A tip to the guys out there trying to get their girlfriends to play (this should be obvious but it's not always) - don't convince us to play a game that you love and have played religiously, and then kick our butts. Continual losing when you don't even know what button does what yet does not make someone enjoy a game.
Amen, sister!
Sorry, got a little carried away.:) But you are completely right. Guys like to show how well they've gotten at something, whether it's playing a game or hacking a linux kernel. Girls can be very competitive by nature, so they want something that they can have a chance to win at. They don't necessarily always want to win, they just want a chance. When you prove to a girl that you will trounce her at whatever you're doing every single time you play her, she will not want to play that game with you anymore. She can't stand seeing herself flattened by someone over and over again, and it really doesn't provide an oportunity for her to learn how the game works, which is what she is going to want to do.
A good example is that the first time I really got to play a networked fps is when Quake 2 came out for linux. The CS students immediatly convinced the network admin to install it on the CS network. For my first game, I joined a game with my husband (then boyfriend) and the local Quake god.
BIG MISTAKE.
My husband-to-be had played in many lan parties and gotten very good. And the other guy was phenominal. I spent the entire game as a pile of giblets. That almost turned me off from fps games forever, as I felt I would never really be able to learn how to play. It was only a year or two later, when I started playing on the network with beginners and people that had realistic skills that I figured out how to play and really started to enjoy myself.
I still won't play fps games against my husband.:P
I love games and have loved games my whole life. I am mainly into RPGs, adventures, and god games, but I'll play almost anything except sports games and flight simulators. I even enjoy networked fps games, as long as I'm not so behind other players in skill that I spend the game permanently dead.;)
I never, never started gaming for any guy. I game because it's fun. I game because I enjoy it. In fact, when I started dating my husband, I played computer and console games much more than even he did. He's starting to catch up with me now, though.:P
So, don't think that you're alone. You're not. We're out here. We just can be hard to find.:)
The album may be a construct, but for some forms of music, it has turned out to be a very important construct. It could just be the typical genres I listen to (progressive, progressive metal, symphonic metal, etc.), but I have found that, at least to me, albums unified by a story or central theme almost never have anything I would consider filler. Oh, I have some concept/theme albums where there may be a song or two I could do without, but because their lyrics reveal more to the theme or story, I still find myself unable to skip the song itself when listening to an album. And we're not talking about old albums here. A lot of the ones I have are from the 90's or the current century.
Now, I may be in a minority (in fact, I'm sure of it), but I like my music that way. The death of the album entirely would, for me, be very much the death of my current style of music. And I'm not looking forward to that at all.
Most people may want their single song buys, but please, remember us concept album fans once in a while. They still exist, really!
You know what, this is true. I can attest to that, being a female myself and all. What I can say is that most females want, no *need*, attention. They need compliments and admiring looks to feel needed. That's just the way we seem to work. I work that way more often than I want to admit, and it seems that other women do too.
However, there is a difference between wanting to be admired and wanting to be sexualized. Women want to be admired, complimented, and, sometimes, to feel sexy. Most do not want to have to beat men off with clubs because they are so overdone, or to have to try to compete for attention with women who *do* need to beat men back. In my mind, there's a difference between a powerful female assasin of fairly modest to large proportions in a skin-tight leather catsuit, and a female assasin with oversized breasts, a three inch waist, and her suit unzipped to her belly button.
Attractive protagonists aren't the problem. Even powerful, sexy protagonists aren't the problem. *Oversexualized* protagonists, beyond what even most normal women would want to be, are the problem. These are what can put women off from video games.
Ugh. I'd be almost willing to give you my copy of Lunar.
I hated that game. The story line was really good, but all the monsters were five times stronger than you ever could be, and it mostly consisted of setting all characters but one to heal and having the one remaining character beat on monsters forever until they died. *shudder* I may try it again at some point, just to see if I missed what everyone else raves about, but I didn't care for the actual gameplay at all.
I thought Grandia was much better, but that was just IMHO.
Alright, I will admit that engineering/scientific girls are in the minority, but I really hope you don't feel that none of them are capable of doing what guys can. Because just looking at my family should be enough to prove that wrong
Every single person in my family has programmed at some point in their lifetime. That's one son and three daughters, by the way. My brother didn't much care for it, and hasn't continued with it. One sister only programmed COBOL, so that doesn't count for much. One of my sisters aced almost every class she ever took (at Michigan Tech) and is now a perfectly capable professor of mechanical engineering who is researching carbon nanotubes, and would be a shoe-in for this if she had the time.
And then you have me. Yes, I am female. Yes, I can code, and do so as a profession. In high school, I scored in the top percentile of mechanically inclined people in the USA on tests. I did quite well in most of my science and CS classes in college. I'm not trying to brag. Just saying that I am not a socialite who went to college for fun. I didn't intend on making any friends in college. I wanted to learn.
So, while I do acknowledge that I am one of very few, please do not discount scientific-minded females as a whole. It gets very tiresome to be told I can't think in a certain way just because I am female.
I do have a moral opinion on this, but I also have an amoral one, which I will try to state as simply as possible.
Take pollution, and for the purpose of this example, take air pollution. If you would have told someone a hundred or so years ago that burning things could be a bad thing and cause harm to the planet, they would have laughed in your face. Yet now we see that we can harm the earth by doing simple things like this.
Now, take genetic manipulation. What kind of effect will this have on the "genetic environment" in the future? I know, everything is controlled, and scientists can't make mistakes... Right? Wrong. What kind of byproducts will we produce?
As humans, we just don't have long enough sight to see what kind of effects our mucking around can have on other things in the future.
I hope that the media will farily cover this situation
Unfortunately, this would be a huge problem, and about as likely as your pig flying.
How many computer-related items have the media covered fairly? E-mail worms become life threatening issues, and defacing of websites becomes terrorist activity. What headline is more likely, "Man Arrested for Playing DVD" or "Computer Professional Arrested for Violating DMCA"?
Slashdot Mirror
A tip to the guys out there trying to get their girlfriends to play (this should be obvious but it's not always) - don't convince us to play a game that you love and have played religiously, and then kick our butts. Continual losing when you don't even know what button does what yet does not make someone enjoy a game.
:) But you are completely right. Guys like to show how well they've gotten at something, whether it's playing a game or hacking a linux kernel. Girls can be very competitive by nature, so they want something that they can have a chance to win at. They don't necessarily always want to win, they just want a chance. When you prove to a girl that you will trounce her at whatever you're doing every single time you play her, she will not want to play that game with you anymore. She can't stand seeing herself flattened by someone over and over again, and it really doesn't provide an oportunity for her to learn how the game works, which is what she is going to want to do.
:P
Amen, sister!
Sorry, got a little carried away.
A good example is that the first time I really got to play a networked fps is when Quake 2 came out for linux. The CS students immediatly convinced the network admin to install it on the CS network. For my first game, I joined a game with my husband (then boyfriend) and the local Quake god.
BIG MISTAKE.
My husband-to-be had played in many lan parties and gotten very good. And the other guy was phenominal. I spent the entire game as a pile of giblets. That almost turned me off from fps games forever, as I felt I would never really be able to learn how to play. It was only a year or two later, when I started playing on the network with beginners and people that had realistic skills that I figured out how to play and really started to enjoy myself.
I still won't play fps games against my husband.
-Female gamers - where are you?-
:)
;)
:P
:)
I'm right here. Thanks for asking.
I love games and have loved games my whole life. I am mainly into RPGs, adventures, and god games, but I'll play almost anything except sports games and flight simulators. I even enjoy networked fps games, as long as I'm not so behind other players in skill that I spend the game permanently dead.
I never, never started gaming for any guy. I game because it's fun. I game because I enjoy it. In fact, when I started dating my husband, I played computer and console games much more than even he did. He's starting to catch up with me now, though.
So, don't think that you're alone. You're not. We're out here. We just can be hard to find.
-Have you ever seen an album with different cover art for every track?-
Yes, actually. Don't listen to much Peter Gabriel, do you? He's been doing that for a while. And he's just one of the more popular ones out there.
I do agree with you on the point that it's probably a bad practice for a music download site, though.
Woah, there....
The album may be a construct, but for some forms of music, it has turned out to be a very important construct. It could just be the typical genres I listen to (progressive, progressive metal, symphonic metal, etc.), but I have found that, at least to me, albums unified by a story or central theme almost never have anything I would consider filler. Oh, I have some concept/theme albums where there may be a song or two I could do without, but because their lyrics reveal more to the theme or story, I still find myself unable to skip the song itself when listening to an album. And we're not talking about old albums here. A lot of the ones I have are from the 90's or the current century.
Now, I may be in a minority (in fact, I'm sure of it), but I like my music that way. The death of the album entirely would, for me, be very much the death of my current style of music. And I'm not looking forward to that at all.
Most people may want their single song buys, but please, remember us concept album fans once in a while. They still exist, really!
You know what, this is true. I can attest to that, being a female myself and all. What I can say is that most females want, no *need*, attention. They need compliments and admiring looks to feel needed. That's just the way we seem to work. I work that way more often than I want to admit, and it seems that other women do too.
However, there is a difference between wanting to be admired and wanting to be sexualized. Women want to be admired, complimented, and, sometimes, to feel sexy. Most do not want to have to beat men off with clubs because they are so overdone, or to have to try to compete for attention with women who *do* need to beat men back. In my mind, there's a difference between a powerful female assasin of fairly modest to large proportions in a skin-tight leather catsuit, and a female assasin with oversized breasts, a three inch waist, and her suit unzipped to her belly button.
Attractive protagonists aren't the problem. Even powerful, sexy protagonists aren't the problem. *Oversexualized* protagonists, beyond what even most normal women would want to be, are the problem. These are what can put women off from video games.
Ugh. I'd be almost willing to give you my copy of Lunar.
I hated that game. The story line was really good, but all the monsters were five times stronger than you ever could be, and it mostly consisted of setting all characters but one to heal and having the one remaining character beat on monsters forever until they died. *shudder* I may try it again at some point, just to see if I missed what everyone else raves about, but I didn't care for the actual gameplay at all.
I thought Grandia was much better, but that was just IMHO.
Alright, I will admit that engineering/scientific girls are in the minority, but I really hope you don't feel that none of them are capable of doing what guys can. Because just looking at my family should be enough to prove that wrong
Every single person in my family has programmed at some point in their lifetime. That's one son and three daughters, by the way. My brother didn't much care for it, and hasn't continued with it. One sister only programmed COBOL, so that doesn't count for much. One of my sisters aced almost every class she ever took (at Michigan Tech) and is now a perfectly capable professor of mechanical engineering who is researching carbon nanotubes, and would be a shoe-in for this if she had the time.
And then you have me. Yes, I am female. Yes, I can code, and do so as a profession. In high school, I scored in the top percentile of mechanically inclined people in the USA on tests. I did quite well in most of my science and CS classes in college. I'm not trying to brag. Just saying that I am not a socialite who went to college for fun. I didn't intend on making any friends in college. I wanted to learn.
So, while I do acknowledge that I am one of very few, please do not discount scientific-minded females as a whole. It gets very tiresome to be told I can't think in a certain way just because I am female.
Can I have both? With a nice helping of chocolate on the side? Just make sure it's good hardware. Maybe a laptop or something..... :P
I do have a moral opinion on this, but I also have an amoral one, which I will try to state as simply as possible.
Take pollution, and for the purpose of this example, take air pollution. If you would have told someone a hundred or so years ago that burning things could be a bad thing and cause harm to the planet, they would have laughed in your face. Yet now we see that we can harm the earth by doing simple things like this.
Now, take genetic manipulation. What kind of effect will this have on the "genetic environment" in the future? I know, everything is controlled, and scientists can't make mistakes... Right? Wrong. What kind of byproducts will we produce?
As humans, we just don't have long enough sight to see what kind of effects our mucking around can have on other things in the future.
I hope that the media will farily cover this situation
Unfortunately, this would be a huge problem, and about as likely as your pig flying.
How many computer-related items have the media covered fairly? E-mail worms become life threatening issues, and defacing of websites becomes terrorist activity. What headline is more likely, "Man Arrested for Playing DVD" or "Computer Professional Arrested for Violating DMCA"?
Something to think about....