7 ms·

The Videogame That Finally Made Me Feel Like a Human Being

40 points by cyphersanctus 13y ago

na85 13y ago
Samus Aran is a great character in general, not just a great female character. Except for in Other M.
facepalm 13y ago
"Boys got action figures, not dolls. Boys got to have watergun fights, not play dress-up. Much like their videogame counterparts, boys got to do things, and I wanted to do things too" Find the error... If you want to do things, don't buy stuff, do things. If you feel you need to buy stuff to do things, you have already lost.
- kylemaxwell 13y ago
  Accidentally upvoted. So to counteract: TFA is talking about children. You know, impressionable and malleable young minds that don't yet have the benefit of wisdom and experience. Your post is Shit HN Says material.
  - facepalm 13y ago
    She's claiming girls can't do things because they don't get action figurines. That's "Shit Feminists Say" material... I feel sorry for her if she really didn't get to do water battles. I wonder where she grew up, some ultraconservative Victorian household? I sent my niece 4 water guns for her birthday and the whole family had a blast. It never occurred to me that girls wouldn't do water battles. The author is probably just extremely unlucky with her family.
ekianjo 13y ago
ugh, that was a painful read. Even text adventures were more emotionally charged than most games today, and i didnt have to wait 2014 to feel like a human being. you just had to play computer games and not console games.
- jmileham 13y ago
  Painful how? It sounds like the author was genuinely moved by the game. It has to be a good thing that a AAA console title can have that effect, even if it only took 30-odd years for us to get there.
  - ekianjo 13y ago
    Such console games "get" this effect just because they look more and more like movies, not because they are better intrinsic games than what we had before. And the examples shown by the author show her clear ignorance of PC games in the 80-90s, so it's not surprising he didn't feel "much" in front of consoles games. We basically had to wait for late SNES games and PS1 games to see more and more games on consoles with deeper storylines and character development. But this occured on PC way before it happened on consoles, and you had actual strong female characters way before on PC too (hey, come on, the Roberta Williams games had almost always female protagonists, and were hugely popular!). The idea that "we had to wait until 2014 to feel something when playing games" is what I considered the most painful. Because it's preposterous. Wired has really become an over-hyped tabloid.
    - icebraining 13y ago
      The whole article is about how the author found a game which she could identify with the character, yet you still refer to her as "he". I just thought it was curious.
      - ekianjo 13y ago
        Corrected.
- mherdeg 13y ago
  I think the author is deliberately excluding interactive fiction from the kinds of "videogames" that are criticized here. Which is too bad; there has been great stuff in the genre for a long time. Photopia (1998) has a heartbreaking story and a strong female protagonist and is well worth playing through ( http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=ju778uv5xaswnlpl http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=ju778uv5xaswnlpl ).
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
xarien 13y ago
I honestly hate when stats are distorted. The "almost half of gamers are female" stat is true, but the majority of female gamers favor puzzles and extremely casual games. AAA title customers are still strongly dominated by male audiences and thus, the market will cater towards that demographic. There's really nothing wrong with this. It's about as sexist as the male section in my local Macy's being 1/10 the total size of the store.
- je_bailey 13y ago
  You're making some broad assumptions here. The fact that 'AAA' titles are dominated males is because the 'AAA' titles are made by males for males with no compelling reason for many female gamers to play them.
  - Perdition 13y ago
    Are you arguing that women are so limited in imagination that they can't enjoy works of fiction in which the protagonist is a different gender? Anyone who argued that men couldn't enjoy The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins because the protagonist is a women would be laughed at.
    - egypturnash 13y ago
      It's not that we can't enjoy works starring a different gender. It's that in video games, we are pretty much given no other option. Look at your collection, pick up all the games that force you into a particular character's shoes. How many of them are about being a guy? How many are about being a girl? You'll probably be able to count the latter on the fingers of one hand. Also did you know that "we wanted to make a game starring a woman and a bunch of publishers turned us down because only guys buy games and they never want to be ladies" is a common refrain from AAA-level developers who want to try to fix this imbalance?
      - Perdition 13y ago
        >It's not that we can't enjoy works starring a different gender. It's that in video games, we are pretty much given no other option. Look at your collection, pick up all the games that force you into a particular character's shoes. How many of them are about being a guy? How many are about being a girl? You'll probably be able to count the latter on the fingers of one hand. Again, how does that stop women enjoying games? Most games which force a character I don't identify with the character at all because being of the same gender is no grounds for identification. >Also did you know that "we wanted to make a game starring a woman and a bunch of publishers turned us down because only guys buy games and they never want to be ladies" is a common refrain from AAA-level developers who want to try to fix this imbalance? I think that comment is true for most teen males due to the kneejerk machismo that still exists at that age, but most men grow out of it. Also, if that comment is true for men in general what compelling argument would you offer to publishers to get them to not focus on the desires of their primary customers? If the publisher can sell HyperViolent MurderSim 2014 to the men and DressUp Dollies 2014 to the women they are still maximising their market.
vezzy-fnord 13y ago
The best video game with a strong female protagonist that I've played is NOLF. Criminally underrated and almost never noted these days, even in feminist discourse. Anyway, this is apparently a DLC pack to a ludicrously well received game called The Last of Us, which honestly I had not heard of before. I can't help but think the reviewer is overly dramatic here, though. Finally, I want to address this: Although women make up nearly half of all gamers, only a fraction of videogame characters are female, and fewer still are playable. This is a fallacy as it only takes up the raw total percentage and completely ignores some critically important details: gender distribution by genres. That makes a huge difference. For instance, women make up very high numbers for things like casual games, World of Warcraft, The Sims and others. On the other hand, a lot of major AAA titles like Grand Theft Auto, Devil May Cry and Mass Effect enjoy only small female audiences (14-22%). That's why there's not much of an incentive. Don't just grab the whole percentage and throw it around like a gospel of injustice when you're going to voluntarily ignore the complexity and fragmentation of the market.
- ekianjo 13y ago
  > Although women make up nearly half of all gamers, only a fraction of videogame characters are female, and fewer still are playable. Double false claim. Women certainly don't make half of gamers (unless you consider people playing Tetris and phone games real gamers, and that's a very different subject altogether). Fewer are playable, false claim as well. Tomb Raider, Bayonetta, Most adventure games from Roberta Williams, Lots of japanese games have female lead characters too (too many to list here), and a lot of these games were very much liked by male gamers as well. I'm personally a huge fan of Bayonetta, and the fact that the character is a female had a huge part in this preference.
  - lotsofmangos 13y ago
    Of course tetris fans are real gamers.
    - ekianjo 13y ago
      Well, yeah, Tetris is a game. But it's a game in the same way that a termite is also a living species just like an elephant is another one. They just do not benchmark on the same scale.
danso 13y ago
OK, to go off on a tangent...here's the best example I can think of that illustrates the imbalance of gender neutral roles that men take for granted and that women basically have never had: the only time I can think of, in American entertainment history, that a woman achieved the authority and an unforgettable identity that had nothing to do with "...because she's a woman" is: Ripley in Alien and Aliens (never saw 3 and 4, and probably never will). In fact, she was so good at being "just" Ripley that it wasn't until I saw Sigourney Weaver in other movies did I realize, "Huh, Sigourney Weaver is a woman and she is hot"...She is the only female character I can think of in which her gender has no real bearing to how she acts, what she says, or how she is presented on screen. I challenge anyone to think of any other woman character who follows Ripley's mold: 1. Does not overtly seek a romantic relationship 2. Sexual tension is not a compelling foil or conflict for the character 3. Is not thrown into an action role purely for the spectacle of a woman kicking ass 4. Is not shouted down or treated differently specifically because she is a woman. 5. Is not shown in a gratuitously sexual light (she is in her underwear the same time everyone else is logically in their underwear). 6. Is unequivocally the hero of the movie. In fact, in both movies [spoiler alert for 20 year old movies], it's quite notable that she is literally the last human being standing, and she wins on her own terms. No other contenders, that I can think of, meet this standard, especially in the action film role: Catwoman, Aeon Flux, Tomb Raider...nope. Clarice Starling...even if you want to argue that no sexual tension exists between her and Hannibal Lecter (even though he specifically refers to it), much of the non-gruesome psychological conflict her character faces is precisely because she is a woman in a (tall) man's world. Beatrice in Kill Bill...great role, but again, it only works because she is a woman and it is a spectacle, even if empowering (i.e. could you imagine Kill Bill being made with a man in the role?) The only woman character who comes close to the unisex appeal of Ripley is Marge Gunderson in Fargo. Other than that, it's pretty slim pickings...whereas for males, there are too many to count. Anyway, I sometimes wonder how much growing up with Alien/Aliens affected how I think about gender roles and imbalance. Those being among the first and the most interesting of the action movies I'd ever seen (then, and today), I kind of think that the idea of a woman action hero was completely normal to me. And yet, as far as I can see, no one like Ripley has since been written...
- TheEzEzz 13y ago
downer99 13y ago
Woah! So wait. Dave Sim is a misogynist? Like, a card-carrying member of the Misogynist party? THE Dave Sim, creator of the Cerebus comic book? How do you kick off an article with a bold statement like that, and not include at least a link to an interview or something? Is he like, the founder of some kind of Men's Rights Advocacy group or something? Does he run a political action committee? Is he quoted anywhere as explicitly stating anything like: Hello, my name is Dave Sim, and I hate women. Yes, all of them, and as a general rule. You may know me as auhor of the independently published comic book, Cerebus. At this time, I'd like to go on the record about my opinion of women: I hate them. Make no mistake. Much like racists hate other races, my hatred of women is similarly general, and all-encompassing. To reiterate, I, Dave Sim, am a self-proclaimed misogynist. Like, really? He's simply a misogynist, and it's a bald fact?
- pessimizer 13y ago
  Pretty much, yeah. Except a lot longer. He's a fascinating person.
- lotsofmangos 13y ago
  Have you read his stuff on women? I like Cerebus, but he definitely has issues with women. "Emotion, whatever the Female Void would have you believe, is not a more Exalted State than is Thought. In point of fact, I think Emotion is animalistic, serpent-brain stuff. Animals do not Think, but I am reasonably certain that they have Emotions. 'Eating this makes me Happy.' 'When my fur is all wet and I am cold, it makes me Sad." "Ooo! Puppies!' 'It makes me Excited to Chase the Ball!' Reason, as any husband can tell you, doesn't stand a chance in an argument with Emotion... this was the fundamental reason, I believe, that women were denied the vote for so long." "Behind this...lies the Greater Void, the Omnivorous Engine which drives every... institutionalised waste of human time and energy, which drives, in point of fact, our entire degraded society. The wife and kids." "In one of those Poor Us studies for which the Emotional Female Void is notorious, it was pointed out that after a divorce, the average male standard of living rises... the average female standard of living drops... I think the...explanation is that the excision of a five-to-six- foot leech from the surface of a human body is going to have more of its own blood in its own veins. Unless the leech finds another body, it is going to go hungry." "In labouring to fill the insatiable Void Need for material possessions at home, his time and his energy and his spirit disappear into the Vaginal Bottom Line of the workplace." "The Male Light and the Female Void: Seminal Energy and Omnivorous Parasite." "If you look at her and see anything besides emptiness, fear and emotional hunger, you are looking at the parts of yourself which have been consumed to that point." "It wouldn't be that big a stretch to categorize my writing as Hate Literature against women . . . in this Fascistic Feminist country"
beloch 13y ago
There are some great games out there with female protagonists and quality interaction (e.g. The Dreamfall series). There are also many games that bend over backwards to be gender (and sexual orientation) neutral, such as the Mass Effect series. However I have to agree with the poster that adolescent males are far more frequently targeted by any sort of game that actually has a plot. While some might argue that most female gamers simply stay away from such titles, I question this assumption and wonder if this is another instance of the girlie-beer phenomenon. i.e. In recent years, several brewers have attempted to market beer to women with pink packaging and, in some cases, pink dye in addition to supposedly "girl friendly" qualities such as being low-calorie, not too strong tasting, etc.. The problem is, women who don't want to drink beer won't, and women who like beer want good beer, not beer made for women who don't like beer. So far these girl-branded beers have all been abject failures. Would more female gamers play blood-and-guts action games if they were gratuitously girly, or would it barely be more than those who don't mind playing as muscle-bound brutes when they crave a bit of the ol' ultraviolence? I'm not saying that the industry shouldn't do more to marginalize misogynistic characterizations, but I do suspect that male protagonists and testosterone driven character interactions tend to give blood-and-guts games more credibility even with female audiences. That should change slowly with time, as we're seeing in cinema, but we should also recognize that this is the present we're currently dealing with. Women aren't an audience that are being ignored. It's what they want that's the problem! It's also worth noticing that we are very selective about what we define as "guy stuff" in male dominated video games. It's definitely not "older guy" stuff. e.g. When was the last time you saw a male protagonist blow thousands of enemies to bloody giblets and, in the next scene, talk about his prostate problems, the virtues of fiber, and his receding hairline? Really, these games are about violence. If a woman does the slaying, it doesn't bother most male gamers at all. It's when they start talking about the female analogues to "old guy stuff" that everybody, males and probable females alike, start to get itchy trigger fingers. This tendency of most video games to sate adolescent desires for violence while ignoring more mature material is, in my opinion, of equal concern to both genders. Any game that makes male-female relationships a part of core game-play instead of an optional bolt-on is instantly branded as a weird Japanese dating simulator for Otaku's who never leave their houses. Games that focus on drama or exploration without "sufficient" violence are frequently viewed as having "boring gameplay". Video games are no longer an emerging art-form. Their gross sales have surpassed that of cinema! However, video games are still stuck in the Nickelodeon era. Practically everything is gratuitous violence with a smattering of sex. However, only now are adult audiences starting to outnumber adolescent ones. The next few decades for video games may well be remembered similarly to the early twentieth century when cinema progressed from being a low-brow diversion to an art-form that fascinates all!
babyturtle 13y ago
This article is a not so subtle way of her saying: women -> "human" (she relates, cares for, empathises etc) male -> animal slave who should sacrifice his life for her, do the dirty jobs and she doesnt empathise with or care for him.

40 points by cyphersanctus 13y ago

na85 13y ago

Samus Aran is a great character in general, not just a great female character. Except for in Other M.

"Boys got action figures, not dolls. Boys got to have watergun fights, not play dress-up. Much like their videogame counterparts, boys got to do things, and I wanted to do things too" Find the error... If you want to do things, don't buy stuff, do things. If you feel you need to buy stuff to do things, you have already lost.

kylemaxwell 13y ago
Accidentally upvoted. So to counteract: TFA is talking about children. You know, impressionable and malleable young minds that don't yet have the benefit of wisdom and experience. Your post is Shit HN Says material.
- facepalm 13y ago
  She's claiming girls can't do things because they don't get action figurines. That's "Shit Feminists Say" material... I feel sorry for her if she really didn't get to do water battles. I wonder where she grew up, some ultraconservative Victorian household? I sent my niece 4 water guns for her birthday and the whole family had a blast. It never occurred to me that girls wouldn't do water battles. The author is probably just extremely unlucky with her family.

ekianjo 13y ago

ugh, that was a painful read. Even text adventures were more emotionally charged than most games today, and i didnt have to wait 2014 to feel like a human being. you just had to play computer games and not console games.

jmileham 13y ago
Painful how? It sounds like the author was genuinely moved by the game. It has to be a good thing that a AAA console title can have that effect, even if it only took 30-odd years for us to get there.
- ekianjo 13y ago
  Such console games "get" this effect just because they look more and more like movies, not because they are better intrinsic games than what we had before. And the examples shown by the author show her clear ignorance of PC games in the 80-90s, so it's not surprising he didn't feel "much" in front of consoles games. We basically had to wait for late SNES games and PS1 games to see more and more games on consoles with deeper storylines and character development. But this occured on PC way before it happened on consoles, and you had actual strong female characters way before on PC too (hey, come on, the Roberta Williams games had almost always female protagonists, and were hugely popular!). The idea that "we had to wait until 2014 to feel something when playing games" is what I considered the most painful. Because it's preposterous. Wired has really become an over-hyped tabloid.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    The whole article is about how the author found a game which she could identify with the character, yet you still refer to her as "he". I just thought it was curious.
    - ekianjo 13y ago
      Corrected.
mherdeg 13y ago
I think the author is deliberately excluding interactive fiction from the kinds of "videogames" that are criticized here. Which is too bad; there has been great stuff in the genre for a long time. Photopia (1998) has a heartbreaking story and a strong female protagonist and is well worth playing through ( http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=ju778uv5xaswnlpl http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=ju778uv5xaswnlpl ).

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

xarien 13y ago

I honestly hate when stats are distorted. The "almost half of gamers are female" stat is true, but the majority of female gamers favor puzzles and extremely casual games. AAA title customers are still strongly dominated by male audiences and thus, the market will cater towards that demographic. There's really nothing wrong with this. It's about as sexist as the male section in my local Macy's being 1/10 the total size of the store.

je_bailey 13y ago
You're making some broad assumptions here. The fact that 'AAA' titles are dominated males is because the 'AAA' titles are made by males for males with no compelling reason for many female gamers to play them.
- Perdition 13y ago
  Are you arguing that women are so limited in imagination that they can't enjoy works of fiction in which the protagonist is a different gender? Anyone who argued that men couldn't enjoy The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins because the protagonist is a women would be laughed at.
  - egypturnash 13y ago
    It's not that we can't enjoy works starring a different gender. It's that in video games, we are pretty much given no other option. Look at your collection, pick up all the games that force you into a particular character's shoes. How many of them are about being a guy? How many are about being a girl? You'll probably be able to count the latter on the fingers of one hand. Also did you know that "we wanted to make a game starring a woman and a bunch of publishers turned us down because only guys buy games and they never want to be ladies" is a common refrain from AAA-level developers who want to try to fix this imbalance?
    - Perdition 13y ago
      >It's not that we can't enjoy works starring a different gender. It's that in video games, we are pretty much given no other option. Look at your collection, pick up all the games that force you into a particular character's shoes. How many of them are about being a guy? How many are about being a girl? You'll probably be able to count the latter on the fingers of one hand. Again, how does that stop women enjoying games? Most games which force a character I don't identify with the character at all because being of the same gender is no grounds for identification. >Also did you know that "we wanted to make a game starring a woman and a bunch of publishers turned us down because only guys buy games and they never want to be ladies" is a common refrain from AAA-level developers who want to try to fix this imbalance? I think that comment is true for most teen males due to the kneejerk machismo that still exists at that age, but most men grow out of it. Also, if that comment is true for men in general what compelling argument would you offer to publishers to get them to not focus on the desires of their primary customers? If the publisher can sell HyperViolent MurderSim 2014 to the men and DressUp Dollies 2014 to the women they are still maximising their market.

vezzy-fnord 13y ago

The best video game with a strong female protagonist that I've played is NOLF. Criminally underrated and almost never noted these days, even in feminist discourse. Anyway, this is apparently a DLC pack to a ludicrously well received game called The Last of Us, which honestly I had not heard of before. I can't help but think the reviewer is overly dramatic here, though. Finally, I want to address this: Although women make up nearly half of all gamers, only a fraction of videogame characters are female, and fewer still are playable. This is a fallacy as it only takes up the raw total percentage and completely ignores some critically important details: gender distribution by genres. That makes a huge difference. For instance, women make up very high numbers for things like casual games, World of Warcraft, The Sims and others. On the other hand, a lot of major AAA titles like Grand Theft Auto, Devil May Cry and Mass Effect enjoy only small female audiences (14-22%). That's why there's not much of an incentive. Don't just grab the whole percentage and throw it around like a gospel of injustice when you're going to voluntarily ignore the complexity and fragmentation of the market.

ekianjo 13y ago
> Although women make up nearly half of all gamers, only a fraction of videogame characters are female, and fewer still are playable. Double false claim. Women certainly don't make half of gamers (unless you consider people playing Tetris and phone games real gamers, and that's a very different subject altogether). Fewer are playable, false claim as well. Tomb Raider, Bayonetta, Most adventure games from Roberta Williams, Lots of japanese games have female lead characters too (too many to list here), and a lot of these games were very much liked by male gamers as well. I'm personally a huge fan of Bayonetta, and the fact that the character is a female had a huge part in this preference.
- lotsofmangos 13y ago
  Of course tetris fans are real gamers.
  - ekianjo 13y ago
    Well, yeah, Tetris is a game. But it's a game in the same way that a termite is also a living species just like an elephant is another one. They just do not benchmark on the same scale.

danso 13y ago

OK, to go off on a tangent...here's the best example I can think of that illustrates the imbalance of gender neutral roles that men take for granted and that women basically have never had: the only time I can think of, in American entertainment history, that a woman achieved the authority and an unforgettable identity that had nothing to do with "...because she's a woman" is: Ripley in Alien and Aliens (never saw 3 and 4, and probably never will). In fact, she was so good at being "just" Ripley that it wasn't until I saw Sigourney Weaver in other movies did I realize, "Huh, Sigourney Weaver is a woman and she is hot"...She is the only female character I can think of in which her gender has no real bearing to how she acts, what she says, or how she is presented on screen. I challenge anyone to think of any other woman character who follows Ripley's mold: 1. Does not overtly seek a romantic relationship 2. Sexual tension is not a compelling foil or conflict for the character 3. Is not thrown into an action role purely for the spectacle of a woman kicking ass 4. Is not shouted down or treated differently specifically because she is a woman. 5. Is not shown in a gratuitously sexual light (she is in her underwear the same time everyone else is logically in their underwear). 6. Is unequivocally the hero of the movie. In fact, in both movies [spoiler alert for 20 year old movies], it's quite notable that she is literally the last human being standing, and she wins on her own terms. No other contenders, that I can think of, meet this standard, especially in the action film role: Catwoman, Aeon Flux, Tomb Raider...nope. Clarice Starling...even if you want to argue that no sexual tension exists between her and Hannibal Lecter (even though he specifically refers to it), much of the non-gruesome psychological conflict her character faces is precisely because she is a woman in a (tall) man's world. Beatrice in Kill Bill...great role, but again, it only works because she is a woman and it is a spectacle, even if empowering (i.e. could you imagine Kill Bill being made with a man in the role?) The only woman character who comes close to the unisex appeal of Ripley is Marge Gunderson in Fargo. Other than that, it's pretty slim pickings...whereas for males, there are too many to count. Anyway, I sometimes wonder how much growing up with Alien/Aliens affected how I think about gender roles and imbalance. Those being among the first and the most interesting of the action movies I'd ever seen (then, and today), I kind of think that the idea of a woman action hero was completely normal to me. And yet, as far as I can see, no one like Ripley has since been written...

TheEzEzz 13y ago

downer99 13y ago

Woah! So wait. Dave Sim is a misogynist? Like, a card-carrying member of the Misogynist party? THE Dave Sim, creator of the Cerebus comic book? How do you kick off an article with a bold statement like that, and not include at least a link to an interview or something? Is he like, the founder of some kind of Men's Rights Advocacy group or something? Does he run a political action committee? Is he quoted anywhere as explicitly stating anything like: Hello, my name is Dave Sim, and I hate women. Yes, all of them, and as a general rule. You may know me as auhor of the independently published comic book, Cerebus. At this time, I'd like to go on the record about my opinion of women: I hate them. Make no mistake. Much like racists hate other races, my hatred of women is similarly general, and all-encompassing. To reiterate, I, Dave Sim, am a self-proclaimed misogynist. Like, really? He's simply a misogynist, and it's a bald fact?

pessimizer 13y ago
Pretty much, yeah. Except a lot longer. He's a fascinating person.
lotsofmangos 13y ago
Have you read his stuff on women? I like Cerebus, but he definitely has issues with women. "Emotion, whatever the Female Void would have you believe, is not a more Exalted State than is Thought. In point of fact, I think Emotion is animalistic, serpent-brain stuff. Animals do not Think, but I am reasonably certain that they have Emotions. 'Eating this makes me Happy.' 'When my fur is all wet and I am cold, it makes me Sad." "Ooo! Puppies!' 'It makes me Excited to Chase the Ball!' Reason, as any husband can tell you, doesn't stand a chance in an argument with Emotion... this was the fundamental reason, I believe, that women were denied the vote for so long." "Behind this...lies the Greater Void, the Omnivorous Engine which drives every... institutionalised waste of human time and energy, which drives, in point of fact, our entire degraded society. The wife and kids." "In one of those Poor Us studies for which the Emotional Female Void is notorious, it was pointed out that after a divorce, the average male standard of living rises... the average female standard of living drops... I think the...explanation is that the excision of a five-to-six- foot leech from the surface of a human body is going to have more of its own blood in its own veins. Unless the leech finds another body, it is going to go hungry." "In labouring to fill the insatiable Void Need for material possessions at home, his time and his energy and his spirit disappear into the Vaginal Bottom Line of the workplace." "The Male Light and the Female Void: Seminal Energy and Omnivorous Parasite." "If you look at her and see anything besides emptiness, fear and emotional hunger, you are looking at the parts of yourself which have been consumed to that point." "It wouldn't be that big a stretch to categorize my writing as Hate Literature against women . . . in this Fascistic Feminist country"

beloch 13y ago

There are some great games out there with female protagonists and quality interaction (e.g. The Dreamfall series). There are also many games that bend over backwards to be gender (and sexual orientation) neutral, such as the Mass Effect series. However I have to agree with the poster that adolescent males are far more frequently targeted by any sort of game that actually has a plot. While some might argue that most female gamers simply stay away from such titles, I question this assumption and wonder if this is another instance of the girlie-beer phenomenon. i.e. In recent years, several brewers have attempted to market beer to women with pink packaging and, in some cases, pink dye in addition to supposedly "girl friendly" qualities such as being low-calorie, not too strong tasting, etc.. The problem is, women who don't want to drink beer won't, and women who like beer want good beer, not beer made for women who don't like beer. So far these girl-branded beers have all been abject failures. Would more female gamers play blood-and-guts action games if they were gratuitously girly, or would it barely be more than those who don't mind playing as muscle-bound brutes when they crave a bit of the ol' ultraviolence? I'm not saying that the industry shouldn't do more to marginalize misogynistic characterizations, but I do suspect that male protagonists and testosterone driven character interactions tend to give blood-and-guts games more credibility even with female audiences. That should change slowly with time, as we're seeing in cinema, but we should also recognize that this is the present we're currently dealing with. Women aren't an audience that are being ignored. It's what they want that's the problem! It's also worth noticing that we are very selective about what we define as "guy stuff" in male dominated video games. It's definitely not "older guy" stuff. e.g. When was the last time you saw a male protagonist blow thousands of enemies to bloody giblets and, in the next scene, talk about his prostate problems, the virtues of fiber, and his receding hairline? Really, these games are about violence. If a woman does the slaying, it doesn't bother most male gamers at all. It's when they start talking about the female analogues to "old guy stuff" that everybody, males and probable females alike, start to get itchy trigger fingers. This tendency of most video games to sate adolescent desires for violence while ignoring more mature material is, in my opinion, of equal concern to both genders. Any game that makes male-female relationships a part of core game-play instead of an optional bolt-on is instantly branded as a weird Japanese dating simulator for Otaku's who never leave their houses. Games that focus on drama or exploration without "sufficient" violence are frequently viewed as having "boring gameplay". Video games are no longer an emerging art-form. Their gross sales have surpassed that of cinema! However, video games are still stuck in the Nickelodeon era. Practically everything is gratuitous violence with a smattering of sex. However, only now are adult audiences starting to outnumber adolescent ones. The next few decades for video games may well be remembered similarly to the early twentieth century when cinema progressed from being a low-brow diversion to an art-form that fascinates all!

babyturtle 13y ago

This article is a not so subtle way of her saying: women -> "human" (she relates, cares for, empathises etc) male -> animal slave who should sacrifice his life for her, do the dirty jobs and she doesnt empathise with or care for him.