Women on Sex and Videogames

KillerBetties.com continues to produce interesting female oriented gaming commentary. Their latest piece is entitled Sex and Videogames, with several female gamers commenting on the likes of Leisure Suit Larry, the Anarchy Online 'Play Me' ads, and the breast size of electronic actors. From the article:"Do you think the shift towards breeding game designers in college with specialized degrees is going to detract from the casual-gaming young female? Companies so intent on hiring people with only complete devotion to videogames... I didn't know I wanted to make games until my last year of college."

Comments

Young AND a girl

[JNighthawk]

This poor child has to face both stereotypes.

this just in....

[TouchOfRed]

SEX SELLS

Boobs

[Anonymous Coward]

Women constantly complain about boobs in games, but look at the cover of women's magazines: boobs. They clearly like looking at boobs too.

Re:Boobs

[drinkypoo]

The women on magazine covers are as real as the rubber shark in Jaws. Just like film, a photograph can be altered (or just shot!) to make someone look any way you want. The lighting, clothing, makeup, and hairdressing conspire to make them look substantially different from the way they REALLY look before you even get to airbrushing, digital retouching, et cetera. The clothing they wear shapes their breasts and in fact the rest of their body, and the pose you see them in on the cover is typically one of tens or hundreds and chosen because it makes them look as good as possible. In other words, they NEVER look like that, and even their body only looks like that for fleeting moments.

My girlfriend just got Sudeki (you know, chick with huge gazongas on the cover, holding her arms above her head) and was actually partially motivated by the fact that Maxim gave it a high rating. The women in the linked dialogue might be representative but they don't speak for all female gamers and they need to build a bridge, get over it, and vote with their dollars. The guys in games are unrealistic too, but I don't give a shit because I'm playing the game, not critiquing its artwork.

Re:Boobs

[Anonymous Coward]

Women in videogames are pretty much 100% fantasy. Waists so thin they can wear a wedding ring as a belt, breasts so huge that no material existing today could truly contain their gravity, and of course, so much jiggle that any real woman would be unable to maintain her balance. Oh yeah, and no depth. They just kill things, or look pretty (or both).

Yes, because MEN in videogames are so realistic! It's not like they have stupidly large muscles or anything, is it? It's not like the veins are basically bursting free of their limbs at all, right? And hey, the men in videogames have so much depth! It's not like they just kill things, right?

Videogame characters are caricatures. Female, male, it makes no difference. The attempt to paint it as some sort of anti-female crusade is just baseless politics. Ignore it.

Boy, am I tired of this crap....

[Anonymous Coward]

"Trisha: Computer companies will need to grow up - and give benefits to workers to include more women. So that anyone can have a family and make games."

Or, in other words "Whaaaaa! Women are discriminated against because they have to make a choice! I require benefits to pad reality so my choice not to devote my life to my art is easier!"

Look, ladies. You either want to play with the big boys or you don't. You can have a career in tech, or a family and a pseudo-carrier. Even maternity/parental leave won't make up for the fact that taking a year out is virtually inconceivable in an industry where 1% downtime is a joke if it's proposed and a disaster if it happens

Even if it that weren't the case men will always outperform women in business (any business, games included) because the choice of carrier or family is one luxury men don't have. That right girls they don't have a choice. Women can have a family or a career. Men can have a career or a bottle of Listerine in a brown bag on the street.

LSL: MCL is _not_ Leisure Suit Larry

[Safety Cap]

Get one thing straight: LSL: MCL is nothing but a collection of fark jokes and jigglies without any plot or character.

Al Lowe, the creator of the original (and who had absolutely nothing to do with this POS) said this about MCL:

It is not an adventure game.There are no real puzzles, no interactive dialog, no narrator, no character development, and nearly no plot. Much of the dialogue is uninspired and trite. There's more profanity in the first scene than in all the previous Larry games combined. Women cuss like sailors. The F-word is repeated so often the writers must have used a macro.

Re:Maxim should make games.

[Ra5pu7in]

Gak, as a woman gamer even I wouldn't find "sagging breasts" and "child bearing hips" attractive. The girl from Dark Alliance isn't ugly, even if these gals don't think she's pretty. Very cliche'd, but it really is true that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder".

I don't think women getting a larger market share would stop games from marketing using sex or making games that include sex. That's like thinking that more women buying magazines will reduce the number of guy magazines. Women getting into games will simply provide support for developers and programmers who want to try different things - like an RPG with female heroes that doesn't focus on changing clothing or an FPS with female characters who dress and act like real military women do.

Gee, I wish I looked and behaved like Duke Nukem!

[aok]

How many guys look and behave like Duke Nukem or most other male characters in video games?

Do we play those games because we wish we were big juiced-up tough guys or is it just funny and fun to play? Are we worried that if girls see Duke that they'll expect us to look and act like him?

Anyway, you can't prevent what guys find physically attractive in females. The reverse is also true. If I'm an ugly bastard, that doesn't mean all male characters in video games should also be ugly bastards.

Horrible Interview.

[DAldredge]

Why did the interviewer allow it to degenerate into a political discussion? Hell, they couldn't keep their minds on the topic for 30 mintues and we a susposed to respect their opinions?

"Telka: You'd be surprised... not to offend anyone here if you did vote for Bush... but look how many people voted for him because "he prays". That's it... *shakes head*
Staci: I don't want to talk about elections ... I was fooled by the liberal propaganda that Kerry actually had a shot in hell and I voted for him -- which made his losing all the more devastating.
Trisha: Understanding a sound bite about the president is easier than understanding the hundreds of games that come out yearly.
Trisha: Bummed at the election as well."

Re:Sex and AO

[Blakey Rat]

I always enjoyed the human female skins in Neverwinter Nights... as long as the camera was zoomed out (the way you normally played), the model was attractive and moved realistically, etc. But when you zoomed in, suddenly she had all these crows feet on her face and looked 90 years old... it was almost surreal-weird. I guess the developers either did it on purpose as some kind of joke, or just assumed nobody would zoom in that far and didn't fix a bug.

Did /. really have to link to such a bad article?

[Flyboy Connor]

This article is terrible. It is just a page ripped from a chat session between four women who have little interesting to say about "Sex in Games", who have no qualifications to talk about the subject (apart from the fact that they are women), and who quickly degenerate towards yakking about game advertisements without saying anything profound about them.

Surely there is a lot that can be said about "Sex in Games" from the female perspective. But it should be said by a woman with a brain who writes an article because she has something meaningful to say, and knows how to bring an argument.

So my mind boggles why /. felt it necessary to link to this stuff.

Family Friendly

[Macgrrl]

There were a number of studies done recently in Australia that showed that men also get side-tracked career wise if it looks like they will put their family first at any stage.

Australia is one of a number of supposedly first world countries that doesn't currently have a fertility rate that is anywhare approaching replacement levels. One of the major issues is that people put off having children and one of the more frequently given reasons are economic.

At some point we need to wake up to real across the board family friendly policies in the workplace for men and women - unless of course we want to outsource our population generation to the 3rd world along with all our jobs.