cars? Or hotdogs and soda at 7-11?
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Actually, I think the Half-Life engine was just so-so. For instance, the sound was horrible if you had the wrong hardware configuration. I have SB Live now and it still sounds horrible. It's too easily cracked up when the CPU is working (even on a P-III 666Mhz).
;). Don't think I'll ever buy into hype again. The special effects slowed down the game to a crawl when the CPU-player started casting spells on your poor creature, and yes I do have a GeForce. The gestures were pretty useless and cumbersome too, and slowed down the game even more.
However, the level designs were superb, but that has not so much to do with technical impressiveness. The AI is pretty cool (and hyped). I got bored with the game after a good while though. You can only stretch a story so far without any real plot. Of course DeusEx fixed that when it came out, but now I'm dead-tired of FPS'.
I bought B&W too, and was unimpressed (except by the intro the first time
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
So what do women want (in video games, that is)?
I'd like to offer "We don't know either." I'm not saying women are indecisive - several here have described their personal gaming preferences quite lucidly, and I could too - but I think that we haven't yet come up with the game genre that's going to provide a massive hit with both genders. This is more a function of how much real innovation and invention is going on in the game industry than anything, rather than the current industry demographics. I'm sure when we do see something like that, it'll be all anyone talks about on the gaming sites. And the gaming companies will never look back once they see the profits from that other half of the population start to roll in.
But I think all this "men want to hunt/women want relationships" pop psychology stuff won't get us anywhere. I read up on Purple Moon's exquisitely market-researched little girls' game titles in the book "From Barbie to Mortal Kombat" (a good book, if a little dated now) and the premises just made me want to heave. "Secret Paths in the Garden" where simulated pre-teen girls talk about their simulated adolescent social problems? Or Rockett's first day at school, revolving around making the "right" friends and wearing the "right" clothes? Ugh, give me my escapist fantasy back, I'd like to get out of Barbie's high school now. (Granted, these are games for kids. But I think my disgust as a child would have been equal.) I imagine there's plenty of guys that feel a similar level of disgust with the "T & A & shoot some stuff" school of game development as well, which is just the same kind of demographic pandering but to teenage males. Maybe if the industry thought less about target marketing and more about coming up with wierd, different, attentiuon-grabbing new game concepts then we'd pass all these hopeless, static, tiresome sex-and-violence controversies by the wayside.
If you look at ads in men's magazines all the pictures have hot women. If you look at ads in women's magazines all the pictures have hot women.
When men see a woman selling a car they think, "If I buy that Porsche I can get that kind of woman." Women think, "I can be that woman."
t
In Sunday's NY Times Magazine there is an article on the size of the porn industry (as much as $14 billion in the US per year) and its consumers (practically everyone). A good read and a strong challenge to those who claim that "community standards" dictate that porn be banned from their towns.
The only difference between Cosmopolitan and Playboy is that Cosmo sells sex from a "Producer" perspective and Playboy sells it from a "Consumer" perspective.
The perversity of this remark really encapsulates the problem with modern sexual attitudes. Working from this position, that women have sex and men rent it from them, we arrive at a whole host of dysfunction, ne?
Hrmm. What if men could get over their guilt at being penetrators; women get over having to cling to something? What if women had the power of choice and men could take responsibility for their desire. What a strange and wonderful world where men might accept that they have something to offer and women might have something to look forward to.
Talk is cheap. It also makes girls horny.
illegitimii non ingravare
I love this. Salon uses sex to sell eyeballs and "Premium" subscriptions as much as E3 does to hype games (check out their "Sex" section and their partnership with Nerve). Objectification of women is pretty bad, but the holier-than-thou tone is a bit much. It's like Playboy criticizing Penthouse for showing pictures of nekkid girls.
She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.
The thing is, geeks call jocks on their predisposition to commit rape, but come on, do you guys REALLY care about women?
All we talk about is nekkid chicks here. Natalie Portman, anyone?
When was the last time anyone gave PROPS to a woman who was technically inclined?
The tech industry is KNOWN for its disrespect of women workers.
Are we any different from the jocks, collectively, when the ball(s?) is in our court?
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Apparently the person who marked the above comment as flamebait thinks it's appropriate to make scathing sexist comments in a public forum like Slashdot. Nice to know where people stand on this.
It doesn't matter whether the original post was a troll or not. I couldn't care less - what I pointed out in my post was that the responses were garbage: reactionary misogynistic crap. They were totally inappropriate even in response to a troll, because real women read slashdot and probably get tired of seing women (real or not) shat upon every time they dare speak an opinion that doesn't fall in line with the male masses.
Now go back into your cave.
The best sex takes place on a much higher level than what the media has led us to believe.
Next - Sex != women bouncing around in g-strings to promote a new product. This is called exploitation.
Got no problem with that. But I don't like sexist verbal abuse about PMS and phrases like "dumb cunt" being thrown around whenever a woman disagrees with the slashdot guy club.
Oh, and have you ever had the fun of being "pussy whipped" as you so kindly put it? Don't put down what you don't know, mate :)
My comment about the majority was based on the fact that 8 out of 12 replies to the original post were simply sexist comments like "dumb cunt" and "wanna fuck?". That makes a majority. I'm just pointing out facts, not making assumptions. Those were all real comments made to be read by real people. It doesn't matter that they were trolls, it just indicated that the majority of men, in this forum at least, take an aggressive sexist stance rather than intelligent disagreement.
Funny thing is, I didn't even agree with Lover's Arrival, and I was going to post a rebuttal, but upon reading the replies I can only shake my head and admit that - in general - she's right.
I personally enjoy both porn and violent video games to some degree. I am also, however, a sensitive and completely non-violent person in my actual life. I know there are a lot of men like me.
However, as is made apparent by this thread, the majority (or lowest common denominator) male is really an inconsiderate sex-crazed propagation machine. At least on slashdot. I hope that some of you can grow into real humans some day.
Ugh.
Good luck, Lover's Arrival.
I agree with the original post that humans are not hardwired for anything. They certainly have inborn tendancies, but can, through self re-programming, change those tendancies.
For example, I _can_ walk on a glass table top now, and if you flick near my face a couple times, I'll be able to hold my eyes open after a couple tries.
There are even people who can maintain absolute calm as they are consumed by flames, like that Monk who protested the Vietnam war by lighting himself on fire.
Pretty incredible, when you think about it. And maybe something unique to mankind...
I remember some years ago, when Comdex declared that sex was evil and the hard-core porn game companies weren't welcome anymore. They had their own across the street, which is still going on in tandem with Comdex.
I remember when Chips&Bits used to sell said software, and when all of the ZD publications used to advertise it. Then suddenly ZD "Got Morality!" and quit accepting these ads. In other words, they could afford to turn their back on a revenue stream that helped make them the major publisher. That's their perogative, but their supposedly moral stance is bullshit.
Chips&Bits? They don't sell any of the old X-rated games anymore. Of course what formerly were X-rated games are now X-rated interactive DVDs.
So the publishing and reselling industry made their mark by pushing hardcore porn, and now everyone's all getting up in arms over softcore porn? Go figure!
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Well, seeing as how it'd be virtually impossible to get that pixellated effect in real life...
(Bah dum-bum...)
--Fesh
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
Any non-anecdotal evidence to back up that might broad brush you've got there?
Just 'cause you don't like jocks or fratboys doesn't mean they're rapists.
--
That's probably because the world is saturated by gratuitous T&A (not that I'm complaining mind you)and the new angle is the more subtle sex appeal. I mean, what would you prefer: 1) an unattractive geek who tries to sell you the latest machine, 2) a brainless bimbo in a bikini who tries to sell you the latest machine or 3) a hot, sexy woman, WITH brains, who IS a geek (or has geek knowledges and leanings) trying to sell you the latest machine?
I'm guessing most level-headed guys (ie: mature) would choose 3.
"I'm not a procrastinator, I'm temporally challenged"
Easy to say "troll"...hard to refute. (Yes, it is sad...but a lot of things are, as Metallica sings, "sad but true.") I refer all interested parties to the works of Warren Farrell.
You're not a more liberal industry just because you're prone to porn. While it's easy to bash attitudes toward sex and nudity (especially for the average adolescent-male Slashdotter who sees these attitudes as denying him what he would otherwise have), doing so doesn't make Joe Porndirector a sophisticate. Even if he does call his films art.
In terms of the trade shows: do the actions and costumes of the characters these "boothbabes" represent (and if they don't, what's their raison d'etre?) make any statement or even just make sense within the context of the game? If not, then it's immature, no matter if it's liberal or prudish, sex or porn.
No. It's considered silly, escapist, and a little sad to read a puerile Harlequin about some woman being ravished in a castle, but just fine to read Lady Chatterley's Lover. It's considered silly, escapist, and a little sad to watch a puerile porn film where the roommates get it on with the pizza guy, but just fine to watch Eyes Wide Shut.
The difference is that more of the books have positive aesthetic qualities, Valley of the Penises notwithstanding.
And we all know that the Japanese video-game and comics markets are known for their sophistication and maturity...
Yes, anime freaks, that's sarcasm.
I don't think you meant "deserve." If you did, you're wrong; nobody's obligated to fuck you.
And if you're actually in pain, see a doctor; there's something wrong with you.
(At first I thought the moderators were on crack. Then I remembered this was Slashdot, home to the folks who know less about women than they do about law, despite claiming to be authorities on both.)
Gee, we'll replace an unrealistic figure with a real one that people have been conditioned to identify as unattractive. We'll leave the unrealistic outfits and the ogle-me attitudes the same. But people are still offended! Conclusion: "basically nothing will make them happy, because they enjoy preaching and making people feel bad." WTF?
C'mon, logic is the sort of thing you're supposed to actually get right round here.
Just because I'm male doesn't mean I can't find comments like that offensive.
When did catholic schoolgirls start reading slashdot? Oh wait, your email address is @americanwicca.com? Hmm, I figure you'd understand things that are frequently misunderstood and misrepresented...
"Brave man."
"When I'm coming, it's all I can do not to tear into them, like . . . " She savors an image on her tongue. "Like dim sum stuffed with scallops."
Erotic literature is weird. How can anyone read the above and not laugh their asses off?
>If there is do you have to buy it? No. But I do have to live in the society that it's influenced by. Saying "if you don't like it, don't buy it, and the problem's solved" is like saying "if you don't like the smog, just top breathing." We must understand that problems in society can't be written off as other people's problems. We already think this way, it's why most people prefer not to have violent criminals in their neighborhood.
I think you'd be hardpressed to prove that fictional scenarios like the ones you mentioned above are more harmful than the pervasive objectification of women which results in real-world problems like rape and anorexia.
BTW, I wasn't intentionally trolling, silly moderator. Perhaps my rape comment was off-base, but I stand by the assertion that anorexia and other eating disorders is linked to the way women's bodies are objectified and portrayed in our society. My point was too take issue with the poster who said "porn good, violence bad." It's not that simple.
It's because the american sheeple are so puritanical (and wholly hippocritical;)that they are fascinated with the taboo sex stuff. Funny (ironic really) how here porn is considered bad and pushed away into the 18+ crowd for sale in stores with blacked out windows to protect us from ourselves. In other places like europe it is a tolerated and open subject matter. The difference being? USians have a much higher sex crime rate (for all that protection from the evil pr0n, imho) than anywhere else on the planet. I for one would rather see the games lean more towards the sex than violence.
Wouldn't it be nice to see a wave of sex spreading across the us again (make love not war, sound familiar?) instead of the rampaging uberviolence we see in our schools? yeah, there are downside to that too(aids, pregnancy, etc.) and I know I am going to get flamed for it but the teen attitude of the 60's and 70's didn't get their classmates killed like it did in the 90's and 00's.
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
What are you talking about? Tons of games have alcohol or cigarettes (and even some have illegal drugs.) Examples: Fallout 1 and 2, Deus Ex, Rune, Quake 3 Arena(Sarge's cigar), Redneck Rampage, and Everquest. Usually whether or not you want to use them is up to the player, but not always.
Most games that don't have alcohol or cigs don't because they wouldn't make any sense or have any practical use. What sense would they make in Descent 3 or Serious Sam? Religious beliefs are usually ignored because they don't deal with the plot. However, in games where they do, like Messiah, they are usually stated or obvious.
Don't get me wrong, you make many legitimate points. And if you want to follow your "no computer games or porn in people I date" clause then you're welcome to, it's your life (and in the case of porn I think it's extremely reasonable). And I very much agree that both of these "hobbies" can be done in excess, especially if the person doing them is involved with somebody else whom they could hurt. However, there are situations where these are just victimless crimes.
Now it depends upon the individual. Basically the person has to distinguish between reality and fantasy. However, assuming they can do this, and that they don't become so obsessed with fantasy that they start having problems with reality, then a little bit of fantasy now and then doesn't hurt anybody. What about reading a good book? Most books appeal to the reader to imagine themselves doing something else, and something that they often could not actually do for any number of reasons.
So yes, if the male of a relationship is always playing Quake and looking at porn and then proceeds to be abusive, that's bad. But if somebody just plays some computer games or watches some porn every once in a while, but doesn't hurt anybody as a result and is able to keep the line between fantasy and reality well defined, then I personally see nothing wrong with it.
Also, this article is poorly written, in the sense that it makes a huge deal about sex in computer games, but fails to mention that this really isn't that unusual. Magazines, television, movies, it's all full of sex. And guess why: because we like it. We can't help but like it, and that's not a crime. As long as our liking of it doesn't cause us to hurt anyone....
(i dont think it was a troll either - mods on crack and all that!)
If its embracing porn or banning it...well, if its available, then the people who like it can view it, and the ones that dont, dont have to. How about that for a compromise?
Body image is an internal thing, best dealt with by the people who have the problem. Saying `porn causes some people to have an image problem and therefore we should ban it` is just sloppy logic. I just dont believe its true.
Its like saying `chocolate causes obesity, so we should ban it`. I think that having a few large people around is a small price to pay for me to continue having the odd sugary snack every few weeks. It`s not fair to use other peoples poor life choices as a reason to make my life less enjoyable, and limit what i can do. You`ll be saying cannabis leads on to harder drugs next!
Many people have a problem with their bodies - most dont seem to want to put the effort into staying in shape and eating properly unless they`ve been forced into doing so by a doctor to treat some condition which probably could have been avoided if they`d eaten properly in the first place.
I`m afraid there is absolutely no evidence that porn is connected to this `body image` problem of which you speak. You can`t prove cause and effect in this way - you may just as well say that because there are so many fat girls, men seek refuge in porn. Its the whole `does violence on tv cause violence in real life, or is the former merely a reflection of the latter` debate again.
"are more harmful than the pervasive objectification of women which results in real-world problems like rape and anorexia."
Whats this - a quote from Watchtower or something! Strangely, the open minded citizens of Europe dont share your belief that soft porn is responsible for that. Perhaps you`d feel more at home in the progressive regimes of Saudi Arabia, Iran etc?
Maybe you should read the article before posting next time, Sparky. It's not about soft porn in games, but about real live soft porn at gaming trade shows. So yes, I find that much more concerning than pushing a button and causing a few pixels on screen to be reconfigured as I "kill" a "zombie."
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
First, what the article said is that there's no proof at all that sex does sell games, or even help promote them. Like all those lame-ass dot-com hype parties in San Francisco and Seattle. Who gives a fuck what the product is? Where's the free booze and tote-bag? Most game companies would be better off having the booth babe beta their game for a day instead of waltzing around in butt-floss.
Second, to answer "why so many videogames rely on explicit violence," my HO is that most game companies have no bloody idea how to make a good game. You'd be hard-pressed to find a better-run or more talented game shop than id software, but they're still basically a technology shop. They build engines and write network code. Ever wonder why Nethack is more interesting to play than Quake3Arena? Because design and coding time went more towards gameplay than technology.
The gaming industry seems to be learning a few lessons lately: Half-Life and Thief were fascinating to play, and technologically advanced "enough." But in this industry, pre-release hype counts for not just a lot but nearly everything. With no hype you get no positioning on store shelves, no advance orders, no magazine covers. And what's easier to hype? A couple screen shots with bump-mapped water or a "gameplay features document" that puts most people to sleep?
Even Black & White was hyped mostly for its engine and AI. The gameplay, IMHO, is pretty stunningly boring. Like Starcraft, but with a sidekick; like Dungeon Keeper with a slightly smarter demon. I don't know what the solution is, or if there is one, but most games these days either put me to sleep or annoy me.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Of course it's not just games. I find women beautiful, but I'm still sick and tired of seeing breasts everywhere as the primary focus of advertising. I fully support a women's right to celebrate her sexuality any way she chooses, for self-gratification, money, attention, or whatever. But I think it's sad that so often it's for the financial gain or prurient interest of emotionally-retarded men.
:/
I found the article's comparisons with porn interesting, but I don't agree with the author's premise that games are very far removed from Hollywood. Christ - Hollywood not exploit women? The difference here is audience, and it's a typical chicken-and-egg scenario.
Women go to see Hollywood movies all the time, and not always the notorious "chick flicks." Hollywood takes the female audience very seriously, and panders to it very successfully (just like it panders to everyone, of course; this isn't gender-specific). Porn and games, however, are consumed mostly by men, often young men, so these industries pander to that audience.
Is it lack of focus by game developers? Is it that men are more easily visually stimulated than women (porn), or more competitive (games)? In my experience, women are less apt to want to sit in front of a computer, for any reason. Dunno why
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Is it just me, or are [console] video games considerably lacking in "adult" content? I think Conker's Bad Fur Day for the Nintendo 64 is about the worst thing we've got, and the word f@$# is censored!
I am unaware of the statistics, but I would guess that more kids play games through console systems rather than computers, and anything on the computer is bought or authorized first by a parent, in the majority of cases. In any event, this story seems to be a load of crap, in my opinion. :-)
I wouldn't mind a "Tour of the Playboy Mansion" game in the future. Something tells me I'm out of luck on that one...
I think that the poster's point is that "Romance" novels and the like are A) the moral equivalent of pornography and B) consumed almost exclusively by women. But for some unknown reason, it's considered just fine to read about sex, but terrible to want to watch it. It's a silly double standard.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Sex sells (when marketed well and not censored). I'd probably buy a game or two with more sex and less violence.
For example, Maxis would part $50 from my wallet for a adult-themes addon to the Sims! I suspect I'm not the only one.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
The trick is to conclusively verify this hypothesis. Many of the world's best have tried and tried.
But often people will believe there is a causal relationship where porn, video games, movies, television shows, rock & roll music, paper-dice roll playing games (or any other entertainment form that the listener doesn't enjoy or understand) leads to actual violent acts.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Just this Sunday, the New York Times had a whole article booth-babe-culture, describing the same thing at auto races and trade shows, and never mentioning video games in particular. Some posters have said E3 babes with booths had fewer visitors (I wasn't there), but that seems to fly in the face of most trade show experiences. And according to the NYT article: "Competition for the job of trade-show hostess is so fierce that the agents who audition the young women and dispatch them to shows say that many would work for free just for the pleasure of all the attention." Read the whole thing here.
It seems like there's a lot of vitriol the Salon author got a chance to vent at geeks, with its shots of "white-trash sex fantasia", "mouth-breathing dudes", "disreputably grab-ass, twerpy", "underground... lost boys", and so forth. I'm not even sure I believe the anecdote about the anonymous gaming/gangbang session with a company-logoed prostitute... that just seems too perfectly disgusting, similar to that journalist a few years ago who fabricated a story about a "gangbang" at the Young Republicans convention in D.C.
To me, this article seems conceived in bad faith in a number of senses, and even misleading, in that it uses the experience of a trade show walkaround as shorthand for the products of a certain industry.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
"I'm sorry, but that is neodarwinian fascist nonsense. Nobody is hard wired to do *anything*. We are all humans, and we all have a choice. We are not automatons, driven by instinct."
hmmm...let me check. Yup, I'm a primate and I know I have some instincts driving my choices...
must eat soon...
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Go read this New York Times Magazine article on the porn industry.
I read the Salon article. I don't have a clue where they found that "$5 billion a year" stat for porn, or why they got the wild idea that $5 billion counted "everything" associated with porn.
The porn industry is quite a bit larger than the hollywood movie industry -- it's certainly much more than twice $5 billion dollars if you count the total revenue from everything. (Real journalists are often as sloppy as the Slashdot toy journalists. Salon journalists are sometimes even sloppier than that. Imagine.)
The game industry will probably blow past the revenues of the hollywood movie industry soon, but they still have a long way to go before they're anywhere near the revenue of the porn industry.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Cosmo sells sex from a "Producer" perspective and Playboy sells it from a "Consumer" perspective.
I prefer it from a "participant" perspective.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
So, instead of being like the $6 billion a year hollywood film industry, it will be more like the $10 billion a year (and extremely profitable) porn industry?
Boy, it would really really suck for games if they were had higher sales, and a much larger profit margin, than porn.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Me beat you! Me fuck your girl!
Ahh....good to let my semi-evolved brain-stem rule for a while.
(Seriously, sex and violence attracts because of a million years of programming through evolution.)
Nothing to see here...move along...
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
The gaming industry is growing at a record pace, despite lackluster PC sales and a hostile environment created by politicos and the media. Salon, by contrast, is experiencing serious financial problems, a decrease in readership, and a growing reputation for producing "whiny" editorials.
I think I know who is really consigned to the "ghetto" here. Take a look at this quote from the aritcle:
Billions of dollars will change millions of hands, as they always have, but in the end, it won't have any impact on the larger culture going on without them outside their digitized walls.
Salon doesn't even have the "billions of dollars." The rest of it is pot, kettle, black.
> Of course it's not just games. I find women
> beautiful, but I'm still sick and tired
> of seeing breasts everywhere as the
> primary focus of advertising.
You are SOOO right. I want to see clitorii
become the primary focus of advertising.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Using sex to sell games demeans the entire industry and prevents gaming from being taken seriously. So what?
The article makes a point that the largest crouds were drawn not by E3 peep shows, but by *gasp* actual games. Blizzard and Maxis, in particular, were very popular. Both make, in my opinion, very high quality, fun games, and have even had breakthrough sucess with "mainstream" computer users. If you don't believe me, take a look at sales charts for the last few years. Starcraft and The Sims have made more cash than most major feature films, and they've done so by word of mouth outside of the gaming community.
The point that I'm trying to make is that good games don't need sex appeal inside or outside of the game to be popular. Companies like Blizzard and Maxis will be around for a long time because they make games that people want to play. Companies that rely on "booth babes" won't, because sex alone does not make for popularity in something that is marketed as a game. The porn industry will crush inferior, over-sexualized games, because it's been around for thousands of years, and knows exactly what it's doing when it comes to satisfying the latent sexual fantasies of the male psyche.
It's evolution at work. It all comes down to whether a game is fun, and fun is a concept that transcends the "geek ghetto". No matter what ammount of gratuitous sex or violence is added, it won't distract people if they're not enjoying themselves. Booth babes, your days are numbered.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
Alright, I'll bite on this troll. First of all I have yet to see any study that has ever been able to link pure porn and rape. Its B.S. Hell your best link to rape at least in the college life, is either being in a fraternity or a member of an atheletic team. Now as far as anorexia, take a look at Cosmo, or fashion models, or even better barbie. These are things that women see and read much more than a game or a gaming magazine. I spend more time with my girlfriend saying "you're not fat, those girls in the magazine are just sickly thin", even though she is height weight proportional and quite shapely. She never complains about being fat when she sees me play unreal tournament or quake or anything. She doesnt complain about being fat while she plays The Sims. If you want to complain about the objectification of women, start with the stuff they read, I have a feeling you will find a much better link there.
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett
I personally believe any guy who is not interested in video games, firearms, paintball, explosions, or something of that nature to be extremely abnormal.
Men are hardwired to be violent, and that has a lot to do with natural evolution. (The non violent guys just didnt make it)
Video games are a safe and effective way to allow us to vent this. (A good game a counterstrike is amazingly refreshing) Pent up guys are prone to stress- or to take out their anger physically.
Perhaps your boyfriend didnt play enough games...
Salon would know a think or two about porn from thier own pay site.
Leather Godesses of Phobos...
That scratch and Sniff didn't smell like pizza to me!
---
This
This is an invariable side effect off the acceptance of computers into mainstream society: more people have them, thus more people will be playing games. Your average person is going to play Zork for about 5 minutes, get bored, break that fancy egg, give up and go watch Baywatch.
I have been gaming for 20+ years and the games that I remember are the games like Zork or Deadline or Enchanter, not of Quake or Descent or Tomb Raider.
Some people seem to think that pointing fingers at Cosmo and Glamour is the perfect rebuttal; the underlying assumption seems to be "hey, women products do it too, so get off our backs already." I see several flaws with this line of reasoning.
First, this is not a gender issue. My bet is that the folks (both male & female) who are against too-much-skins-in-video-games are also opposed to the risque nature of Cosmo and Glamour.
Second, while it's not unreasonable to compare Cosmo with Playboy, the analogy between "women's magazine" and video games does not hold water. People buy Cosmo (and Playboy) to read about sex; people buy Ridge Racer, say, to play a racing game, not to think about sex. It's not the inclusion of strong sexual themes in games I object to, it's the gratuitous sex that I find questionable. For example, if I were to buy Leisure Suit Larry, I would expect to see sexual contents; but if I were to buy Ridge Racer V, I would expect to race cars, not to be accosted by some scantily-clad, computer-generated female that has no purpose in the actual game-play.
Finally, there is a question of options to be addressed. Cosmo and Playboy and magazines of their ilk are targeting a niche market; people who find these magazines insulting have lots of other magazines to choose from. This is not the case for choosing games now, and sadly, the options will probably dwindle even more in the future.
The fecal porn is a bit much, but you can do that accidentally these days. No joke. It has, I swear, happened to me. Mind you, I do surf porn intentionally, but not scat.
In any case, telling someone to eat your mangina shouldn't offend anyone. Screaming bitch, maybe. In any case, that sort of thing happens all over the place, any time a bunch of guys are feeling rowdy. It's not a big deal.
For those that think it is, I give you this thought: "Words have the power which you give them." If you choose to be offended and think someone is a bad person because of some words coming out of their mouth, that's your issue, unless those words are intended to offend you. It's usually pretty clear what the intent is, and if you disagree, I consider you to be an irrational individual. And yes, I expect you to cry over it. Cry, baby, cry.
BTW, if your daughter can't handle hearing and or seeing things like that, I shudder to imagine how she will fare in the Real World(tm). And the important thing to a gamer, whether they be a player or a developer, is the game, not something some wanx0r is screaming whilst fragging those less twitchy.
--
ALL YOUR KARMA ARE BELONG TO US
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hmm. Is this really so amazing? The primary target for video games is: teenage/pre-teen boys. And the primary target for porn? Well, technically, the over 18 crowd, but if you think every teenage boy isn't counting down the days to when they turn 18, then you obviously weren't a teenage boy (or at least, not a horny one). What's next - people complaining that modern rock (such as light punk, metal, stuff you hear on 'alternative' stations and MTV) is too violent and sexual? Same frickin' people!
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
Desire is not an occupation.
I just moved up to Seattle from California. Doing a lot of grocery shopping, I noticed something. You know how they have black plastic or something over porn mags in stores? Look for the latest issue of Cosmopoliton. It has it too... because the woman on the cover is too sexualized. Hmm.. Last time I checked, Cosmo wasn't a game mag. ;)
... so I can play the new games on my TV. Seriously. It's the older, simpler, more fun games that I enjoy. My roommates have all of the wizbang new consoles, but we still spend more time playing and enjoying our collection of SNES games. The eyecandy of a new game is only fun for about two days.
This is bullshit. Gaming is what it is: a delicate, yet perfect, balance between acceptable and unacceptable, between extreme and normal. Gaming is a natural activity of the human mind. Computer games are a natural extension.
I ask you: what does this question implicate, that we attempt to change the nature of games, of computer games, or of all games? And, taking into account the thought that "games are art..." are we then too blind to realize that pornography, too, is art? For crying out loud! There's tons of games with pornographic material, but similar games without. What the hell happened to Nintendo? HELLO?
The choice to employ pornography in a game is a risky one, forcing any number of consumers from a variety of markets to silently, or loudly, boycott the game, and the trade-off is a greater focus on the 'meat' market: teen-age boys. And since when is 'skin' not 'good clean fun'? Religious people are the only ones who think we shouldn't naturally celebrate the naked human body, and I say fuck that.
The only fool bigger than the person who knows it all, is the person who argues with him.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
The only fool bigger than the person who knows it all, is the person who argues with him.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
"We are upping our standards ... so up yours." --Pat Paulsen for President, 1988.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
It's our culture. Everything we do is sexualized. How many trade shows have you been to and not seen booth babes? How many ads have you seen use sex to sell things? The argument of the article is basically: There's a lot of gratuitious sex here and it's keeping video games in the "geek ghetto". But that's not true: All products use sex to sell, especially entertainment. Saying that video games are especially sexually charged ignores the legions of sexually charged movies, tv shows, magazines, etc that are already consumed. Video games didn't grow in a vacum. end rant.
If you don't like games with nudity then don't bloody well buy them! Sheesh!
--
NO TOUCH MONKEY!
Is it just me or does your ex-boyfriend seem to come up a lot in your posts? Not the more recent ones, but at least 50% of the time, your ex, or one of your ex's is brought up to have done something in the past that affected your outlook on life...Which tells me you either suffer from advanced delusionary schizophrenia with involuntary narcissistic rage, or you still haven't gotten over the poor sod(s).
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
Thanks
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
"we should not stimulate those who cannot handle a heightened sense of awareness and can't resist their desires"
"it is the women of America who really pay for the porn and violence that our menfolk consume"
I hate to cut apart your entire post, but I just wanted to highlight those points, as they seem to speak clearly for themselves. I've gotten the impression that you're advocating that much of the male populace cannot handle such intense emotions without longterm side effects? And, as a result we should do our best to shield them from any intense media in order to protect the interests of the other 51% of society? The problem here is, this is an extremely gender-biased approach to solving some of the most harmful aspects of society towards women (spousal abuse, rape, etc). Perhaps those that do offend are directly influenced into their actions by sexual and violent media, but then again, such violence has been declining in North America (please correct me if I'm wrong) long before such media really existed in such a wide spread manner. Perhaps, instead of blaming porn and violent video games, we should look at unemployment, poverty, racial/gender inequity (gender inequity is not just a problem for women, it is a problem for men as well), and general social frustration.
-Medgur
So that's why Interplay covered up the breasts on the Sea Reapers then?
"accepting of sexuality as an everyday part of existence"
Let me relate a story to you. Yesterday I was on my way home from work and I was sitting on the subway by myself playing chess on the palm pilot. I live in New York, so I expect to be harassed by crazies every once in a while, but it doesn't make it any less disturbing when it happens. When you're riding the subway in New York, you really, really want to be left alone. Anyway, so this guy comes up to me, looks perfectly normal, no puke or bad smell, obviously not a bum, and he says "Hey, where'd you get the chess game for the Palm Pilot?"
So first of all the guy is looking over my shoulder, which is a little annoying but I can deal. So I say "My friend gave it to me." Then he comes out with this: "I love the Palm Pilot, I have all kinds of stuff on it -- do you have the Palma Sutra?"
Thanks, dude. I don't want to know you, I don't want to know your name or talk to you, I wish you would go away, and I CERTAINLY don't want to know about your sex life or how you have the fucking "Palma Sutra" on your goddamn palm pilot. Leave me the fuck alone.
So I say, "Oh really." He makes some more small talk and then says something like, "I beam programs back and forth to my friends all the time, we'll get together, I'll give you the Palma Sutra. Sorry to disturb your game.", and he gets off the train.
I don't know how you would feel at this point, but at this point I felt like the guy had tried to feel me up or something. I'm a guy, so I guess he thought that he could safely talk to me about the fact that he was a disgusting pervert and I would be right on the same page, but he was wrong. I like to keep my private life private. And I am NOT accepting of trumpeting out in the open every single detail of everyone's sex life all the goddamn time. Like for example, all of America knows that Clinton did something disgusting with an intern and a cigar. Need I say more?
---
Don't post on slashdot. Get back to work.
Why is it that anyone who says a few less bouncing breasts in games might be nice immediately gets slammed with comments about PMS, or someone feels they need to identify the poster as a woman? As if the opinion of the woman has to be inferior. "sex good, slam things good" yea, I see how thats a much better opinion. If sex is so good would you run out to buy a game in which a Brad Pitt look-alike ran around in hot pants and no shirt? Is it completely inconcievable that a game might be just as good without scantily clad bimbos. These masogonistic opinions are not free thinking but they are discriminatory and demeaning
All right. It's a troll, but I'll bite anyway. As both a geek and a member of a fraternity, I have to say that you're being far too general.
No. It's not a troll. Badmouthing greeks and jocks is not generally considered trolling here, as opposed to, say, bad-mouthing Linux or OSS. Did you go to your library and check a single source I cited? I thought not.
You're letting the experiences of a few bad apples spoil your conception of what fraternities are about.
What conception would that be? That the children (and YOU are a child if you're in a frat) of the privileged band together in the spirit of exclusivity? What is it about frats that WOULDN'T give me that impression?
Let me tell you about some of the things my fraternity does: We sponsor a buffolo wing eating contest to benefit various charities.
At most schools, (public anyway,) THE ONLY REASON FRATS PERFORM PUBLIC SERVICE IS BECAUSE THEY ARE REQUIRED TO DO SO. Who else falls into this category? Petty criminals come to mind. Don't you even dare to pretend for a second that the overwhelming majority of frats' public service is anything other than compulsory. What's next? Would you like a medal for using your turn signal or not running a red light? How about the Nobel Peace prize for not cheating on your taxes? Hot wings? Give me a break.
We throw parties. But all of our parties are dry. No one has ever passed out at one of our parties.
Then those weren't parties. Not by a long shot.
Our basement doesn't smell like beer and vomit.
Hurrah for bleach!
We certianly don't include rapists amoung our brothers; we wouldn't allow anyone to join who is disrespectful to women, or disrespectful in general.
Do you ask? I bet not.
In short, we take the concept of a fraternity as a brotherhood of men who care about each other and the community seriously.
More self-serving slop. Tell me again about your superior GPA's, but be sure to leave out the bit about the filing cabinet full of essays and exams.
Stop over generalizing, and go out and actually meet some fraternity members. Don't turn your nose up and greek letters. You might be surprised. I certainly was. -Aaron Hertz
Let me explain something to you. Listen very carefully. I am a native of a small city which is host to a large public university. I have taken out groceries for frats, attended classes with them, shot pinball with them, graded their essays and scored their tests, sold them music, rented them movies, given them a jump when their battery was dead, carded them in bars, etc. I can't know them any better than I do now. Here's my take: SOME are OK one-on-one. Get them in a pack, and common sense goes out the window. I will tell you right now that if every single one of them were wiped from the face of the earth right now, the collective IQ would skyrocket. Why don't you go out and meet some locals and ask them what they think of the frats where you are? Be sure to leave behind your woven leather belt, leave the ballcap at home, and for God's sake, tuck that goddamned shirt in ALL THE WAY AROUND.
--
Freeper Logic
Any non-anecdotal evidence to back up that might broad brush you've got there?
Just 'cause you don't like jocks or fratboys doesn't mean they're rapists.
No, that's backwards. I don't like them because they're mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging rapists. Even though it's not my broad brush, I can't let this go, so try this:
Erhart and Sandler, Campus gang rape: Party Games?, Association of American Colleges, 1985.
[Vast majority of campus gang rapes committed by fraternity members or athletes.]
I found it here.
Or this:
From a sample of sorority, 24% had experienced an attempted rape, 17% were victims of a completed rape. Almost half of these rapes and attempted rapes were perpetrated in a fraternity house. (Copenhaver, Grauerholz, Sex role, vol. 24, nos. 1,2, 1991.)
Found that one here. I don't think those girls were hanging out with the Physics club, do you? More?
Bernstein, Nina "Behind Some Fraternity Walls, Brothers in Crime." New York Times 6 May 1996, late ed. sec A 1+. Bernstein reports that nationally, fraternitites spend one-third of their budgets, "some $30 million dollars a year," to pay liability costs. Discusses specific aspects of date and acquaintance rape in the University of Georgia's Greek community.
Boeringer, Scot B. "Influences of Fraternity Membership, Athletics, and Male Living Arrangements on Sexual Aggression." Violence Against Women, 2(1996): 134-148. Abstract: Investigates fraternal membership, intercollegiate athletic participation and sex composition of living arrangements as possible correlates of sexual coercion. Greater rape proclivity in athletes; More significant use of intoxicants and nonphysical verbal coercion in obtaining sex by fraternity members.
Found those two here. Face it, those motherfuckers exhibit all the moral judgment and respect for others you'd witness with a pack of wild, snarling dogs. Defend them at your peril.
--
Freeper Logic
He said "blow". Uh-huh-huh-huh.
Maybe you should think a bit before shooting off your mouth. The article also talked about how the soft porn in question related to the notion of alienating the non-geek portion of their audience. Their audience, for the most part, does not go to a trade show. I'd consider someone not in the industry who goes to a video game trade show pretty geeky.
I know this is a troll, but I want to comment on two things this post was implicitly saying: (1) Sex and violence must be separated. (2) Aggression is a very very bad thing.
/\/\3 VV4R32 |)00|)!
(1) is a rather standard assertion from people who understand neither sex nor violence. (2) is a standard assertion of those who accept most current norms of behavior. Both spring from the ideal that gentleness and meekness are the virtues of those who are greatest. However, this only depends on our valuing gentleness and meekness in our current ethical and social norms. Unfortunately, aggression has come to be associated with violent behavior (quite rightly), and has been tainted by the current fixation on the elimination of violence. The problem is that violence will always be with us - it will always be useful, and moreover, it is necessary for our continued survival and prosperity.
Violence is the use of force. Sometimes force must be used, either to prevent violence upon oneself, or to accomplish a goal that is otherwise unattainable. The showing of force, any force, of assertiveness, of initiative, has come to be associated with aggression, and any aggression has come to be associated with unwarranted violence.
Violence and sex have been associated since the beginning of recorded history. To deny their mutual association is to deny the obvious: namely that violence and aggression have been responsible for more sexual acts than any aphrodesiac, any gentleness, any frothy feelings of love. Whether there was a lack of consent is another question entirely, and that is a question that is forgetten by those who submit that all sex is rape. Even though the act is violent, one need not withhold consent - one may commit violence upon oneself.
Maybe I have done enough to show that (1) and (2) are both in some respects false, but I doubt that I will convince many. So, to conclude:
1 4/\/\ 3V1L L337!!!!! G1\/3
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Yours,
This is Salon we're reading here. Salon has proven many times in the past that they are extremely biased, amateur journalists with a very sensationalist streak. Just gotta love their article about 'alternative sexuality in the Open Source community,' and David Brin's whine -- er, rant about how Star Trek is better than Star Wars, and another rather bothersome article/rant about the BDSM community. Salon seems to go out of its way to be as sensational as possible. This isn't journalism; it's 'literary self-gratification.' They like seeing their names in print.
It's their opinions, of course, and they're welcome to them. I'd even read their opinions (for free, of course) but it bugs me that they're trying to pass their opinions as objective, unbiased journalism.
---
Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
Didn't see THAT one coming a mile away. ;)
What surprises me is that there weren't more offers.
So here's mine: Wolf-chan, will you... at least let us get to know each each other so that maybe, in the future....
Oh, heck, I'll stop making an ass of myself now. ;)
---
Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
People that are really into games (quake et all) don't even look at the graphics or pay attention to the game details after the first few days. It just turns into a game of framerates and precision hand-eye movements.
I dare say, if you're looking for a date, you came to the wrong messageboard... It's a shame too, because you sound very... how shall I put this... female? I think I hear the sound of a million /.'ers crying over their consoles.
Please mod me up. My grandma might not make it to the weekend and she always wanted me to hit karma cap.
And if all video games had the same (profitable) plot line, and wonderful character development.
"ding dong!"
"I wonder who that could be?"
"Hello, I'm here to clean the pool"
"My, but that's a large pole you've got there"
"Actually, it's a plasma gun. I intend to kill you with it."
"No, no. Please don't. I am very scared."
Cue the electric bass...
Please mod me up. My grandma might not make it to the weekend and she always wanted me to hit karma cap.
Perhaps someone needs to write an article called "Using sex to sell your editorial piece and get web-page hits".
I can't remember the last time some booth said 'win a palm' and when you win it, you just get to look.
I advocate booth hookers. Auction them off for business cards, watch sales skyrocket.
TK
The tone of the article suggests that it is self-evident that these behaviors are wrong. Any woman with a g-string is evil and any man who looks at her needs help. I think we're going to find, as geeks find their influence in society growing with the technology they are affiliated with, a clash between the geek morality and the "traditional" morality.
Anyone who has read the Jargon File section on J. Random Hacker probably saw a lot of themselves in it. Geeks/hackers often have looser morals than the mainstream. This is not necessarially a bad thing, but just like Linux and Microsoft are going head to head because of different ideologies, we're going to see a clash over moralities soon. Geek culture is going to either have to adapt or conquer. Mainstream culture, at least in the US(about the only place Puritan values are considered anything but laughable) is going to clash with geek culture. It's already happening in the schools as more and more "geek" kids get in trouble for following the natural curiosity that is, in my opinion, the defining charastic of a geek. Similarially the geek curiosity makes us want to experiment with different moralities, especially where sex is involved. With a open mind, free of moral paradigms, pornography becomes a non-issue. Behavior is what is important. Individual responsibility and personal growth are far more important than some outdated feelings of "obligations" to current moral standars and the paradigms they represent.
Stay tuned, it's going to be a bumpy ride.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
See, this is really funny. My wife loves Everquest, but not for the "normal" woman reasons of being online with a bunch of people and chatting a lot. She likes to hack and slash stuff. I prefer Black and White. She is bored by Black and White. The Heroes of Might and Magic series is the only games we both really enjoy. It seems to have that balance of complex gameplay that I enjoy and the action she enjoys.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
Do we really need to go over this chestnut again? Instead of some good solid games coverage of E3 Salon ruminates over some geeks (I was *ahem* one of them) gauping at a model in the nack. If you have nekkid lady, you get a crowd surrounding your booth. You can see games every day, how often can you see a coulple of women almost wearing leather costumes and pretending to be interested in you.
A study once discovered that college athletes are responsible for something like 70% of rapes while constituting only 8% of the student population.
Numbers 31:17,18 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man,but save for yourselves every virg
The issue, to me, is separating fantasy from reality, and encouraging mutual respect for each other. If we are raised to be afraid of our fantasies, then we may wish to express those fantasies as reality. There was an interesting article in the Times concerning divorce rates in the bible belt. This article states that divorce rates in Oklahoma run above the national average. Could this be caused by unrealistic expectations for marriage, or perhaps the Baptist men take the fanciful notion of a dutiful wife seriously?
Likewise we must respect each other. If we are raised to disrespect other people, or more specificaly the opposite sex, then naturally we will look at the objectified persons in the media and presume that they are nothing more that packages to be exploited. Likewise if we cannot be civil to the waitress who needs 30 more seconds to get our order, what hope to we have with the foldout in playboy?
It would be pretty to think that banning soft porn would solve whatever problems are bothering us. In fact, what may be bothering us is all the bother over the so-called soft porn.
Not entirely true; The Sims is a lone example of how computer games can attract a huge female fanbase (nearly 50%, IIRC) provided it's something they're interested in. But computers in general are still perceived as a "guy" thing, and it'll take several more Sims-scale hits to make the rest of the male-created gaming industry sit up and take notice.
actually, i know several women who wouldn't have a problem with this type of language. I do know a few guys (programmers even) who would be offended by this language. It's not about gender. It's about who's openly a sick fuck, who's in denial about being a sick fuck, and who genuinely isn't a sick fuck. The people in denial are usually the biggest problem.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
"with no genuine celebrities, or pop-cult recognition outside its narrow subculture" he conveniently ignores the fact that any given teen or twentysomething, and many older folks, can list their fvorite games just as they can their favorite films, and list their main characters just as they could list film stars. "
You forgot Mark Hamil, from Wing Commander...and that other movie back in the 70's...what was that again, Star something....anyhow....now that they are making the movies based on games (Tomb Raider, Dungeons & Dragons *sucked* etc...) I'm sure that the gaming industry will start to clean up it's image
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
He has inflicted his ill-researched morality and his ill-researched games technology prowess on Salon readers before. That he has shot off his mouth in a hypocritical rant against the sexual marketing aspects of E3 ("I can't stand its emphasis on sex, but I have to go! Really!") should come as a surprise to no-one.
Careers should combine three things: what you can do, what you want to do, and what you can get paid for.
perhaps we know different women. The ones that I know that interact with pornography at all view pornography (usually VCR instead of mpegs).
And of course no women play computer games, or view pornography.
Perhaps instead of limiting your partners to those that do not participate in computer games or pornography, try to find ones who *can* handle the heightened sense of awareness, while still being able to resist desires...
Then maybe you should turn off your TV, or bomb a local movie theatre, or boyott makeup and skirts.
And god knows the Backstreet Boys aren't objectified by teenage girls the world over...
Perhaps, however it depends on the cross-section you look at.
For one, there was no such game at E3--which was the basis of the article. Two, there has been no such thing in the console market for a great many years due to regulatory influence. (Basically, yes, you will find sexually explicit games in the PC sector, but that's not what the article was talking about either.) Three, yes you will find such games in Japan even on console, but that's apples to oranges--the amount of sexually explicit acts in media is much higher there in both movies and general media. Also, the amount in games even in that situation is far less than that portrayed in movies, anime, and manga (the latter being the foremost offender.)
Any way you look at it, though, comparing mainstream games to mainstream movies will end up with the result I mentioned in my firest post. Comparing it to any of the games that you refer to would require me to start including the porn industry as "movies". As far as casual sex acts, the general Hollywood industry is *far* more likely to ever exploit them than video games.
You can compare mainstream to mainstream, porn to porn, but not mainstream to porn.
What's a sig?
I mean, really. A guy going on and on about the "ghetto" nature of a few floozies stading at the booths is supposedly outweighing the over-sexxed nature of Hollywood? I think now.
If there's any industry that follows the "Sex Sells" motto, it would be that of the film industry. Sure, it's nice and all to idealistically blame videogames for the proliferation of viloence and sex in today's society, but it does little to explain the existance of the *realistic* violence and sex-laden nature of the movie and TV industry.
I suppose that using Brittney Spears and her hips to sell Pepsi is somehow more justified than having a "Booth Babes." I'm not saying the latter is better than the former, but it is definitly comparable. When following that line, the movie industry definitly carries protrayals of sex to a far more extreme nature than videogames ever could get away with. How many movies released last year had graphic sex scenes? How many videogames? Whatever high number you come up with for movies, you're still comparing it to a big *zero* in the gaming industry.
But, of course... With Hollywood, I guess it's considered "mature" and "artistic"--with games it's "Ghetto" and the "downfall of women."
What's a sig?
Certainly there's an element of a self-fulfilling prophecy here: If you market to guys, you'll probably sell to more guys, which makes it more effective to market to guys, and so on. And I'm sure the sex-drenched marketing techniques do turn off plenty of women (as well as plenty of mature men). But I somehow don't buy that if the marketing departments cleaned up their acts, the world would suddenly witness a vast growth in the number of female gamers. There aren't a lot of female software engineers, either, and I don't think it's because HP and Sun have been turning off potential female recruits with their sex-centered marketing campaigns. There's a much deeper gender difference (perhaps having to do with societal conditioning; I don't know) underlying this whole thing.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Admittedly, the use of hired booth bimbos smacks of tawdriness, but hey, if you can't get attention for your lame-o game you can probably get some by making a sexual connection. This is hardly unique to the gaming industry, or even to men. Just walk into your local supermarket and take a look at the covers of the magazines by the checkout aisle. It's all "Revive Your Sex Life" and "10 Things Men Wish You Would Do In Bed".
Sex sells. Wow, news flash. Sex sells to horny teenage gamer boys who are not the kind of alpha males who go to prom with the cheerleader on their arms. Geez, I'm so shocked.
There's a much better story, IMHO, in asking why so many videogames rely on explicit violence. Not that I think videogame violence turns our kids into monsters, but I do find it ironic that Americans are so puritanical about sex when we're so forgiving of graphic violence.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
In terms of culture, the computer gaming industry is moving more and more toward pure, plotless sex and violence. Hardcore gamers actively make fun of bestselling games which don't involve blood and skin such as Riven or The Sims, even though they appear to appeal to a wider audience.
At least in this sense, I think that the "hardcore gamer" community is largely a collection of adolescent boys and underdeveloped men who live out their aggressive fantasies alone or online in games because they're unable to relate properly to "normal" humans (i.e. outside the tech industry). The tech industry and especially the gaming community seems to be a race of people unto itself, apart from the rest of humanity.
Of course, I say this as someone who owns $2,500 worth of PC and Linux games and was just looking at those butt-floss pictures on the gaming sites yesterday...
But seriously, I do get frustrated with some other gamers and their extreme views and behavior. Some of these guys make me feel downright normal and human by comparison.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
You find that Sex does Not Sell.
That the biggest crowds were around Metal Gear Solid II, gawking at Warcraft 3, listening intently to the designers of Sims and other ground breaking games.
Sex causes commotion, yes, but if the game being tied to the commotion holds no appeal, the crowd walks on as soon as the performance ends.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Hawaiian Tropic filed for Chapter 13 bankrupcy today, after their failed attempt to create sensitive advertisements, based on the backlash against the use of attrative women in their marketing. The new campaign involved the display of several weight challenged hair deficient men in thongs playing volleyball.
In a related story, several other companies filed for Chapter 13, including Snap On Tools, the Autoshows of America, Bally Fitness, Coca Cola, MTV, E! Entertainment, the software industries, and others too numerous to count, upon undertaking similar measures.
In closing, the stock market crashed today, with the pit boss plummetting to his death from a 20 story building on Wall St as a finale, screaming 'Smoke 'em if you got 'em, we're (expletive deleted)!!!'
This is CNN.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I've had a sore point with games for years, because there were only so many ideas being rehashed over and over. Same junk just looks better, but the game doesn't hold my attention. Strange as it may seem, I download one of the Apple ][ or C64 emulators and find all sorts of creative, interesting games which never made millions of dollars, but are fun to play, even trying to figure them out.
Updates of some of my favorite old games, I felt have been spoiled by the too-many-cooks "solution." (If a mountain bike is fun, then it should be fun with a blown-hemi, positraction differential, chrome wheels and sound like a Hog!) Uhm, no. It's the idea, if it isn't a fun idea, all the skin, glam, glitz and 5.1 audio isn't going to make it any more fun. Best games are still designed by people with an idea, who put it together. Crummy games are rehashes pushed by companies with shareholders as hungry and interested as a nest of baby birds looking for momma to show up. Seems there was a fun place to look for new developments. www.garagegames.com/
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Sounds like a woman to me.
How are females going to want to get involved in the gaming industry when there are events like E3? There are some females that are into that subculture (I used to be one), but they aren't going to go out and make female-geared games. If you want to get females in there, then start acting like it.
1. Look beyond your mind and realize that there are benefits to people who think differently.
2. Clean up your conversation. I know many females who left Computer Science because they couldn't stand how the males talked.
3. Volunteer helping Junior High & Elementary School girls get into programming (this is the age where it's most influential).
4. Don't be afraid to make friends (and nothing more) with females in computing.
5. Try to think of some original games (ooh boy, shoot-em-up number 2032, or RPG number 6983).
Bottom line, the number of females enrolled in Computer Science has dropped by almost half in the last decade (at the greatest boom). What are you doing to change the stereotype?
~KONala
I thought that game developers brought the scantily clad women and the sex to their booths to help encourage their own employees to attend. It's not marketing at all! It's all an effort to get developers on the floor to talk to gamers!
Go Lakers!
The reason for mor "porn" is simple: the gaming industry, and the computer industry in general, is much more liberal than Hollywood and any other industry. What exactly is wrong with having more sex?
I find this hilarious. You've got games where you can frag or blow up humans, mutants, zombies, terrorists, counter-terrorists, buildings, spaceships, starships, elves, dwarves, attack choppers, gangsters, aliens, vampires, hostages, and beings from the Alice in Wonderland universe.
And you're concerned about Lara Croft's short shorts? Only in America.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
nickel psychology, I love it. I'm sure that if you investigate his behavioral history more closely, you will find that OZZY made him do it and not the porn OR video games, or perhaps Beavis and/or Butthead. Or maybe you're just a doormat. Dr. Laura called, she wants her show back...
I like toast!
> Women dont have a problem with sex, you dolt, they have a problem with PORN.
Many women don't have a problem with pornography, you dolt, and many men do have a problem with pornography, you bigot.
> People who watch porn have a fucking problem - they dont fuck,
> they dont experience sex, they watch porn.
Please don't push you difficulties off on me. I am happily married to a woman who enjoys pornography as much as I do, and it doesn't seem to interfere with our ability to have real-life relations at all. You speak as though you had a problem with a human being and are trying to dump what appears to be his problem on all of the rest of us because you're unable to conceive that we could think differently than you. Solve your own hang-ups before you try working on mine, and don't tell me that you speak for all women when you so obviously do not.
> Porn is only as useful as it keeps useless men as far away
> from women as usefully possible. As a woman, I wish you fucking
> losers would emblazon a remote on your clothing so that we can keep
> as far as fuck away from you as possible.
I wouldn't need to wear a marking for that. I'd only need to talk to you for a few moments and I can assure you you'd have no problem keeping me as far from you as possible.
Virg
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
Gotta love the moderation line on that one:
Offtopic=2, Flamebait=4, Troll=11, Insightful=5, Interesting=4, Informative=4, Funny=2, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=34
That's 33 points efficiently wasted.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
The writer seems to have a major problem with men and boys. They like sex. The horror! However, the fact is, with the exception of a small "non-mainstream" percentage, most women like sex too. Ever taken a look at a "Woman's Magazine" lately? It is full of pictures of half-naked women/girls and explicit advice about sexual matters. Half the content is advice on how to attract wealthy and powerful men, and how to get rid of losers. Just as men rate women on how good their figures are, women rate men on their success, or "alpha-characteristics."
The only difference between Cosmopolitan and Playboy is that Cosmo sells sex from a "Producer" perspective and Playboy sells it from a "Consumer" perspective.
Magnus.Porn (soft or hard) has been and always will be on the forefront of technology because of it's success in the market. The day the game developers get their collective minds out the gutter is the day they start failing to make money. Here's an idea for an article. Research all the games that have been spectacular failures and see how suitable they would be for advertising on PAX.
And about the porn industry? As profitable as it is, there is much more people who want to become movie/tv stars than people who want to be porn stars (that is, as far as I know :).
I'm sure the women at these companies can take care of themselves. I was just joking about my hypothetical daughter. Women being offended or not wasn't my point.
My point was that there is a HUGE lawsuit just waiting to happen. I don't know anything about law, but it seems like one determined plaintiff and a good legal team could prove the existance of a "hostile work environment", whatever that is, and shake down just about any game dev house for a good amount of money. I think just dragging email archives into court would be bad enough. Most game companies I've worked at pretty much turn a blind eye to the stuff that goes on, making themselves liable. (I think)
I agree with you completely about words, and the daughter thing was just a joke (I don't have a daughter, and if I did, she'd survive hearing bad words, I'm sure).
I was only making the point that SOME people are very offended by words and situations, and some of them will have very good lawyers. I think that the way game development is currently done is going to come crashing down someday soon.
From the article:
"As it stands, the whole jig is just one disgruntled female employee away from toppling under a sexual harassment suit. Very likely, the "hostile work environment" clause of the code is fulcrum enough to bring the entire embarrassing enterprise down around the industry's ankles."
She is talking about E3, but if she only knew what kind of hostile work environment exists at your average male-dominated game development house....
At one (nameless but could be any) game company a few years back, I remember hearing guys down the hall screaming "EAT MY FUCKING MANGINA, BITCH" repeatedly while playing games. This, at 4pm on a weekday. Also, surfing fecal porn during work hours brought barely a blink from our producer.
If I ever have a daughter who's a programmer, she's going into databases.
I like these people that play computer games all day and night for years. They never learn anything new, except for where to get the latest Detonator drivers or stupid Quake tricks. Dont get me wrong, I like to play games, but I am not dork about it. Alot of my friends went from working on legitimate projects, to sitting, and playing. That is ALL that they do. People call them nerds and geeks, they do not deserve that title. They are more like dorks.
You are very right.
Wow, games use titillation as a promotional tool, huh? It's not like any other form of pop-culture media does that, is it? Oh wait, yes they do. All of them.
Preferences > Homepage > Customize stories on homepage > Authors > Zonk > Uncheck
Hey Salon, way to make enemies with the biggest entertainment industry on Earth.
Preferences > Homepage > Customize stories on homepage > Authors > Zonk > Uncheck
As far as my environment, moralization isn't a factor. If it were I would be feel guilty not embarassed.
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
"Nerd-geek Ghetto." Ah ha ha. So true, I have many friends who pick up NHL 2001 or Madden just to have it on the shelf to balance out the "nerd-geek" factor.
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
So what?
Sex sells. ESPECIALY to the 13-20ish male geeks. That's the demographic these games have.
Face it, we're geeks. We can't get any. If we could, we wouldn't be playing the games in the first place. Will half-naked chicks get me to buy a game? It all depends. Are they in the game? Are they out of the game? Are they hot?
And really, who is a little softcore porn in games hurting? If you don't want to see it, close your eyes. If you don't want your kids to see it? Tough luck, they will one day, no matter what.
and objectifying women? Please give me a break. Anyone who cant tell the difference between a [hooker|porn star|naked chick in a game|insert other sex orianted female profesion here] and an honest to goodness real life woman needs to go out and get a f'ing clue. Thank you. You may go now.
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
Alow me to shoot down your plan, if I may.
1)"Women in general actively dislike porn...The few women who do enjoy it are probably suffering from the kind of psychological problems that can only be solved by therapy." Umm, no. They just have a different view then you. Sex, in itself is a very natural thing. The human body is a beautiful thing. Sex/nudity is not something that should be considered bad, hidden or anything of the sort.
2)"If porn were made available freely, to anyone" I'll forget how ridiculous this is for just a moment, and focus on the LEGAL issues. Somebody owns a copyright on it, and thus it is THEIR PROPORTY. They can do with it as they see fit. Sell it, give it away free, etc. I'd love to see more free porn, but I know that the people who make it need to make money. (Anything free [as in beer] has this problem)
3)"regardless of sex or gender" Last time I checked, it was...
4) "say for example in our public libraries, and supermarkets" And just HOW MANY easily offended people like you are going to FLIP over this? Please...you shoot this one down yourself.
5) "It is the duty of congress to kill off the market for this debasing pornography" No, it isn't. Plus, congress is a bunch of old white guys who don't understand jack about the modern world, and don't know what FUN means.
6) "...and all the consumers get totally bored." Good god. I thought the problem was "There is enough porn in circulation now" If there's enough, why ain't we bored? I leave this one up to you.
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
How long do you remember your sweet kills for? I remember sweet kills from DooM 1.666 on up to present. Beyond team organized killing, what's there? I'm not sure I really care. I would perhaps submitt that's why games have continued to add eye candy as a way of improving the experience. For their customers, that's what really counts. I've got to tell you, the high I would get off of killing people and talking smack while listening a good soundtrack to kill by was well...killer, and probably difficult to improve on.
As for T&A in games, certainly male targeted games. It will be around for a LONG time. It's not that we males are the lesser sex, it's that evil game companies are manipulating our endocrine system. The stupid fact is, males give hotties, even fake ones, attention. It's hard wired. This will always be, and sex will always be an effective and cheap ploy to sell anything. It's like in anime a good number of the protagonists are either female or have a female side kick. Why might that be? Well anyone from either sex can blow stuff up, but teenage males only enjoy watching one of the sexes in a shower scene. Look at baywatch, Lifeguards fighting crime, makeing the streets safe. Who in the hell would watch it if there weren't playboy bunnies running down the beach in superslomo wearing stretchy stretchy lycra with the new worst single you've ever heard? Shepards in Mongolia installed satellite dishes in their yurts to see this show. And it was not for the compelling story.
As for difference. Well it's the spice of life, so I'd literally be a fool to dissagree. But I would submit that most people aren't fans of risk, particularly people who are letting other people bet their money. And in games, like everywhere else, people gravitate to proven concepts.
I think a truly cross over game would have to simulate a true microworld and society. It would have to be nonlinear, open ended, and free form. We've seen a lot of baby steps towards something like this. But still, were really a long ways off. The only things that offer this kind of experience are MUDs and their ilk. To tell the truth. As far as new goes, I now start to find my self whistfully looking back. I started out with some pretty sweet games. Adventure...ah adventure, to this day I hate and love that bat. Mostly really hate. Conan for the Apple. Oh yeah. Karataka. Why you had to save the princess when she could obviously take care of herself, I'll never know. Bard's Tale. Damn skippy baby. Wolfenstien, where the revolution would begin. 3d, DooM and Quake et al. All the way up to Jet Grind/Set Radio. Maybe Shenmue was another little tiny baby step into a brave new world, as it stands it's OK. Well maybe a little better than that. But Shenmue won't be a game I look back on whistfully 15 years from now.
At the end of the day, I think the question really is do males and females like to play the same games the same way? My guess is a pretty solid no. Are their exceptions? Sure, by in large, people are individuals, but statistically those exceptions aren't meaningful, and won't factor in. Right now, targeted games might be better, as they're easier to make. To be all things to all people isn't an easy task, ask Al Gore. And in the future, when there are unisex games that all love and adore, well I bet boys and girls will play them differently. In fact, it might be an interesting sociological study to do on the sims. See how different genders play the same game. Actually you could study any set of demographics. That'd be kind of a cool add on.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Do not listen to Tom Leykus.
Do not goto This website.
Do read Cosmo.
Do make your boyfriend take those tests as they really will tell you what's going on in your relationship.
Do ask him what he is thinking, preferably if he's watching his favorite sports team.
However, if he's watching his team in the playoffs: Turn off the TV and tell him you want to talk about your relationship.
Your boyfriend was actualy a composit of all man and so is an accurate depiction of any individual man. Your milage will not vary.
Do generalize all of his traits to the larger population, as they will certainly hold true.
But most importantly, make sure the next guy pays in full for the crimes of the last.
Only in this way will two people ever find true love.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
They're harder to make games for, I imagine Black and White might appeal to some girls, but there are a lot of other market forces competing for those dollars. Getting girls to shift some of their income to games, might be like getting boys to shift some of their income to nail polish for men (yeah right). In Japan I think the games that really have the attention of the ladies, are the relationship role-playing games which (from descriptions I've read elsewhere) seem to revolve around a girl picking some boy and convincing him to fall in love with her, in a game akin to an old skool pick-a-path adventure.
At the end of the day, it looks like good games are one of the rewards of being born a male. Hand-eye coordination is easier to code for than relationship building.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Here is the bottom line :
Lets see some oiled-up hard-bodied men in thongs.
Nintendo? Sierra? C'mon guys - for every ten busty beauties you hire to peddle your wares I'd like to see one or two well-muscled David Duchovny lookalikes on poles. Why should only the hetero boys have the fun?
Yeah baby, spread the love.
Oh no! The Game industry is more like the porn industry than hollywood because of boothbabes!... oh wait!!! there are models in hollywood too! And Tomcats just came out! Wait...whats that... American PIe was made in hollywood??? ahhh... stupid people...
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/20/magazine/20PORN. html?searchpv=site02
:). might just give gamers a reason to chuckle at how trollish the salon article really is.
read this article from the NYT about the porn industry then read the salon article
"Shut up brain or ill stab you with a Q-tip" Homer Simpson
Ahh, there is nothing better than the quick and satisfying simple downfield pass that requires 4 menu screens and a 116-thousand freaking button presses. Then the little bastard calls an audible, and goes into a thousand seperate screens, AGAIN. AIIIIIEEEEEE!!! YARS REVENGE!!! I NEED ONE BUTTON!!! JUUUUUST ONE FRIGGIN' BUTTON!!!
1) E3 is a gaming expo. It's gaming nerd central. Of course it is going to be appealing not to the tiny, erudite minority but to the geek boy majority. This guy just wants to believe that he can be a big enough geek that he shows up at huge nerd-o-ramas like E3 and yet expect all the other nerds to conform his "sensitive adult guy" prude mores.
2) Look at games like Myst. 95% of science fiction & fantasy books have a sex act in the first 15 pages to keep the teen boy audience hooked. Games, sci-fi, fantasy, RPGs have a core audience of guys. It doesn't mean there isn't a solid audience for thoughtful, "deep" games with a mature sensibility. But don't expect the industry to abandon skin and gore: the dog wags the tail, dumbass.
"Games should be treated as art:" there's room for artfulness in anything. And there's a big ol' economy of scale and typical corporate practices black hole sucking everything from cars to, well, hamburger into being treated like hamburger. But they call them GAMES, not ULTRA-SERIOUS PURSUITS, for a reason - they're supposed to be fun. This article sucked and this guy needs to shut up and play some Q-bert.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
As an example, my ex-boyfriend used to like both porn and sex. However, after viewing both for some time it was as though a change had come over him - he would become very demanding and really quite aggressive. I noticed that when he had been playing Quake III the effects were actually worse than when he had been watching porn. Since he has left me, I have made it a condition that those I am interested in not play computer games or use pornography. Both stifle the imagination whilst heightening emotions. This effect is dangerous - we should not stimulate those who cannot handle a heightened sense of awareness and can;t resist their desires.
I would very much like to see both industries become more responsible. I would not like to see them banned, of course, but I would like to see them consider the consequences of their actions - it is the women of America who really pay for the porn and violence that our menfolk consume.
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
PS Before I get flamed: I love Salon, and I realize Slashdot has linked to it quite a bit in the past.
Then again, 90% of all teenage guys play video games and view porn, so that statement doesn't really mean anything.
It wasn't talking about porn in the games, but being used to *show off* the game designers at E3.
I think the author had a good point. Unless you want to exclusively market your product to under 30 males, why not have your booth have something to do with your product?
Do you expect to see strippers at the Sims booth? Ok, this is a bit of an exageration, but it makes the point.
I've seen about 5 reports on this show in the past couple of days (how did I ever live without TechTV?) in various media and have not noticed any blatant sexism. Yeah, there are tall, skinny chicks in a couple of the fighters, but they kick ass, so it's no tryanny that they're hot, too.
Maybe those outlets are winking at the developers and suppressing the mix. Or maybe Salon.Com--whose print ads include a fake story lead that reads like the top of a racist troll--is just trying to pad their unique-eyeball tally.
--Blair
"You think?"
Mayny people suggest that viewing pornography or playing violent video games can cause a person to be perverted or violent.
The statistics are there, initiators of school shootings have played violent games, and rapists have often been found to be frquent pornography viewers.
I don't, however think this is cause and effect. People that commit violent acts are attracted to violent media, they're violent, that is what they like. Those who play violent video games or view pronography aren't drawn to murder or rape. While the fact that a rapist is drawn to porn facilitates the statistics conservative politicians wave around, pornography is more of a symptom than a disease, and I could have a sore throat for any number of reasons. (insert your ailment here)
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
OK, it seems as if most of us agree that the gaming industry's semi-obnoxious focus on sex and violence is just targetted marketing at work. After all, the biggest market for computer and/or console games is boys/men in, roughly, the teen through early twenties age groups. And males in that age group, as every Hollywood producer knows, *like* sex and violence. Simple enough, really. But, consider: People grow up. In a few years, lots of the people who are buying today's games will be getting boring real-world jobs, settling down with their wives, and raising kids. Are all of those people just going to stop playing games at that time? Of course not. But their tastes will have changed somewhat, and the gaming industry will have to come to grips with a huge chunk of their market no longer consisting exclusively of technologically sophisticated but culturally underdeveloped adolescents. I can't wait!
/* "Specialization is for insects." -Heinlein */
I guess this is more believable and consequently a better troll, but your post earlier this day in the Japanese gadgets discussion was much funnier.
if some one posted this link already the credit goes to them, I just do not have time to read all the posts, but this is a funny article called " Targeting The Loins "
Selling sex is wrong? When it comes to base prostitution, I can understand, helps keep mental rejects from spreading some VD... But I'd have to think that throught all of fucking history most parents are guilty of persuading their daughters to be upstanding and get a good husband instead of one without a future... Go for the money is the motto. Not much different than prostitution here. I don't see anything wrong with any girl selling their body for money, its theirs to do with as they want. Wow, softcore porn as characters. Who cares?
God spoke to me
yeah, right, Wagner, we should keep sex out of things. so, i guess writing stuff like this is completely out of the question.
Now, about this subject: it's wrong that while sex is publicly banned subject, entertainment and advertising industries make money on peoples daily need of it. They can sell more as long as people doesn't get used to sex. And you can't masturbate either because that's a BIG no-no in religious countries. Why, you'd be so fed up with sexual satisfaction that advertising wouldn't have any effect on you! OMG! So it's sin, makes you blind, embarrassing and what not.
"Whatever you do, don't come knocking. Not on this door." -Udall
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
James, have some balls! You can't get over it, only through it to become a Better Person(TM). Sex is fun, happy and very neccessary part of our lives. Those "lost boys" just might remember there's more to life than games when they get to talk to a real woman face to face at E3. Ok, so those women are not quite the ordinary type being too fit and wanted, but it's better than nothing.
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
No doubt. Since when has porn been sexuality? Since when has sexuality had anything to do with Deaus Ex?
E3 is an excuse for a bunch of little boys to get together and missapriopriate money that should be spent on advertising and game development on stroking their, well, egos. As the Salon article said hiring strippers sure doesn't sell games or build brands.
This article wasn't necesarily opinions held by Salon.com but by the writer alone. As Salon's fact sheet says about the Technology & Business section, "Smart, opinionated coverage of business, Internet news and digital culture from today's best technology and business writers." Here, the "opinionated" clearly is assocated to "today's best... writers."
Some support from Salon towards the article's viewpoint is given in the act of publishing the article. However, without explicit identification of the article as an official editoral opinion of the Salon site, any opinions and viewpoints brought forth in the article should be attributed to the author and not the publisher.
Christopher N Emmick
Christopher N Emmick
A good man, a better nerd.
Is it any wonder that bimbettes and games appear often together? Male adolescents playing games are already likely to be struggling for self-esteem and experimenting with pr0n at the expense of forming actual relationships with girls. Sorry to sound like Katz, but doesn't this stem from the poor socialisation of youth in general?
You can't blame marketers for picking the easiest, most-likely-to-succeed option for shifting units. Duke Nukem Forever will sell by the bucketful, esp. now that 3DRealms spent long hours coding that g-string dancer at the end of the preview movie released recently.
It isn't the gibs or girls I play games to see. Sure, seeing blood on a wall is handy for seeing if you've hit your opponent. I can't explain the value of tasselled b00bs in the same way. Once you develop some social skills and a mature attitude to other human beings, all this skin just becomes an obstacle to avoid when you're trying to have fun.
"If you create user accounts, by default, they will have an account type of Administrator with no password." KB Q293834
try 10^100 retard.
So a bunch of ugly, dumb moralists are upset again... Good. Sex is finally being accepted by NORMAL people. You can't call people perverts just for living their lives anymore. More sex the better -- in games, movies, tv,
Let's only have disgusting, unattractive characters from now on. We'll replace Lara Croft with Rosie O'Donnell. Will that satisfy the Tipper Gores of the world?
NO!? In other words, basically nothing will make them happy, because they enjoy preaching and making people feel bad. It has nothing to do with their cause; if they actually got what they wanted they'd still bitch just as loud.
Our culture has made soft-porn. We feel the body MUST be covered, and so we're attracted to what we can't see. Look at Europe, where any actress will casually strip for a movie where it is REASONABLE to be naked in the plot. :op
Stupidity leads to stupidity.
Oh and by the way... if all of our kids were looking at porn and not doing anything violent, this world would be a better place
While it is a sad commentary on life, the fact still remains that this is our society. Video games in general(at least for males) are all about competition. Video games are no different than sports in this aspect. So it is natural for your testosterone to rise while playing a video game. The gaming industry knows this all too well, and you better believe they will exploit it for thier own profit. SEX SELLS. Is this news? I actually find it easier to accept sex selling video games, rather than sex selling soft drinks. Welcome to America! Where up is down and down is up ;)
Who really cares if theres sex and violence in video games? If there is do you have to buy it? The only reason that there is because it sells, if people didn't really want it it wouldn't be selling now would it? If I've heard right so far, the only industry that thrives on the internet is porn... Maybe it's cause people actually *gasp* like sex... though everyone in the world is trying to stop you from it...
There may be a barrier, but I don't see it being broken here in America anytime soon. After all, women are still forced to be covered up (by something, if not by clothes) and there may come a day where the ad ALL advertisers want to be able to use (as described by the late Bill Hicks) may come about...
For the unknowing, the ad goes something like this: Imagine you're watching a commercial on TV...it's a close up of a woman's face, obviously happy...the camera pulls out....she's topless...the camera pulls out even more...she's totally nude...legs spread, showing everything Nature gave her (and I mean everything) with her hand stroking what should be the center of attention for every heterosexual male watching....and two words appear on the screen on either side of her hand: "DRINK COKE"
So as you might see...even though I doubt I will see an ad like that in my lifetime (never say never) we still have a ways to go before sex in advertising (or anywhere else) is considered passe. After all...as the MPAA or Madison Avenue can tell you, sex sells.
"What's so random about flipping a coin? Ever heard of the I Ching?"
Not to mention the fact that any hack who would use the word "cock-tease" in an article about alleged over-sexedness in an industry can be safely ignored. That in itself is proof that we live in a day and age when sex has mass appeal and is not considered by most to be impropriety when used like this. The majority of society--not just geekdom--is accepting of sexuality as an everyday part of existence, not something that needs to be kept private but something to be used as any other tool and any other type of appeal. This writer is just out of touch, and believes all the out of touch statements by old and out of date people like Sen. Lieberman and the others who are trying to close the gate after the horse has already left the barn.
Gaming is not a market for the old. It is a market for the young, the bulk of the industry aimed at teens through 30. As such, it is natural that the gaming community should reflect the values of its audience. And those values include treating sexuality openly. When the writer speaks of "the industry's dogged unwillingness (or inability) to join the mainstream," he's being ignorant of the fact that the behaviour he is denigrating is actually the mainstream.
It's ironic that at the same time old throwbacks like Lieberman who want to return culture to the 50s, are complaining that Hollywood is marketing sex and violence to teens, that this writer is ignorant enough to try to try to separate Hollywood from the gaming industry based on the gaming industry's wealth of sexuality and violence that is exactly akin to a typical Hollywood blockbuster. When he complains that gaming is an industry "with no genuine celebrities, or pop-cult recognition outside its narrow subculture" he conveniently ignores the fact that any given teen or twentysomething, and many older folks, can list their fvorite games just as they can their favorite films, and list their main characters just as they could list film stars. The lack of flesh-and-blood gaming icons outside the hardcore community is merely a reflection of the fact that people don't star in games--computer generated characters do, at least so far. So that's the fair comparison to make. Whether Mario or Lara Croft or Frogger, mainstream people know these characters and their games just as they know Hollywood stars and their movies.
The writer is just out of touch.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
A video game is no place for sex and violence. They should choose one or the other.
Hey, most gamers that I know like the babes, but they aren't the reason for going. The new games, trailors, demos, etc. are what make people want to come. The babes are kinda like that cherry on top of the whipped cream: Damn nice to have, but not essential to the meal.
Arrrrgh! Stop the monkeys!
Most of today's gamers are 15-21 yr old males. Does this not explain why games with scantily clad women are so popular? Of course Looge is older, but he'd never shy away from the chance of a sight of some babe's skin, oooh no.
Don't worry about it, Looge will make it all better.
He feeds on your apathy thereby becoming a greater force for good.
Nope: Definition of good varies according to morals but weed is always good.
CHUNG is KING, you fuckers
--------------------
From: Peter Chung
Subject: LIVING LIKE A KING
Date: Tue, 15 May 2001 17:26:21 -0700
I've got a spanking brand new 2000 sq. foot 3 bedroom apt. with a 200 sq. foot terrace running the entire length of my apartment with a view overlooking Korea's main river and nightline......Why do I need 3 bedrooms? Good question,.... the main bedroom is for my queen sizebed,...where CHUNG is going to fuck every hot chick in Korea over the next 2 years (5 down, 1,000,000,000 left to go).... the second bedroom is for my harem of chickies, and the third bedroom is for all of you fuckers when you come out to visit my ass in Korea. I go out to Korea's finest clubs, bars and lounges pretty much every other night on the weekdays and everyday on the weekends to (I think in about 2 months, after I learn a little bit of the buyside business I'll probably go out every night on the weekdays). I know I was a stud in NYC but I pretty much get about, on average, 5-8 phone numbers a night and at least 3 hot chicks that say that they want to go home with me every night I go out. I love the buyside,.... I have bankers calling me everyday with opportunties and they pretty much cater to my every whim - you know (golfing events, lavish dinners, a night out clubbing). The guys I work with are also all chilll - I live in the same apt building as my VP and he drives me around in his Porsche (1 of 3 in all of Korea) to work and when we go out. What can I say,.... live is good,... CHUNG is KING of his domain here in Seoul.....
So,.... all of you fuckers better keep in touch and start making plans to come out and visit my ass ASAP, I'll show you guys an unbelievable time....My contact info is below.... Oh, by the way,... someone's gotta start fedexing me boxes of domes,...I brought out about 40 but I think I'll run out of them by Saturday.....
Laters,
CHUNG
Peter Chung
The Carlyle Group
Suite 1009, CCMM Bldg.
12, Yoido-dong, Youngdeungpo-ku
Seoul 150-010, Korea
This is one ghetto I wouldn't mind living in!
It is getting so annoying now that the game developers spend so much money trying to put in all the details to the women in the games that it's making the rest of the game crappy. Take Tomb Raider for example. I know so many people that love that game just because Lara Croft is big-breasted and they only play the game with the nude patch on! Then you can take Duke Nukem as another example. Now that is a fun game, going around blasting fat pigs in cop suits so that their brains spill all over the walls. And then you have two strippers in a bar dancing on the tables while sick bastards pay them to take their tops off. Like come on, don't buy the game just for that. If this keeps going on we might not have a game industry, we could just replace as a porn industry.
The world is split into two parts. People who like anime and people that despise it. Be on the winning side. FORWARD ANI