"The Industry Thinks We're All 17-Year-Old Douchebags"

http://www.cracked.com/article_18571_5-reasons-its-still-not-cool-to-admit-youre-gamer.html

"Such power!"
"If it's this good watching, just imagine!"
"Is he going to...."
"By the gods!"

I wasn't going to bring this up...but then I got riled.

I just read this on twitter:

@theborderhouse Why are most casual gamers women? http://bit.ly/actM8L

linking to: http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=1414

This article really pissed me off...it is a glaring example of how most of the media, and possilby many gamers, are thinking about games. Boy vs. Girl...Blue vs. Pink. Guns vs. Unicorns. Spatial cognition vs. social relations.

Why is the author assuming these 70% female casual games are Pink and Long Haired? Why were those the images the website linked to? Casual games can refer to puzzles, murder mysteries, haunted mansions, wizard towers, hidden objects, card games, deserted islands...

This Queen of Hearts blog has lots of women, and I thought about marketing it as such, but I don't want to. It's against the very point.

This is all stuff my friend Lehanna started me thinking about, along with sending me many links to Jezebel coverage:

Games are games and brains are brains. I like playing rogue assassins and am obsessed with treasure collecting (see my user name). I love sniper gunts and anti personnel ammo and mininukes.

The whole "girls play becasue their boyfriends do" angle makes me ill. The people I date tend to like video games because like me, they love fun, and games are fun. I don't play because they do - we ALL play because we ALL like fun.  We all have brains and like being challenged and figuring out problems people before us have crafted for us to play with and solve.

http://jezebel.com/5443722/act-like-you-know-nielsen-research-confirms-that-women-buy-systems-and-play-games

http://jezebel.com/5381665/why-is-marketing-to-female-gamers-considered-challenging

more on this later!