Tropes vs Women in Gaming & the Female Gaming Experience

Thanks for the tip! I looked at the video on Steam and it seems a bit weird but not scary, so I think it will work. Her favorite game so far has been Costume Quest, so this should be right up her alley.

complexmath wrote:

Thanks for the tip! I looked at the video on Steam and it seems a bit weird but not scary, so I think it will work. Her favorite game so far has been Costume Quest, so this should be right up her alley.

There are some weird eyeball spider things with blade legs that I just encountered which might be a little bit creepy but in more of a Tim-Burtonesque way I think (but then I play stuff like Outlast and Amnesia so my sense of perspective might be a bit off )

Also it's SUPRISINGLY hard :O
[size=2]Or I'm just really dumb this morning...[/size]

Oh, and in case you wanted a little rage with your morning cereal, here's a particularly classy thread from the Steam Forum for the game: "A face only a mother could love". Couple of real class acts in there.

stevenmack wrote:
complexmath wrote:

Thanks for the tip! I looked at the video on Steam and it seems a bit weird but not scary, so I think it will work. Her favorite game so far has been Costume Quest, so this should be right up her alley.

There are some weird eyeball spider things with blade legs that I just encountered which might be a little bit creepy but in more of a Tim-Burtonesque way I think (but then I play stuff like Outlast and Amnesia so my sense of perspective might be a bit off )

Also it's SUPRISINGLY hard :O
[size=2]Or I'm just really dumb this morning...[/size]

Oh, and in case you wanted a little rage with your morning cereal, here's a particularly classy thread from the Steam Forum for the game: "A face only a mother could love". Couple of real class acts in there.

It's not just you! I thought it was kind of hard, too.

Good grief, I actually went and took a peek at that thread. What is WRONG with people?...

I don't recall seeing it mentioned before, so I was wondering what the participants in this thread thought of the game "Nelly Cootalot: Spoonbeaks Ahoy!" and its protagonist.

It's a freeware point-and-click adventure game reminiscent of the Monkey Island games, in which you play the titular Nelly Cootalot who is sent on an epic quest to free captured spoonbeaks from slavery. It's relatively short (~2 hours), but I found it to be very enjoyable:
IMAGE(http://www.nellycootalot.com/wp-content/gallery/nelly_1/nelly1_01.jpg)

A sequel (Nelly Cootalot: The Fowl Fleet!) was successfully kickstarted half a year ago:
IMAGE(https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/projects/557533/photo-main.jpg)

The industry is a veritable oroborous of fail and dumb.

That's just depressing. They can't figure out how to sell toys to girls so they want to just pretend they don't exist?

stevenmack wrote:

Pardon me while I just..

/switches to steam and thumbs-up depression quest in greenlight.

...there we go.

I've played the web version of that. It was intelligent in how it looked at depression and captivating as a video game. It's good.

So, I also voted for the game. It's a worthy game, easily. The author, too, looks worthy of the support.

It sounds like they aren't even trying to sell toys to girls. They're just assuming they won't sell because some historical attempt failed for unknown reasons.

That's just awful. It's easier to stick with the shooty, splody, karate-chop action figure marketing tactic than even attempt to figure out how to get those toys in the hands of a girl. So they can the whole show. That's ... Wow.

1) The ads for "action figures" are usually focused on violence. The cool thing about the toy is how it beats the crap out of other toys.

2) Girls are rarely in those commercials, if ever. It's not marketed to them so young girls and parents don't consider them girl toys.

A simple ad with a boy and girl saving Metropolis with Superman and WonderWoman dolls would be enough. Heck, make a commercial with just girls playing with all of the superhero toys. Make another ad with items like t-shirts, backpacks, sneakers, cell phone cases, whatever kids like these days.

Done.

It weirds me out that boys and girls playing separately as kids is a thing. I mean, I know it's because of the patriarchy and all that, but it's always still been weird to me. All us local kids just played together as a large group. The adults only started segregating us by gender at puberty.

Horrible.
But it is nice to see someone at least honestly acknowledge what is going on behind the scenes.

LarryC wrote:

It weirds me out that boys and girls playing separately as kids is a thing. I mean, I know it's because of the patriarchy and all that, but it's always still been weird to me. All us local kids just played together as a large group. The adults only started segregating us by gender at puberty.

At the Primary school I went to (ages 4-12ish) playtime was entirely segregated with a bloody great stone wall between the boys and girls playgrounds. Which is a shame since I had ZERO interest in that "Foot-to-ball" game or "running around screaming for no good reason" - another popular favorite - so it would have been nice to have a few alternative options besides the "stand around in a corner being miserable and counting the minutes till the bell rings" game.

That's a crap game by the way. Don't recommend it.

Dini's revelations are especially galling as someone who says Legend of Korra is their second favorite show this year.

SpacePPoliceman wrote:

Dini's revelations are especially galling as someone who says Legend of Korra is their second favorite show this year.

Now I know why they canned Young Justice. It was awesome but the wrong demographic was watching.

I kind of just want to yell, "TELL ME HOW MUCH MONEY IN TOYS I CAN BUY AND RECYCLE TO KEEP GOOD SHOWS ON THE AIR?"

But that won't do anything.

This guy has an agenda.

Thanks Obama for spammers and canceling Young Justice.

Man, I wish I had a profile on Social Media Site. I hear that's where are the cool people hang out.

LarryC wrote:

It weirds me out that boys and girls playing separately as kids is a thing. I mean, I know it's because of the patriarchy and all that, but it's always still been weird to me. All us local kids just played together as a large group. The adults only started segregating us by gender at puberty.

I grew up in the 70's but this is what I remember for where I grew up (NJ for that part of childhood). Lots of boys vs. girls "wars" however. Still, everybody played games together.

Reminds me of the tricks I had to pull when reading the Barsoom books to my kids. Dejah Thoris wore dresses MADE of jewels, not ONLY jewels.

We used to do a lot of "good parts" editing a la The Princess Bride when reading to the kids. King Solomon's Mines got edits in all directions. I didn't know others didn't do this to tailor the stories to the audience.

It works both ways, too. Pippi Longstocking makes a very interesting boy.

I started playing Runner 2 as it was free on PSN.
Commandgirl Video looks a lot less weird once you add a costume:

IMAGE(http://i.stack.imgur.com/1anAV.png)

Not sure if this is the right place for this but Game Studios put up a fairly lengthy paper (I've only started reading it) about the women and gender in the industry, although a quick skim indicates it primarily focuses on Roberta Williams.

Ah. And she was in the game industry before it was prejudiced against women.

Edit: Wow, Nooney is a wordy writer. Even the abstract puts me to sleep. I'm trying to get through it anyway though. It's certainly well researched.

Is the weird historical trick here that what we've written thus far aren't histories of gaming but a history of gamers -- and that's why so much gets left out? The curious lives of Roberta Williams, of Elizabeth Hood, of the women who make confessions of their ludic pasts to me at conferences, suggest that we may need to flip the sentence: what does it take for a life to fit a game? Within game history, the only people we've made historically visible are those we've organized ourselves to see, those who've made the game a certain type of culture.

I think a large part of the problem is that the term "gamer" exists in the first place. It denotes a social group, as if playing games is somehow specific to a subculture. And I think a large percentage of the people who identify as gamers are too young to have played Sierra games, for example. It's a term that denotes core gamers and the games they play. So I suppose the paper has a point. If people really confuse gamer history with gaming history, it leaves out a lot of diversity.

complexmath wrote:

Edit: Wow, Nooney is a wordy writer. Even the abstract puts me to sleep.

2 reasons for that a) it's an academic paper written for an academic audience and b) socialist/marxist-feminist critical theory is nothing if it ain't all wordy as hell.

complexmath wrote:

Ah. And she was in the game industry before it was prejudiced against women.

Yeah, it dovetails nicely with the Polygon long-form about how marketing switched from all-audiences to boys only post-80s crash.

In fact, now that I think about it... Sierra On-Line (just the original Oakhurst studio, not counting their acquisitions) had almost as many female designers as male: Roberta Williams, Kristi Marx, Lori Cole, and Jane Jensen. On the male side you had Al Lowe, Scott Murphy, Mark Crowe, Mark Seibert, Cory Cole, Josh Mandel, and Jim Walls. That's a very high ratio compared to the current industry.

Here's a piece linked by boingboing on how it is that "Your" marketing iterates to only targeting men

http://howtonotsuckatgamedesign.com/...

Helen Lewis in New Statesman asks Do videogames need their own version of the Bechdel test?

I'm racking my brains for a conversation between Elizabeth and Daisy Fitzroy in Bioshock Infinite, or indeed Elizabeth and any other woman.

In order for female characters to converse with one another, you have to have female characters in the first place.