Silly Girls

[Rimeshade]

I think the best solution to situations involving main characters is simply to allow for the afforementioned choice, not only of gender but of size and appearance. It's just as sexist and irritating to see so many over-muscled, testosterone fuelled, ape men as it is to see skinny, scantly clad female characters/leads.
In movies, books and plays there is a set storyline and the "play's the thing", the storyline and characterisation are what is important and these run along train tracks, strict lines determined by the writers.

In video games you are not a passive observer, you are controlling the action from the PoV of your avatar, in that case shouldn't your avatar have a personality you can impact on? By all means allow the rest of the cast their preset characterisation (perhaps their reaction to you can change depending on your actions a la Fable, Fallout et al) but shouldn't a game's storyline be malliable enough to accomodate varied types of main lead?

Personally my own lead of choice (when I'm given a choice) is male (I find it easier to relate to a character of my own gender and that's my failing) and a mage type in fantasy or a charismatic thinker who uses guile rather than brute force in others.
I'm sure there are plenty of players who prefer the stronger leader types and I would assume there are plenty of players who would want to play as a female who actually wears substantial clothing and has a strong character rather than merely being something for the stereotypical male gamer to lust over (a la FFX-2) or a female with a stereotypically male way of doing things (shoot first and ask questions later).
So why not just allow that choice? Surely a storyline can be constructed that evolves independantly of the player's attitude and personality, Fallout 3 and Fable 2 have both already done this, as has Oblivion and Neverwinter Nights.

 

[Kuchinawa212]

Sigh, videos games never make a person change who they are.
Right?

 

[Woe Is You]

There is nothing more inherently intelligent in shooting than shopping, and yet somehow only one of them gets labeled as "dumb."

You know, I'm not quite sure here. Gaming has been labeled dumb mostly because of all the blowing stuff up that's going on. The only place where it isn't so is in the gaming communities that are mostly dominated by people who play games about blowing stuff up.

 

[mshcherbatskaya]

There is nothing more inherently intelligent in shooting than shopping, and yet somehow only one of them gets labeled as "dumb."

You know, I'm not quite sure here. Gaming has been labeled dumb mostly because of all the blowing stuff up that's going on. The only place where it isn't so is in the gaming communities that are mostly dominated by people who play games about blowing stuff up.

I agree with you. I should have specified that I was talking about gamers and the gaming industry.

 

[GonzoGamer]

Don't look at me.
I thought the protagonist of GTA San Andreas should've been Catlina. That would've made sense, especially the way I play.

And yes I too was wondering why Science needed Papa instead of Mama.

 

[DirkGently]

Honestly, video games do have influences on people. People name themselves online after video game characters (and real people and movie/tv/book characters as well, and just about everything under sun, from fishes to detectives, to good dogs), and if my old psychology teacher was to be believed, there are studies show that violence loaded video games help to provide a nice safe release for aggression and stress and all that poppycock. I wouldn't put it past videogames to provide yet another source for young girls to generate issues with self image, though as games tend to be a step or two visually removed from real people, it's effects may not be as potent as a show about models or a fashion catalog, but I would be surprised if it didn't have some influence.



As an aside, I don't feel that video games teach anyone how to shoot. They don't have video games in Liberia, and they've been raising child soldiers there for generations. Boadie Broadice didn't learn how to shoot his chrome from playing GTA or counter strike, but because it's goddamned simple and Weebay probably took him a bunch of the other little hoppers out to a nice secluded spot one day and a bunch of bottles and cans got got.

 

[Kiutu]

Glitter and clothes and ponies are not stupid, ok, Jonas Brothers are, but the otheres are not.
Those games though, are just bad games.

 

[Pink_Pirate]

gender is a myth... the sooner society as a whole starts to get that we'll all be better off.

 

[capnjack]

I'm not going to be so daring as to ask for more female protagonists, more Samuses and Laras and Jades. I mean, there's no reason why Gordon Freeman had to be a guy, after all, he could've just as easily been Brenda Freeman, but that's a debate for a different day. And honestly, that would just trade the current inadequate system for a new and differently inadequate one. An overabundance of games with female leads is no better than our current situation, in which everyone saving the world has a five o'clock shadow. Well, the humans, anyway. For now, I'd settle for more games in which the main character's gender is left up to the player's personal preference. What could be more fair? Why does Sora have to be a boy? Why can't the Elite Beat Agents be girls? I don't want to hear about how that mucks around with the storyline, either, because Mass Effect and Fable 2 both pulled it off just fine.

I liked most of your article a lot, but this paragraph was certainly a low point. You went from thought-provoking to unnecessary in a short blank space and detracted from the point of your article. Gordon Freeman could have been Brenda Freeman, but the fact that he isn't shouldn't even be questioned. Why does it matter what gender your lead characters are? Why does it matter if there are more male leads than female leads? That isn't about equality at all, it is just unecessary accomadations for people who are offended far too easily for everyone's good.

In a truly sexually equal world, strong male figures in a market that is primarly directed towards males would be simply viewed as a smart business decision and absolutely nothing else. Reading any deeper into it is looking for problems where no problems exist. Some argue there is no reason that every male lead needs unrealisically bulging muscles and a five o'clock shadow, while every female character shouldn't be too skinny to support her enormous tits and ass, but my only question is: why is a concern at all?

In case you have any misconceptions, I certainly like it when there are strong female leads, but it isn't a moral issue for me. Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica, or Xena from... Xena, are bad ass, and I even applaud the fact that they have different body shapes than what people are used to seeing on television. But I don't want to create a strawman, so I'll stick to the main points of this paragraph.

You say that an over-abudance of female leads would be a problem, and I have to argue that it would not be a problem at all. It depends on the audience. Personally, I'd be more concerned with the realism of it. In World War 2, the soldiers were male, so you'd expect male soldiers. In Gears of War, and Halo, and plenty of other popular titles, it's expected and possibly even necessary for many of the characters to be males. In Mirror's Edge, however, it really doesn't matter. Faith could have just as easily been an acrobatic white male, but she is an Asian girl instead. In a world with no sexual prejudices, no one would even bat an eye at what race or sex she is. It would simply be a fact of the game.

I also have a big problem with you saying that the most fair thing is to let people choose what sex they want, and Fable and Mass Effect proves this is possible. First of all, you're asking that all art be constrained by what is least likely to offend people. This is completely ridiculous. In games where the main character is your avatar, to more fully immerse you in the game, this makes perfect sense. However, when you are playing through the main character, as opposed to as the main character, it would be unfair to expect the developers to include a gender option. Besides, you don't relate to someone or become immersed in a game or story just because the lead is the same sex as you are. Even if you did, are you really saying you don't think character customizer in every game would be absolute shit? And what if the developer wants to include voice acting?

Character customizers work in games where the main character is you, I guess. But often enough, people don't even care to have the character be like them - just represent their tastes. This is evidenced by the fact that plenty of people choose the opposite gender in World of Warcraft. Besides, to accomadate such a feat means that every story would have to be more generic (like Fable), all the leads would have to be more generic (like with every character customizer), and it would only be appeasing small minded people. You could choose between two fully-designed characters, like in the Pokemon games, but that still seems highly unnecesary, and it could weaken the story.

Anyway, if you really wanted to be "fair", you'd want girls with different body shapes, different races... you'd be complaining about a lack of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transexual leads. But since when is video games politics? Who put the burden on entertainment media to represent every single kind of human being, and where does the representation stop? How about this - if you're a woman and you want female leads, buy games with female leads, or make them. If you're Native Indian or Arab, you're a eunuch or a hermaphrodite, or if you're an alien or ground-dweller, make a game that represents you and stop giving me a headache.

As an aside, I have to ask whether "Samus" would really be pluralized as "Samuses". That seems incorrect. Shouldn't it be Samus's (Samus' being the possessive form, and Samus's being the plural?)

 

[Zombie_Fish]

The problem with it is that these stereotypes have been in society for hundreds, maybe even thousends of years now, and we as humanity have had the time to get used to them. This means that people would now need to get used to equality in society, something that, although seeming fairly minor, is a hard thing to do, when a thought that has been around for so long gets proven wrong.

I don't know what else to make of this article though. I agree with your opinions on that there should be more games where you get to pick the gender and be who you want to be, but I can't seem to make sense of anything else about it. You say that these games promoting stereotypes isn't a bad idea, but then criticise Nintendo for promoting stereotypes with Science Papa.

 

[Tears of Blood]

Gee, I wonder why more males enjoy video games than females? Oh right, because the content is marketed to them. There are plenty of shall we say "feminine" game premises that make great video games (Flower, for example?), it's just that they don't get made because people figure males are a bigger market.

Hah. No. When gaming started out, they made games for everyone. What, you think Pong prefer's manly men to girly girls? You think the bright colors depicted in the old NES games and the things that came before that were really aiming toward men? Stop being so stupid. Men take to games because they have a greater tendency to like them. Guys don't play games because they are marketed to guys, they are marketed to guys because guys play games. If you stop to think for a second, you'll realize that makes much more sense.

There are girls who play games, and may genuinely enjoy a feminine gaming experience, but if they had decided to make games for girls instead of guys like they did, there wouldn't have been some role-switch. It wouldn't be tons of teenage girls at home playing games while guys went out and drove monster trucks or something. Gaming would have just dropped off the map. We now have Gears of War and other big manly violent games because this is what the gaming community wanted, which was mostly guys. We decided "Well, Mario Bros. was pretty cool, but I wanna' shoot a giant monster in the face." and we got it.

(By the way, I did read the whole article later, And it wasn't that I disagreed with the thesis. She was calling out people in her article that had a certain opinion about girly games. She was just being offensive about it and even though I didn't share the opinion she was calling out, I felt like I was being yelled at while reading the article. Like I said, I don't care if they want to market some games to girls, but I just want everyone to realize that girly games will never ever be popular and evolve.)

 

[LaBambaMan]

Girls can play whatever games they damn well want to, just don't come to me and fucking brag about it like you just discovered a fucking habitable planet or something.

 

[TalonsOfWar]

playing as a girl in css would just be weird but then i fu played as a girl people would know u were a girl or a guy just wanting to play as a girl to get wood lol

 

[Florion]

Gee, I wonder why more males enjoy video games than females? Oh right, because the content is marketed to them. There are plenty of shall we say "feminine" game premises that make great video games (Flower, for example?), it's just that they don't get made because people figure males are a bigger market.

Hah. No. When gaming started out, they made games for everyone. What, you think Pong prefer's manly men to girly girls? You think the bright colors depicted in the old NES games and the things that came before that were really aiming toward men? Stop being so stupid. Men take to games because they have a greater tendency to like them. Guys don't play games because they are marketed to guys, they are marketed to guys because guys play games. If you stop to think for a second, you'll realize that makes much more sense.

It's true that a lot of primitive video games maybe weren't targeting an audience of any particular gender, but your argument that guys just like games more than girls is pretty stupid because plenty of female gamers enjoy accessible games. [http://www.gamespot.com/news/6212734.html?sid=6212734∂=rss&subj=6212734] I suspect guys have a greater tendency to like games that are challenging and competitive (not to say that there aren't girls who enjoy those games too), and those happen to be very common games because companies know that there is already a market for that. But the female gaming market would be just as strong as the male gaming market if the ratio of games made for each gender was closer to 1:1. There is no anti-gaming gene in girls.

There are girls who play games, and may genuinely enjoy a feminine gaming experience, but if they had decided to make games for girls instead of guys like they did, there wouldn't have been some role-switch. It wouldn't be tons of teenage girls at home playing games while guys went out and drove monster trucks or something. Gaming would have just dropped off the map. We now have Gears of War and other big manly violent games because this is what the gaming community wanted, which was mostly guys. We decided "Well, Mario Bros. was pretty cool, but I wanna' shoot a giant monster in the face." and we got it.

The article I referenced earlier actually mentioned that the female gaming market is growing now, which I think is pretty clear evidence that you can lead a horse to water and it will drink. Maybe in the beginning, when there were more male gamers, it was appropriate to make games marketed to guys. But that's not the case now. It would be better to have games embrace an audience of both genders.

(By the way, I did read the whole article later, And it wasn't that I disagreed with the thesis. She was calling out people in her article that had a certain opinion about girly games. She was just being offensive about it and even though I didn't share the opinion she was calling out, I felt like I was being yelled at while reading the article.)

Oh, I see where you're coming from with the criticism of the tone of the article. I can also sort of see where Susan was coming from (in general, the forums give me the impression that a number of people here have questionable attitudes when it comes to gender equality), but you're right, it's like shuffling your feet awkwardly in a classroom where the teacher is yelling at "you" (rather, your classmates) and you are "the good child."

As an aside, I have to ask whether "Samus" would really be pluralized as "Samuses". That seems incorrect. Shouldn't it be Samus's (Samus' being the possessive form, and Samus's being the plural?)

Answer: not really!

Names that end in "-us" are even more awkward than nouns ending in "-um" (memorandums? memoranda?), ESPECIALLY SAMUS BECAUSE SHE IS FEMALE. It screws with my latin brain. x_x

I'm not sure I quite grasp what's at stake here. I read the article, but then I read the comments, and I feel like somewhere along the line the point I got from the article disappeared and people started to respond to something completely different. So anything I say might be totally off base.

I own a fully functioning penis, so my vote might count for naught, and that's perfectly alright, but I'll offer up my opinion on this article.

Spoiler

I think you're on the money (if this what I think is correct). The message being sent is largely "Learn to cook and be attractive, and do nothing else." This isn't videogames fault in general, this is pretty much a group effort by all of society. It's been that way for years, then there was brief period where people fought against it, and then the Equal Rights Amendment failed, and now we claim to have fixed the problem, along with racism, but we also tell people "feminist" is a dirty word.

I also feel that videogames do have some effect on shaping people's behavior, or at least, their dispensation towards certain behavior. This includes violence. I'm not saying videogames make us killers, but, like action movies, they do glorify violence and as viewers, we glorify in return, in large part because there don't exist games that come at it from any other angle. So I do postulate that these games may have some detrimental effect on some women's self-esteem in a few years down the line. I recognize that I may be in the minority on this, but look how many people claim Ayn Rand changed their world outlook. And that's a book. Why can't a game do something similar?

The trouble, though, it really seems to me, is not solely that these games have set a narrow range of standards for women. The trouble is that they also suck. Barbie Horse Adventures has been called the worst game of all time. I think a lot of these ideas would dissipate and we would see a healthier range of character if developers spent some time making these games and creating some sort of story behind it, one where their characters might have to emote beyond the old "I exude sex (and I can cook)." But instead, game developers have cranked these suckers out in order to make them quick and cost effective. Imagine if they'd spent Blizzard-esque time developing BHA. I'll bet it'd be a great game. I'll bet Barbie would look a lot different, and have better lines. But instead, we got crap that perpetuates more crap.

Publicly mundane statement is publicly mundane: "SECOND!" <3 Being correct is a gender-neutral act.

 

[Tears of Blood]

Gee, I wonder why more males enjoy video games than females? Oh right, because the content is marketed to them. There are plenty of shall we say "feminine" game premises that make great video games (Flower, for example?), it's just that they don't get made because people figure males are a bigger market.

Hah. No. When gaming started out, they made games for everyone. What, you think Pong prefer's manly men to girly girls? You think the bright colors depicted in the old NES games and the things that came before that were really aiming toward men? Stop being so stupid. Men take to games because they have a greater tendency to like them. Guys don't play games because they are marketed to guys, they are marketed to guys because guys play games. If you stop to think for a second, you'll realize that makes much more sense.

It's true that a lot of primitive video games maybe weren't targeting an audience of any particular gender, but your argument that guys just like games more than girls is pretty stupid because plenty of female gamers enjoy accessible games. [http://www.gamespot.com/news/6212734.html?sid=6212734Ý=rss&subj=6212734] I suspect guys have a greater tendency to like games that are challenging and competitive (not to say that there aren't girls who enjoy those games too), and those happen to be very common games because companies know that there is already a market for that. But the female gaming market would be just as strong as the male gaming market if the ratio of games made for each gender was closer to 1:1. There is no anti-gaming gene in girls.

Short answer: You're wrong.

Long answer: We'll have to agree to disagree here, I suppose. But, let me just point something out. Women may not have an "anti-games" gene, but that's not the only thing that makes us who we are. Having taken Psychology, I could explain that society shapes us to fit the role of our particular gender. We aren't just born a boy or a girl and automatically do boy/girl things. We do these things because of our environment and upbringing and such. Video games simply aren't one of those things that girls aren't programmed to like.

Human beings are social, but there's a big difference in the ways the two genders are social. Guys like to do things together, such as play sports or video games, while women are more content with book club meetings and other gatherings where they're focused simply on each other. A guy can ask another guy if he wants to come over and play a game, but two women aren't going to ask each other to play a game together.

As I said before, I'm not denying the existence of female gamers. I am not saying there aren't lots of gamer women. However, male gamers have and always will outnumber them, because gaming is largely a masquline passtime. Furthermore, non-gamer women will always outnumber gamer women. It's okay to admit such things, because that's the way it is. You can market games to women all you want, but the majority of them will far prefer shopping and the other feminine passtimes.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Just as a interesting counterpoint, Mission:Runway is now the top game on Steam:

Do you have what it takes to design a fancy frock or a fashion flop? Compete in creative challenges for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to show your creations in a major runway event and become the ultimate fashion designer. Will you be asked to stay or leave Mission: Runway?

It also includes "Mild Suggestive Themes", so I'd be very interested to see how that works out for Steam.

 

[Mockingjay]

Lol as a girl I actually don't care about the stereotypes and I'm not going to start bitching, but you woukd be suprised what games like 'Top Model' will do to a woman's mind xD

 

[DeathQuaker]

"Pretty Princess" games are fine and dandy (and yeah, I've mocked them before, but Susan Arendt has shamed me, 'cause she's right. Girly passion is what it is. And I've certainly played with my fair share of Barbies in my youth, even if they shared their Dream House with Voltron (he did the cooking)).

My only problem is the general media/marketing assumption that these are the only games "for girls" and that girls will not want to play other kinds of games--or, for that matter, that some males may not want to get their pretty princess video gaming on too. But yeah, the pink/pony/fashion show land of gaming has its place (and apparently sells damn well by seeing how many kinds of games like that I see in the NDS section of Best Buy).

And I would like to see games that actually have a universal appeal (many RPGs for example) marketed more... well, universally, rather than run with the assumption that only teen boys play them, when a respectable demographic of females and people aged 25+ play them as well.

Now I'm off to play Cooking Mama. Or God of War, not sure which.

 

[Pumpkin_Eater]

In my mind this falls under the larger umbrella of people blowing unimportant things way out of proportion. Games are entertainment first and foremost. The only reason for analyzing the sociopolitical implications of over 99% of them is to hear yourself talk; the real story, boring as this is, is people buy it so developers make it. Cooking Mama, Master Chief, and Laura Croft all exist to turn a profit for their respective companies, and you know what? They're all ok. Criticizing developers for making games that are popular and appealing is just backwards and curmudgeonly.