Quote:
Originally Posted by Clodfobble
Lot of angry young men in the world. We like to tell ourselves that the more modern civilizations sublimate the testosterone, but sometimes I think they just pack it under greater pressure until it has to spew out into whatever ridiculous outlet is available.
The internet has made harassment far too easy.
|
Yep. Totally agree.
I'm currently on a break from gaming, and have been for about the last 2-3 years. I get too obsessed when i am into a game and that's really not good when trying to write a PhD thesis :P
The last time I was into gaming, it was two games mainly that I played - both MMOs - Darkfall and Mortal Online. I was very involved in the game forums too. The MO forums were a lot more wlecoming of emale players than the DF forums as i recall.
With MO, the game was very much still in development. I had two paid accounts and also donated money to the development fund (not a lot, just £50). Because it was still in dev, there were lots of feedback/dev threads. One of them was about character design - and in particular the introduction of NPC characters to the cities. They'd brought in a bunch of male NPC character models and a single female NPC character model. Needless to say the female NPC was a scantily clad, hotbabe slavegirl type. So we had a long discussion about that character design and that branched off into a discussion of female characters in games generally. Maybe it was because the game community had a higher average age than in DF, but it turned into a really interesting discussion. Some of it frustrated me (I maintain and always have that, having been a gamer in the early 80s when both boys and girls played and then seen the scene change to a mosly male one) that there is no natural reason for girls not to play games. Some of the male contributors were convinced that women are biologically less likely to want to play fighting games - I found that frustrating. I say that those games attract mainly male players because they are mainly male characters, and marketed mainly at male players - with the only female characters being hyper sexualised - this effectively makes them seem an unfriendly place for women.
I also found it frustrating when younger lads told me that girls weren't proper gamers - as I say, Ive been gaming for longer than some of them have been alive. But even so - for the most part it was a civil debate with excellent pioints raised on both sides, and by both male and female community members. One of the best arguments in favour of more inclusivity of women came from a male community member. Some of the best arguments against the hper sexualised portrayals of women in games came from male community members who were sick of being treated by games makers as if they were drooling adolescents who just wanted wank material. They were arguing for better female charaters - they wanted more depth and they wanted to be able to play this stuff with their wivesand girlfriends.
As i am coming towards the end of the PhD I've started taking notice of games again. I'm reading games reviews and making a mental list of the games I want to catch up with once I have some free time (no surpside that a lot ofthem are zombie survival games:p). And I've started tootling about on gaming sites and forums. But fuck me the atmosphere has soured. There's been some small progress in terms of portrayal of women in games, but the gaming community seems to have taken a step back in some quarters. Their response to more participation of women, and of women starting to demand that their needs be met within game production has been to launch a war.
Bit depressing really. I really thought by now things would have gone the other way. Why is it such a threat to some men that they may have games in which the female characters have actual roles in games and might not be wearing a metal gstring on the battlefield?