Slashdot Mirror
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."
These women must not read any womens magazines as they are just as 'bad' if not 'worse'. Of course, they could just be jealous that they do not get as much attention as they think they should.
Begin Quote:
Sarah: Here's another rant on sex in videogame advertising. It's an endless cycle, girls don't play because the ads are clearly geared towards men. They don't feel like game development is a good place to be. They don't join the industry to change things, so things stay the same.
Telka: Sexuality in ads will exist as long as you have uncreative minds clamoring away on the idea "
that their audience is entirely male."
In defense of Anarchy Online's marketing ads. The game is a cyberpunk game and you always have half naked girls in sci fi. (Of course this is a fairly accurate stereotype).The game has been in a downward slide for some time. Even back when I played for about 6 months there were only like 3 servers. Now they are letting people play for free for a year. Lastly I had several friends online and real life that played the game and were girls.
I agree with the comment about at least making the video game girls attractive. My friend and I just recently played through the second Baldurs Gate and I choose the Cleric and she was very ugly. Even my friends wife was like, "Man she is ugly!"
You're not really advancing the "sensitive male cause" here by linking that as the first comment. Neither are the moderators who modded it up. (And come on, guys, hasn't everyone seen it a dozen times already anyway?)
Comment of the year
First of all, no one was more surprised than me that this was linked on Slashdot -- although we'd had 3 articles linked last month, I didn't think this would be one. It is what it is, a roundtable chat involving women in the industry. Second, I kept that in to show off some personality. I could have edited it out as I did some other extraneous stuff, but I thought that was a fun comment and thats what KB is about - FUN.
Killer Betties - www.killerbetties.com
In the last decade I have noticed a significan tincrease in the number of women involved in roleplay conventions, largely due to an increase in games that focus more on characterisation, political machinations and problem solving over dice rolling and simply slaying things.
Which is not to say that us chicks don't enjoy a bit of hack-n-slash from time to time, but overall we don't find it particularly compelling hour on hour.
Oddly enough, games that apparently did well in the female demographics were games like Myst and The Sims. They focus more on relationships and problem solving and not so much on killing stuff. They were also games that appealed to non-gamers generally.
They were also games that support picking them up and playing for a few minutes if that's all you have, but will also let you play for hours if you can. As someone with lots of other responsibilities in my life, it can be incredibly frustrating to playing a game and being unable to find the save point before you have to leave the game to deal with something more important. A good example would be one section in the middle of Sphinx last year where it was about an hour between save points the first time through in one area, with complex jumps, stealth sections, pattern based puzzle sequences and several combats. As another example, in WoW my primary character is Lvl 27, my husband's is Lvl 36, we started on the same day but I do most of the housework because he can't drag himself away from the computer.
Most women who game probably class themselves as casual gamers rather than hardcore, if they want to capture the femlae market it's possibly more important to focus on that aspect rather than how much cleavage the female characters are showing.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
From article: "I took pride in the fact that I was the only person to write reviews consistently for IGN who was a female. When I got added to their editorial staff list (because I was promoted to run their vaults), I was the only female on those lists. If another female had come in, I would have felt odd about it. But I would have needed to check myself too."
I think it's interesting that they admit to doing the same that males often get blamed for. Being a "newer" market for women, it feels strange or awkward when a women is in the ranks. This isn't to say she shouldn't be there and if they can pull their own weight than so be it. At least they admit that it seems strange for them too.
actually there was a show a few years ago that did a piece on how magazines use computers to adjust pictures for stuff like covergirls etc. they will often stretch womens legs, reduce their thighs, make their lips bigger, supersaturate their eyes and on and on. the lengthening of the legs was really interesting as it is so subtle it's almost unnoticable. however you still see it and it does look more attractive...
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
I don't like Valve tech or how Valve treats their community, but Half-Life 2 was a thing of beauty. There were both male and female resistant fighters, dressed pretty identically.
And Alyx? If Gordon didn't have his HEV suit, he'd probably dress like that.
They also went for realism all across the board, and although the breasts are perfect, they aren't DDD.
I would even guess that we will start to see more fairness there as games get more realistic. Notice how big they were in Q3A -- but everything was big, guns, armor, everything, because if it wasn't big, you wouldn't see it -- computers weren't capable of particularly fine levels of detail.
No, what I want to see is games that aren't so damn American. If I can blow up a zombie, will seeing some skin really traumatize me so much? Only in America.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Um, no. The Duke Nukem shape is not physiologically possible for any human being.
The strange thing is that while the ultra-hunky heroes are seen as a "wish-fulfillment" figure for guys ("gee, I wish I had muscles like him and knew how to kick ass"), the ultra-feminine heroines are seen as a "jealousy/envy" figure by women ("they've no right to have a heroine looking like that - she makes me feel inferior"). Me, I reckon that speaks volumes about the way most men and women think. Men are much more "pack animals" who collect in mutually-supportive groups, and status rubs off from who you're with. Whilst women are more likely to hang out in larger groups, they're classically a group of mutual competitors. I know this doesn't always hold true, but it's a good approximation.
Grab.