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Female Gamers Duke It Out
It's March, and that means that Women's History Month has rolled around again. The latest event put on by 'Women in Games International' was held in February; Both Wired and Gamasutra have rundowns on the event. Wired's coverage highlights the two camps of female gamers, the 'Frag Dolls' and the 'Casual Gamers' that populated the event. Gamasutra's piece discusses the exploration of women in all gamer roles. That, indeed, was the focus of the event: Women as players, designers, and gamers. From that article: "Margaret Wallace (Skunk Studios), also on the panel, railed against the industry for disenfranchising women. 'There's a push against women gamers from within the game industry,' she said. Games have been made 'with puke-humor' thought to be edgy, she said, wondering why developers don't see the direct correlation between the 'sophomoric' humor put into the games and women not liking them. 'They treat women as a mysterious nut to crack.' Wallace's advice: 'Make a game mechanic accessible.'" GameSetWatch also a blog post linking to some advice for female FPS players, especially 'aggressive young girls'.
Sure, everybody talks about the women who like Tetris-style games (my own mother is one of them), and the "tomboys" who like blood and violence are a big deal, but what about the third camp? The big secret behind women: we like to play God. Give me SecondLife or The Sims or Black and White any day of the week. I think it's a control thing.
Anda's Game (have to either subscribe or go through an ad to see it) is a cute story about gaming from a girl's perspective. Fiction, but maybe not so much as it seems. It seems like the sort of thing that might help some guys relate a little bit better.
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Some females play video games. We've gotten that for YEARS; it's about as revolutionary at this point as minorities going to college.
I find the Fragdolls website sort of amusing. It seems to do nothing but promote a few girls who play video games.. What else do they do?.. well they're semi-attractive 20-somethings, of course.. just look at their profiles, it's an amature modeling site.
That's unlike any clan I've ever been in. Most of the people in clan [DXM] were so overweight I doubt they could even stand upright for a whole photoshoot..
Their site is paid for by ubisoft, and I wouldn't be surprised if they make a bit on the side so they can devote more time to gaming and attracting males to specific areas such as x-box live games.
And what kind of "serious gamer" puts x-box as their mainstay? Last time I checked, half the genres out there are nearly unplayable without a mouse.
I'd imagine this type of thing would deter more women to play games than anything else.
I could be wrong though, I know when my girlfriend played Battlefield 2 she was all about flirting with the other team to get them to type more than play. We'd win nearly every round.
Latewire
Ever hear of a game called "Beyond Good and Evil"? I'm not saying the developers understood women. But the games main charecter was a strong willed woman who wasn't about sex appeal. It was also an amazing game. It's on all the 'current gen' systems (GC, PS2, XBox) and is not likely to cost more than 20 bucks. I think I saw it on PC, but I might be mistaken.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Hey, I'm a GUY and I don't like seeing women objectified in video games. Not just because of how I think it might effect our culture, but because it really feels like a threat to my intelligence, and it reenforces male stereotypes just as much as it does female stereotypes. Game companies putting in big-titted, thongly dressed women over and over again just says to me, "we think that men only ever think about is sex, and from a purely physical standpoint." You see this stereotype reenforced everywhere in our culture, but this is usually completely exadurated. Sure, it makes sense to cast characters that are reasonably attractive, especially if we are supposed to connect and empathize with them, being "easy to look at" is a positive feature. But making them completely abnormally sexual, either in appearence or in personality, just destroys all empathetic connection with that character. If I wanted to just look at sexual women all the time, I'd probably just hang out at METArt all the time or subscribe to Penthouse.
Strangely enough, in narrative games, such as RPGs or adventure games, I think that there is a lot more diversity in female characterization than male charactization. For the guys, 95% of characters either fall into: "tough talking hero", "silent, hard-boiled badass", "innocent young boy", "wise, though cool, old geezer", and "silent seifer protagonist". For the women, you have you're typical "starry-eyed romantic lead", "boobulicious, overbearing young woman", and the "annoying, but cute little girl". Yet, I would only say that about 50%-60% of female characters in games fit into those distinct catagories, and even the ones that do tend to have much richer personalities than the guys.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.