It's true - to broadly generalise, women love the social stuff. At least, that's one of the key points made at the Women's Games Conference last year! I know loads of women playing MMOs -- even my FPS clan has started a MMO division -- though I have to acknowledge that many of them were introduced to the genre by a (usually male) friend.
So to me, hookers and pimps and johns in a MMO game doesn't sound bad at all. Not because of the sex but because these people found a way to play the game wich goes beyond what is in the manual.
It's not quite as exciting as all that. When there's not a manual, and there's the ability to customise your appearance and animations almost infinitely (sticking to a humanoid theme), sex will emerge. Just like real life, tbh.
It must be working -- the recruitment event in London tonight (with speech by Cerf) is fully booked. Google is definitely the cool place to be now if you're a comp.sci. finalist looking for a job. They should bottle that attraction and sell it to flagging tech companies starved for grads...
Not at all. See the other posts in this thread for a proper definition:-)
Second Life isn't an ARG--it's an MMO and a virtual world. Key ARG features missing: cross-media interaction; "This Is Not A Game" (blending of ingame and out-game resources--you never quite know if something is real or not); Web-based network of sites which follow a central universe or storyline; Puppet Masters creating content behind the scenes; puzzles including codebreaking, riddle-solving and distributed challenges (I Love Bees' payphones); etc. etc.
Well that's the thing Dorkmaster; Adrian's numbers show that actually more people played The Beast than any other ARG since! However I think awareness and popularity has definitely skyrocketed--the people who played Haunted Apiary and those playing PxC at the moment are not the same as played the Beast, though there's plenty of overlap (myself included).
Here's to more grassroots games as well as more highly-publicised ones!
as the author of the Joystiq article in question, I'd totally recommend Perplex City. Crazy, futuristic, with a real money prize and puzzle cards to collect.
Getting started with ARGs is always the hardest part both for players and designers. Most people fall down the rabbit-hole by accident:)
I could really enjoy a multiplayer cooperative puzzle solving game that didn't require every member of a group to be online at the same time. Imagine some of those simple puzzles they put in newspapers (crosswords, soduko, cryptoquotes, etc.) of massive size where a group of six or so friends could get online together and work cooperatively towards solving it, or any one of you could get back on at your liesure and put 30 minutes into solving a tiny part of it. Imagine massive puzzles of various types that are aggregates of smaller puzzles and as each smaller piece is solved, the larger puzzle inches closer towards the final solution.
You have just perfectly described an Alternate Reality Game. One that may interest you right now is Perplex City. I'm addicted, there are puzzle cards, online mysteries and live events to go to, no fees (the puzzle cards cost money, but this is unusual in an ARG) and my brain is getting one of the best workouts I've ever gotten from a "game".
Zonk completely fails to mention that Highbury Press is currently up for sale and most of its magazines face closure.. UK magazines are in a pretty sorry state. Edge is good, but PC Gamer is a self-congratulatory smarmy piece of chauvinistic rubbish. I used to get PC Format but that's gone downhill too.. now the only thing I get magazines for is the exclusives (and the only decent one in months has been OXM360's FFXI beta).
My personal experience backs that up. Women are huge casual game consumers. On the other hand every female Halo player gender-bends, as the only playable characters are male:)
Studies show that only 5% of male characters are played by women. Yet 60% of female characters are played by men... The ELSPA white paper "Chicks and Joysticks" has more on that.
I didn't personally think up the clan name, I'm just a lowly division leader;) I think like so many things it was a good name for a group of friends who came together, and the name has now stuck. I don't think we could actively change it now due to force of habit and reputation, but who knows..
As for suitability: Ideally 3 letters long as either an acronym or word, that makes it easy to register consistent gamer tags, gamer names and clan names across games. Subtle is good, though something like "Gamers In Real Life" would mean members would have to put "GIRL" in their gamertags, which ruins the subtlety:)
If I were to create a new girl clan, today, I'd probably take some gaming acronym with G in, and replace that with the word "Girls" -- e.g. SMG, gg, etc etc. But some people think that's even worse than an acronym which is related to femininity -- you can't please them all, so I think we're going to have to work with what we've got.
(My branch of the clan, iPMS -- international PMS -- is possibly an exception to the "PMS" thing because it doesn't instantly scream out "GIRLZ" but makes people wonder if we're something to do with Apple. Oh well!)
Ah, I see what you mean now. I wasn't quite talking in that context (I meant I was personally serious about what I was writing, rather than meaning to emphasise that we are a serious clan, but hey)...
If you can think of a better name then please go ahead. It has to be suitable for a clantag and also mean something useful, it has to reflect the clan's credo and raison d'être, and not be sickly sweet or girly-girlish. Not easy, is it?
It stands for Pandora's Maiden Soldiers, by the way, we're not actually a clan called "Pre-Menstrual Syndrome":)
The Frag Dolls are a small, high-profile, sponsored clan. I wasn't using it as a derogatory remark towards the sort of girls so disparaged in these threads -- for example, the girls who apparently only say they like games to get guys. (Not that I've ever met any girls like that!)
Some of our members are also Frag Dolls, and they're the scariest, craziest, most hardcore gaming ladies you'll ever meet. Just make sure you're not the wrong end of their SMGs...
As for any division in our ranks, well; we all love games, and we all spend a lot of our time playing them. Obviously, as with any large number of women with common interests, you'll find all sorts of different types of people. But we're all gamers first, girls second, despite whatever angles the press might try to take. It seems the gaming press can't get enough of the whole girl gamer thing.
I'm personally off to the Women's Game Conference in a couple of weeks to see what all the fuss is about...
I like the people I play with to at least have an inkling that I'm female, because eventually they would find out anyway, and I'd rather get the abuse over and done with. People can put whatever they want in their names, surely?
I love that term. Corporate-sponsored feminism. As for the hired models, well, I can't entirely deny that. GASP. SHOCK HORROR. Because some of our members are Frag Dolls, and we know how the gaming community feels about them... But man, if I were a model, it would have to be for some pretty specialist magazines.
I have that shirt! I imported it specially, because to me it sums up exactly what PMS is all about, and all the comments you make about the people who give female gamers a bad name, well, none of those apply to PMS. I'm entirely serious about this. We don't have the girly-girls who scream whenever they get shot and we don't have women who complain that their hair is being mussed up by the Xbox headset. Well, we might have a couple, but with over 200 members we have representatives of every type of female gamer. The clan founders are pretty, yeah, but they don't leverage it the way the Frag Dolls do (now there's a whole other can of worms!). To prove this you can look at the success we've been having in the UK (where I'm from) recently as a clan; none of us are supermodels, we just like to shoot things dead.
Come frag with us and you'll find out what I mean -- do you have Xbox Live or are you a PC gamer?
Slashdot Mirror
It's true - to broadly generalise, women love the social stuff. At least, that's one of the key points made at the Women's Games Conference last year! I know loads of women playing MMOs -- even my FPS clan has started a MMO division -- though I have to acknowledge that many of them were introduced to the genre by a (usually male) friend.
Still, the future's bright.
So to me, hookers and pimps and johns in a MMO game doesn't sound bad at all. Not because of the sex but because these people found a way to play the game wich goes beyond what is in the manual.
It's not quite as exciting as all that. When there's not a manual, and there's the ability to customise your appearance and animations almost infinitely (sticking to a humanoid theme), sex will emerge. Just like real life, tbh.
In a non-ironic sense -- I actually prefer this design. Sure, I'm female, but it somehow takes the harshness out of /.
Please don't bring the old ugly green back!
It must be working -- the recruitment event in London tonight (with speech by Cerf) is fully booked. Google is definitely the cool place to be now if you're a comp.sci. finalist looking for a job. They should bottle that attraction and sell it to flagging tech companies starved for grads...
:)
I aten't dead.
Not at all. See the other posts in this thread for a proper definition :-)
Second Life isn't an ARG--it's an MMO and a virtual world. Key ARG features missing: cross-media interaction; "This Is Not A Game" (blending of ingame and out-game resources--you never quite know if something is real or not); Web-based network of sites which follow a central universe or storyline; Puppet Masters creating content behind the scenes; puzzles including codebreaking, riddle-solving and distributed challenges (I Love Bees' payphones); etc. etc.
Well that's the thing Dorkmaster; Adrian's numbers show that actually more people played The Beast than any other ARG since! However I think awareness and popularity has definitely skyrocketed--the people who played Haunted Apiary and those playing PxC at the moment are not the same as played the Beast, though there's plenty of overlap (myself included).
Here's to more grassroots games as well as more highly-publicised ones!
--sherpa
as the author of the Joystiq article in question, I'd totally recommend Perplex City. Crazy, futuristic, with a real money prize and puzzle cards to collect.
:)
Getting started with ARGs is always the hardest part both for players and designers. Most people fall down the rabbit-hole by accident
I could really enjoy a multiplayer cooperative puzzle solving game that didn't require every member of a group to be online at the same time. Imagine some of those simple puzzles they put in newspapers (crosswords, soduko, cryptoquotes, etc.) of massive size where a group of six or so friends could get online together and work cooperatively towards solving it, or any one of you could get back on at your liesure and put 30 minutes into solving a tiny part of it. Imagine massive puzzles of various types that are aggregates of smaller puzzles and as each smaller piece is solved, the larger puzzle inches closer towards the final solution.
You have just perfectly described an Alternate Reality Game. One that may interest you right now is Perplex City. I'm addicted, there are puzzle cards, online mysteries and live events to go to, no fees (the puzzle cards cost money, but this is unusual in an ARG) and my brain is getting one of the best workouts I've ever gotten from a "game".
Enjoy.
Interesting article though ;)
Zonk completely fails to mention that Highbury Press is currently up for sale and most of its magazines face closure.. UK magazines are in a pretty sorry state. Edge is good, but PC Gamer is a self-congratulatory smarmy piece of chauvinistic rubbish. I used to get PC Format but that's gone downhill too.. now the only thing I get magazines for is the exclusives (and the only decent one in months has been OXM360's FFXI beta).
Don't you give the citizens enough prostitutes and they get happy again?
My personal experience backs that up. Women are huge casual game consumers. On the other hand every female Halo player gender-bends, as the only playable characters are male :)
Studies show that only 5% of male characters are played by women. Yet 60% of female characters are played by men... The ELSPA white paper "Chicks and Joysticks" has more on that.
Where is this story "via"? I've only seen it on one blog today.. where's the credit..
You know there are DoA and Halo 2 competitions in the WCG, right?
Think so. I get confused over the specifics of the M, though.
I didn't personally think up the clan name, I'm just a lowly division leader ;) I think like so many things it was a good name for a group of friends who came together, and the name has now stuck. I don't think we could actively change it now due to force of habit and reputation, but who knows..
:)
As for suitability: Ideally 3 letters long as either an acronym or word, that makes it easy to register consistent gamer tags, gamer names and clan names across games. Subtle is good, though something like "Gamers In Real Life" would mean members would have to put "GIRL" in their gamertags, which ruins the subtlety
If I were to create a new girl clan, today, I'd probably take some gaming acronym with G in, and replace that with the word "Girls" -- e.g. SMG, gg, etc etc. But some people think that's even worse than an acronym which is related to femininity -- you can't please them all, so I think we're going to have to work with what we've got.
(My branch of the clan, iPMS -- international PMS -- is possibly an exception to the "PMS" thing because it doesn't instantly scream out "GIRLZ" but makes people wonder if we're something to do with Apple. Oh well!)
Ah, I see what you mean now. I wasn't quite talking in that context (I meant I was personally serious about what I was writing, rather than meaning to emphasise that we are a serious clan, but hey)... If you can think of a better name then please go ahead. It has to be suitable for a clantag and also mean something useful, it has to reflect the clan's credo and raison d'être, and not be sickly sweet or girly-girlish. Not easy, is it? It stands for Pandora's Maiden Soldiers, by the way, we're not actually a clan called "Pre-Menstrual Syndrome" :)
Wow, that's a delayed reply and a half, and entirely unrelated to what I posted... Care to elucidate?
The Frag Dolls are a small, high-profile, sponsored clan. I wasn't using it as a derogatory remark towards the sort of girls so disparaged in these threads -- for example, the girls who apparently only say they like games to get guys. (Not that I've ever met any girls like that!)
Some of our members are also Frag Dolls, and they're the scariest, craziest, most hardcore gaming ladies you'll ever meet. Just make sure you're not the wrong end of their SMGs...
As for any division in our ranks, well; we all love games, and we all spend a lot of our time playing them. Obviously, as with any large number of women with common interests, you'll find all sorts of different types of people. But we're all gamers first, girls second, despite whatever angles the press might try to take. It seems the gaming press can't get enough of the whole girl gamer thing.
I'm personally off to the Women's Game Conference in a couple of weeks to see what all the fuss is about...
Most of the time, because of the Xbox Live microphone functionality, and the propensity of most gamers to use it.
I like the people I play with to at least have an inkling that I'm female, because eventually they would find out anyway, and I'd rather get the abuse over and done with. People can put whatever they want in their names, surely?
I love that term. Corporate-sponsored feminism. As for the hired models, well, I can't entirely deny that. GASP. SHOCK HORROR. Because some of our members are Frag Dolls, and we know how the gaming community feels about them... But man, if I were a model, it would have to be for some pretty specialist magazines.
I have that shirt! I imported it specially, because to me it sums up exactly what PMS is all about, and all the comments you make about the people who give female gamers a bad name, well, none of those apply to PMS. I'm entirely serious about this. We don't have the girly-girls who scream whenever they get shot and we don't have women who complain that their hair is being mussed up by the Xbox headset. Well, we might have a couple, but with over 200 members we have representatives of every type of female gamer. The clan founders are pretty, yeah, but they don't leverage it the way the Frag Dolls do (now there's a whole other can of worms!). To prove this you can look at the success we've been having in the UK (where I'm from) recently as a clan; none of us are supermodels, we just like to shoot things dead.
Come frag with us and you'll find out what I mean -- do you have Xbox Live or are you a PC gamer?