Showing posts with label gender. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gender. Show all posts

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Why are Dead Men okay but Dead Women upsetting?

Is it the rules of warfare at play? Or a kind of weird sexism? I'm glad guys in general don't actively want to kill me. But does that mean women 'don't count' in warfare? I assure you honey, if it's a matter of war, you will fear me.

Also it pisses me off that violence in video games is ok for men, but not women and children. Again, the ancient rules of warfare. Human life counts no matter who is getting a facefull of lead. Artists and designers and concept makers: if you don't have the balls to depict dead women and dead children, it doesn't make sense to be okay with depicting dead men. It's all dead people.


Gamazon: Dead Girls Have More Fun

I don’t think the idea of making a “dead girl” prop would ever have occurred to them.

Is that because they don’t like women? Or have some agenda to deny the existence of women? No. It’s actually because they have not even the tiniest shred of a subconscious urge to hurt a woman. Nor does it give them even the slightest pleasure to imagine a woman suffering or dying, or to envision what a dead and partially devoured woman might look like. This is not about talent, about dev time, or about sexism: it’s about a man’s own emotional limits as an artist. There are some things that just don’t necessarily make a person happy with himself after a day’s work. Fiddling with the mutilated corpses of women is high on the list.

Monday, March 22, 2010

No Pun Intended?



How Not To Market to Girl Gamers as seen in Game Informer Magazine :b

Thank you

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_235/6978-Vaginophobia

According to the ESA, 40% of people playing games are women. There are almost twice as many women over the age of eighteen who play games than there are boys under the age of seventeen. And yet only one in every ten game developers is a woman, while the ranks of videogame journalists skew heavily male, as does the audience that reads their work.
That's what keeps eating at me, especially at coventions like Casual Connect, where hundreds of males gather to figure out What Women Want. Come on people, just pay a woman for her opinion already. Do some A/B testing and some dialogue. Pay some average ladies to hang out (booth babes don't count!) and my guess is it will look more female-friendly and a few more will start hanging out for free.

It is like pulling teeth around here.

Of course there's a second question which is, why do we have to pay women to hang out when there are thousands of dudes willing to stab someone for the chance. Why do women shy away from game development when these positions are held in the greatest esteem by fans worldwide? I'm getting into it with some friends of mine and may post more soon.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

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!