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Getting the Girl
1up.com has a great article up entitled Getting The Girl. Zoe Flower discusses female gaming stereotypes, the role of women in gaming, and the mythical "girl formula" for gaming success. From the article: "Lara Croft continues to personify an ongoing culture clash over gender, sexuality, empowerment, and objectification. It was while standing in my first-ever ladies' room line at E3 2004 as I pondered the Playboy bunnies, the return of Leisure Suit Larry, and the slew of buxom virtual ladies headlining each booth that I questioned whether the industry had evolved at all."
The biggest market for video games are males aged 12-25. Big breasted women helps sell games to this demographic. That is all.
If having a slew of "buxom virtual ladies" is wrong then I don't want to be right.
Sometimes women will say to me "Look at those scantily clad women with their tits hanging out on the box! That's sexist!"
To which I have to say "Do you see any short bald dudes with a big pot belly on any of these boxes either? No, it's all he-man looking dudes busting at the seams with muscles".
These games aren't any different than music videos or movies. Do you see any ugly people in music videos or movies aimed at 18-25 audience? Of course not. No one attacks the music industry for using half-naked chicks and musclemen with abs-o-steele to get teenagers to watch their videos...
1: "Box" isn't used as a slang term in the USA
or
2: Slashdot is even geekier than I thought...or perhaps less geeky...I'm not sure now...
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
Zoe Flower sounds more like a porn name, to me at least.
Give the feminazi shit a rest for awhile.
If Lara Croft was a fat bull-dyke noone would buy or play the game.
BTW, before you start crying "sexism", you might want to note that male characters are invariably the 6'4 rugged Dirty-Harry type.
I've never seen an FPS where you play a myopic, balding, fat kernel hacker.
Half Life was as non-stereotype a lead character as I've seen, and that's only because Gordon wears glasses.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Oh, Girl... Something we know nothing about. :)
Just because there's pornos doesn't mean someone else can't release chick flicks. Similarly, just because Leisure Suit Larry games exist doesn't mean female preferred games like the Sims series haven't been released and done very well.
Hopefully some publishers/designers will realise that they're excluding potential customers with such tactics like those who now release for Macs as well. But realistically, there will always be a probably large section of the industry [just like the movie industry] which will focus on their core target audience: horny, horny young men.
That's her real name. Her parents were hippies.
I'm being completely serious here. She used to write a collumn for OPM, and she wrote about her name once.
In Soviet russia, only old Koreans profit from pictures of Natalie Portman stored on Beowulf Clusters.
If you go to the magazine section and see all the silly men's magazines, they have pretty girls on them (occasionally men).
When you look at the women's trashy magazines, they have pretty girls on them (occasionally men). You know, the ones that tell you how to make your butt smaller, charge your cell phone, run a fortune 500 company, and get that cute guy, all before lunch?
I thought Alyx was a pretty well realized female character. Tough, feminine, sexy without being a slutty, smart as hell, and she even possessed a figure without Laura-Croftian... embellishments. I think it says positive things that the top game of the year has a female character that can stand up with the men in the game, and possibly has a future in her own game. I'd *love* to see an Alyx and DOG game, or just Alyx for that matter.
Sure, you can find stereotypes in trashy games like BloodRayne and various fighters, but there are plenty of male stereotypes to be found over there as well.
Like my comments? Try my podcast: http://www.baldmove.com
What makes Ms. Flower's opinion about what characters in video games should look like, "more" valid than anyone else's?
Nothing. Unfortunately, there are many more video game customers who would like their female characters to have cartoonishly large breasts than there are video game customers who would like their female characters to have folds and beards.
The difference is that guys don't get their panties in a bunch because all of the male video game characters have cartoonishly large muscles.
Ms. Flower is trying to manufacture a double standard where none exists - male and female characters are treated the same; they're made to look perfect.
As for video game themes, Ms. Flower is simply outvoted. Our culture uses sex to sell. We sell stuff using attractive people, choosing gender based on audience. Complaining that video game conferences have booth babes is like complaining that there are no fat guys in soap operas.
paintball
http://zoeflower.1up.com/
Cute.
After reading the title i thought the article would actually be useful to us (the stereotypical /. reader). Turns out its about selling video games to girls, laaaaaame.
Everywhere I've read, the average age of video game buyers is 36.
Do booth babes sell product? I can recall only two sets of booth babes at a LWCE. The first was the BSD Daemon Babe, Cerwin Ercen. She remains popular to this day. But her popularity has more to do with her geekiness, ordinariness, and her obvious play on the booth babe stereotype. Cerwin as a booth babe is clever hack. It's screaming to an unlistening world that you don't have to be a lobotomized and plasticized supermodel from the pages of Playboy to look sexy.
But at that same expo there was another set of booth babes (and a couple of booth studs for "balance"). They were the epitome of the stereotype. What booth was this? Frankly, I can't remember. These people were so out of place at the convention that even the models looked embarassed.
They didn't show up at the next show.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Men/boys (your main game demographics historically) like to look at attractive women. There is nothing wrong with this, it is a natural response.
Men do not have to stop acting like men just because a few women (I say "few" because I most women I know are OK with guys looking at girls, as long as it's not overt and rude) take offense. I say, let 'em make games w/beefy guys as the characters, if the female market will bear it.
Suppressing biological drives is tough... attempting to suppress the most important drive is a futile exercise.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
This is an example of political correctness stifling scientific understanding. Over the years people have been taught to despise and shoot down any stereotype, even if that stereotype has a basis in truth. Remember, not ALL stereotypes are bad or offensive.
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What the original poster said is true. The brains of men and women are specialized for different functions. It has been proven numerous times that men are more optimized at visual spatial skills while women have inherent advantages in verbal and organizational skills.
http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?
And as far as black people having more fast twitch musle fibers, that's not entirely accurate but there is some truth behind the story. It's not all black people, but specifically people who evolved in the Western Africa region do have a higher percentage of quick twitch muscle fibers and a higher testosterone level than those elsewhere in the world. They have a distinct advantage in anaerobic performance such as sprinting, and the records over the years spell it out clearly. Don't confuse this with "all" black people, because those who evolved in Eastern Africa, notably the high altitude region between Kenya and Ethiopia have almost the complete opposite evolutionary specialization. Not surprisingly, from evolving in a high altitude region, they have a larger lung capacity and better cardiovascular system (more red blood cells) than those who evolved at lower altitudes. They excel at aerobic activities such as long distance running.
http://www.africana.com/articles/daily/index_20
In the examples I gave above, look at the records. You have a huge pool of competitors from all over the globe yet people from a small area seem to win a *huge* proportion of events that *far* exceeds the percentage that a random group of people should win. I mean just take a look at the Boston Marathon. Kenya is not exactly the most populous country on Earth, but look at the results from the last 20 years when they started competing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_winners_of
This is not a racist or sexist discussion, this is a discussion of the realities of evolution and the differences that we live with. It's not a reason to hate, it's a reason to understand.
I am not racist or sexist, I'm just not an ultra left-wing PC Nazi or an ultra right-wing Bible thumper. I'm just a regular guy who would like to throw the racism and sexism out the window and find out the *real* underlying causes, even if they are taboo to talk about. I'm firm believer in evolution and I believe that many of the differences you see in races/the sexes is due to evolving in different areas or doing different tasks.