Month: August 2005

Bad, tekanji, bad!

tekanji

Okay, I haven’t delivered on my promised third part of my Girls and Game Ads series. I will, I swear. See, now you have a promise and a swear! But it isn’t entirely the fault of my laziness, really, I’ve been busy too! No, not just playing Sims 2 (I just got University, I blame EA!), but switching around my flights to Miami and scheduling my tubal ligation. Yeah, I said tubal ligation. Excuse me while I squee like a fangirl. That’s right, folks, on September 7 I will say goodbye to my fertility and hello to reproductive freedom. More on that after the procedure.

I’m also attending a gaming conference in Seattle on the 10th. I originally wasn’t able to go ’cause I was supposed to be in Miami, but then the hurricane hit and my dad’s house got trashed by a tree so I postponed until the 12. So I’ll be traveling so much my head hurts, but it’ll be totally worth it. I’ll try to write on that too, but I might not get to it with all the running around I’ll be doing directly after.

Oh and, as you may see, I’ve added a “personal” section to the blog. It’s part of my effort to both fan my narcissism and remove the “part-time hypocrite” stamp from my forehead (you know what I’m talking about, Sour Duck) and put some more personal into my political. I’ve also added a “series” category to keep a bit better track of any post series we do here. Oh, and done some link cleanup. Some were broken, some I never read, and some I decided were too outside the spirit of my blog to keep. I’m somewhat sorry to see Little Miss Attila go, but half the time I popped over to see what was up in her neck of the woods I would be greeted by language I found offensive. I value other perspectives, but I can’t support things like calling people other people’s “bitches”.

PS. I know this blog’s design is hideous and broken for IE users. Please poke me to update it, ’cause I really should but I’m a bad, bad, person because my laziness keeps getting in the way.

"He's a man", "she's a woman"… So what?

tekanji

While I’m on my mental vacation I’d just like to point ya’ll to a post by alley rat entitled Why Do Women Cheat?. It’s a critique on a pop-science article that uses essentialism, bad evolutionary science, and a big dose of idiocy to say that since “monogamous” female birds cheat for supposed “reasons”, human women do it for the same “reasons”. Yeah. Right.

Anyway, the conclusion of the article caught my eye. It gave me a warm fuzzy, so I wanted to share it:

While I’m at it, I’ll just mention that I think that the absolute weakest explanation for anything people do is “well, he’s a man” or “well, she’s a woman, that’s how women are”. No, people. That may be how YOU are, but don’t include me in that. The reason I got interested in feminism when I was a teenager was because people kept telling me what I was like, and they kept being really, really wrong. People told me that I wanted to get married and have kids; people told me that I couldn’t enjoy sex without love; people told me that I was a romantic, delicate creature. People told me lots of shit that was supposed to be true because I was female, and that wasn’t true at all. And it wasn’t true of most of my female friends, but a lot of it was true of my male friends. And I realized that people had been telling me a bunch of lies, things that were “social convention” and things that were stupid rules that I was suposed to follow whether or not they actually suited me. And the same thing applies to every boy I’ve ever been close to, only probably to a more severe extent. They got told all kinds of untrue things about themselves too, because when you’re born people look at your genitals and they think they know who you are. But they don’t. And so, to close this rant, I’d just like to say a big “Fuck off!” to all the lies. Human beings are infinitely more complicated than our biology (whatever that may be, anyway) and if you ignore or downplay the role of culture in behavior, you are doomed to telling lies.

Right on, alley rat.

Pitching Harassment [Girls & Game Ads, Part 2]

tekanji

For this part of the series, I’m going to mainly be using World of Warcraft for reference, as that’s the company I’ve had my most recent (and bitter) experience with. I also think that the company’s marketing and design choices have provided me with a clear link between sexist marketing and the creation of a gaming culture hostile to women. Keep in mind, though, that this is a phenomenon that pervades gaming culture as a whole.

First off, I’d like to point out that I’m not the first one to make the jump from advertising and how the actual players treat women:

Further, many of the marketing strategies and magazines are directly exclusively toward guys. I stopped reading Electronic Gaming Monthly a few years ago after I got sick of seeing yet another article on a “girl gamer” with a few squares of cotton stretched over her fake boobs. Those interviews usually focused on whether or not she played naked rather than what was currently spinning in her system. What I find particularly sad about this is not that it tends to alienate their few female readers, but that a large chunk of their target audience is younger boys… so these melon-chested interviewees (surrounded with drawings of the same, ripped from the games themselves… see Dead or Alive) come to represent women for these kids. Sexist attitudes are reinforced. Girl gamers are shunted aside by a new generation as fluffy sex kitties who prance about playing The Sims and giggling behind a hand.

[From Girls, games, and a culture of hostility by Legendary Monkey]

One of my main beefs with Blizzard’s treatment of women was that the advertising that involved female characters always showed scantily-clad, hyper-sexualized female avatars. Ever since Warcraft III one of their main “poster girls” has been a busty Night Elf vixen; she is by far their most visible woman, prominently featured in the background of their website and the most visible female in their game loading screens. Check out, if you will, their official wallpaper section and compare the females’ representation to that of the males’.

One line of Blizzard’s official WoW wallpapers.

The focus in the above female featured wallpapers is on their perfectly round, gravity-defying, eye-catching breasts. Also notice the similarity in their body shapes: thin, small waists, similar shoulders, etc. When you rule out the obvious elements like their different races, opposing colour palettes, and hunched versus standing up tall poses, the similarities are actually quite striking, even down to their long hair and magical right hand as a secondary focus. Sure, if you look closely they have different face shapes (the undead warlock has a longer jaw), but I only realized that when I sat down to examine the row I selected. In stark contrast to the scantily-clad ladies, the dwarven rifleman is suited up with leather armour and a cloak and the focus is on his beard and face. I would definitely say that this fits my argument that women are turned into “cookie cutter” objects while men are seen as individuals through these kinds of advertisements.

I’d also like to address another noticeable issue of the gender split: character dancing. It isn’t advertising, per se, but it’s an example of Blizzard generated content that reinforces the misogynist culture the players engage in. While playing my Horde character (Troll female) I started noticing a disparity between the way women dance (sexy, hip-moving, arm-waving way) and the way men dance (active, much movement, often jumping, sometimes silly). The female Night Elves are the worst: they were described to me as “pole dancing without the pole” and when I saw my Night Elf alt dance, I couldn’t help but agree. But, they make a joke about it in their /silly command so it must be ok! (The joke command is another area that’s a bit of a sore point; I noticed that the girls make on average more sexual jokes than the guys, often focusing on their own bodies.)

So, I’ve shown how Blizzard buys into the same sexist marketing ploys as the rest of the industry, but what does this have to do with in-game harassment?

Well, I’d like to return to the quote I pulled from Legendary Monkey’s article: “a large chunk of their target audience is younger boys… so these melon-chested interviewees… come to represent women for these kids.” Granted, in this case she was talking about actual women, but the females in these games do to a certain extent represent actual women. One of the way we learn as humans is by absorbing messages in popular culture (news, advertising, books, games, movies, etc) and the message the video game industry is sending it’s target audience is clear: women are whores on display for your amusement.

Think I’m exaggerating? Hop on to any FPS (first person shooter) game that uses a mic (I recommend Halo 2, since the atmosphere seems particularly virulent there) and say something (or, if you’re a guy, have a female family member play using voice chat). Count how long it takes for the insults like “faggot”, “nigger”, and “pussy” to be replaced with vitriol thrown at the woman player like “whore” or “go back to the kitchen”. Or go onto a ventrilo/teamspeak server for an MMO guild and listen to the way they talk with their female members, chances are they’ll be a lot of talking about cybersex, how “hot” the girl is, boob-talk, etc. No “bad” name-calling there, though, because if she’s in the guild they “like” her.

Any time I bring up the offensive language (all that I cited above and more, not just the female-directed slurs) I’m told that I’m oversensitive, or it doesn’t mean the same thing in gaming culture that it does in real life. Sorry, kids, but I call bullshit. There is nothing harmless about an environment that uses verbal intimidation to dehumanize a group of people, whether or not the person using the language intends it to be so.

But isn’t dehumanizing a group of people exactly what the ads marketed towards these teenage boys do? By reducing the women depicted into not much more than a sexual object the companies are not only attracting people who already feel this way to play their game, they’re encouraging and condoning the objectification, and by extension the harassment, that goes on in their servers.

While stopping the hyper-sexualization of the female characters won’t fix the harassment problem, I truly believe that representing the women avatars in advertising and in-game as individuals/people on the same level as the males would be a step in the right direction. If the companies send the message that all people – regardless of sex, race, sexual orientation, etc – deserve respect, then not only will more people who believe this to be true be drawn to the games, but also it will help foster an environment friendly to all players. Who knows, maybe even the kids who grow up in a bigoted atmosphere might even learn something about tolerance.

Up next: Girl Power? – we all love girls who kick ass, but does showing mostly “sexy” women in these roles hurt more than it helps?

All World of Warcraft images copyright © Blizzard Entertainment.

Introduction [Girls & Game Ads, Part 1]

tekanji

Okay, I’m sorry for the myriad of video game oriented posts recently, but what can I say? I’m a gamer, which makes me obsessed with games. My recent break from World of Warcraft has given me a lot to chew on and it doesn’t help when other people are writing on the same topics I’ve been giving serious thought to. There’s a lot of ground to cover, so I’ve decided to make this into a series entitled “Girls & Game Ads” (sorry, I suck at names and this one is short-ish and uses alliteration). Obviously, it’s going to focus on issues of how the gaming industry chooses to market its games and how it relates to and affects women.

I’d like to turn to a recent editorial at GameGirlz to give everyone an idea of the current atmosphere of the general advertising in the industry. The piece, a letter by a GameStop employee, discusses an in-store advertisement that Gamestop has chosen to run:

A guy and his scantily clad girlfriend are in a car; the guy is driving and he looks like he’s in a rush — and the girl for some reason is punching him senseless. The next shot is of a video game box with the same girl on the cover.

Oh, okay, she’s from a video game. (Or she’s supposed to represent a video game).

Whatever. Somehow, it didn’t sit right with me. In the next scene, they are at a GameStop and the guy tells the salesman “I wanna trade her in” pointing to his punch happy girlfriend. The salesman smiles, brings out another scantily clad woman who punches the boyfriend so hard he crashes into a wall, but he gets up and grins, “OHHH, I’ll take her!” So the guy walks out with his new ‘game’ or ‘girlfriend’ and they live happily ever after. Meanwhile another guy walks in and wanted to buy the other girl, er, game that just got traded in. She starts punching him too.

City of Villains ad on GameStop
I went to the GameStop website in an effort to find any information, images, or even a movie of the advertisement itself. Unfortunately, neither the website nor google turned up anything useful on it*, but when I visited the company page I was greeted by the City of Villains advertisement depicted on the left of this paragraph. Maybe I’m just a pervert, but the first thing I saw was the boobs. Indeed, the first thing my eye was drawn to on the entire site was the advertisement and, by extension, the prominently displayed breasts. Yeah, the guy’s head is bigger but apparently I wasn’t the only one who thought the boobs were more eye-catching (see image below).

Ad line-up on GameStop
Cropped cover art from featured games on GameStop’s official website.

Another thing evident in this particular line-up is something I’ve noticed as another feature of video game advertising: images of women tend to have the large boobs as a focus (either by showing lots of skin or by having skin-tight costumes), while images of men tend to focus on the face, or show a heavily armoured (or clothed) man. While there are obviously exceptions to this (armoured/small breasted women, scantily-clothed men, etc), I posit that this dichotomy is one that is typical in advertisements for the gaming industry.

Now, objectifying women in advertisements is not new. It’s a ploy that the video game industry has been using since I can remember. The “trade-in” ad has apparently jumped on the “sexy fighting chick” bandwagon that’s become popular in the media over the past decade or so since it uses “scantily clad babes + show of ‘strength’ (punching) = desirability” model. Again, nothing new. This is the first time that I’ve seen such a blatant acknowledgement of the whole ownership of women that this kind of gaze gives men, though. Here women actually are the property of the men – to use and then trade in for the newer, better model.

But fear not, ladies, it’s ok because the girls weren’t supposed to be real:

Oh, and also, we received an e-mail from the powers that be from M-A-R-K-E-T-I-N-G and they state that that commercial is not meant to be offensive, the girls were meant to be video game characters and they were trying to appeal to their major demographic target, young males.

Beautiful. Exploit women to exploit young male hormones. So beautiful.

Gee, I guess I shouldn’t be such a humourless feminist. Marketing says it’s funny, so it must be! Seriously, I’m not the only one who finds this sort of bullshit insulting to both the women who are told that our bodies are the equivalent of video games (ie. property of sex-crazed teenagers), but also to the young males that the game is targeting. Last time I checked, their target audience bought games because the gameplay looked good not because they’re some mindless automatons controlled by their dick (“Oh look, it’s boobies! Who cares if the gameplay is awful, bugged, and no fun? Penis says boobies = buy!” Please).

The employee who wrote this editorial said that the commercial made her feel “sad”, “insulted”, and “degraded”. I have to say ads like the one she described make me feel much the same. Is that the feelings that Marketing wants to elicit in its consumers? I may not be their “target” but did I miss the part of “Marketing 101” that says it’s a good idea to put down any potential customers that aren’t in your target audience? Last time I checked, the whole purpose of advertising was to get more consumers, not less.

And, while we’re on the subject, why aren’t women a target audience? Gaming culture is already firmly entrenched with young males, they don’t need to be “pandered to” (if you can call exploiting their supposed lack of hormonal control “pandering” to them, which Marketing may believe but I don’t). Gamers, even casual gamers, buy games based on content – preferred genres, innovative gameplay, staple companies/series/characters, etc. The only difference is that the culture has been such that most guys grow up in an environment that assumes they’ll play games (casual gamers at the very least) while girls grow up in an environment that assumes that they won’t (unless cajoled/forced by a boyfriend). The popularity of games marketed in a way that includes women (female oriented or genderless) should make things clear: women have the chance to make up at least 50% of the consumer base, if only the industry would wake up and stop marketing against them.

Up next: Pitching Harassment – examining the links between sexist advertisement and in-game harassment of women.

* ETA 12/14/2007: Thanks to Feminist Gamers I’ve found the video! The description of it was spot on.

Sunday Link Blogging

tekanji

Stop saying video games cause violence or I'll kill you!

tekanji

Surprise! A new study shows that video games don’t make kids violent. I know, it’s hard to believe that after all the wild speculations, conflation of correlation and causation, and lack of any real evidence that a scientific study pops up to say, “Nope, sorry folks. Video games = violent kids hasn’t been proven yet.” But, that’s exactly what Dmitri Williams (University of Illinois) and Marko Skoric (School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore) are saying about their recent study.

Results from the first long-term study of online videogame playing may be surprising. Contrary to popular opinion and most previous research, the new study found that players’ “robust exposure” to a highly violent online game did not cause any substantial real-world aggression.

The study was a month long and followed Asheron’s Call 2 players for about 56 hours of playtime. Of the 75 players, none of them any MMO background although it is not clear whether or not they were gamers. The control group was 138 people who did not play the game at all, although again it is unclear whether or not they were allowed to play other kinds of games. The ages ranged from 16 to 48 with an average of 27.7 years. The gendered makeup of players was not mentioned.

Players were not statistically different from the non-playing control group in their beliefs on aggression after playing the game than they were before playing, Williams said.

Nor was game play a predictor of aggressive behaviors. Compared with the control group, the players neither increased their argumentative behaviors after game play nor were significantly more likely to argue with their friends and partners.

“I’m not saying some games don’t lead to aggression, but I am saying the data are not there yet,” Williams said. “Until we have more long-term studies, I don’t think we should make strong predictions about long-term effects, especially given this finding.”

Many of the obvious flaws in the study were acknowledged in the article: using Asheron’s Call (a fantasy-based, not particularly violent MMO) as the studied game, the way aggression was measured meant that only moderate to high changes would be noted, and using a broad range of ages made it harder to measure the impact on children/teenagers specifically.

Instead of merely assuming that violent games must be directly responsible for violence in teenagers, or assuming that violent games have no impact on the players, Williams calls for better research on video games in general.

“If the content, context, and play length have some bearing on the effects, policy-makers should seek a greater understanding of the games they are debating. It may be that both the attackers and defenders of the industry’s products are operating without enough information, and are instead both arguing for blanket approaches to what is likely a more complicated phenomenon.”

Nor do researchers know much about the positive effects of gaming, Williams said.

“Based on my research, some of the potential gains are in meeting a lot of new people and crossing social boundaries. That’s important in a society where we are increasingly insulated from one another.”

Some game researchers believe that video-gaming leads to substantial gains in learning teamwork, managing groups and most important, Williams said, problem solving.

Despite the flaws, I think that Williams’ study is a step in the right direction. I especially agree with what was said on the potential positive effects of video games, as I noted in my Shrub.com article Gaming Communities: Real or Imaginary? Bottom line, and I think this article captures this quite well: stop jumping to conclusions and start doing more, quality research on the subject.

Via Game Girl Advance

WoW Whining, revisited

tekanji

Over at Utopian Hell, Astare took me to task for some of my cited reasons why I left WoW. I was thinking about writing this post anyway, but after reading what she and Aurora had to say (even after writing a novel in response – no, I wasn’t kidding when I said being concise pains me) I felt the need to elaborate on why I cancelled my account.

My feeling about Blizzard and women is the main reason I left. Because of the character limit, it was the only reason I felt the strong need to address in the “why are you leaving?” comment field. For the sake of my argument, and the fact that my anger was mainly directed towards that, I used the issue as my sole address in my previous post. Despite that, it wasn’t the only reason I left.

While I did mentally set aside the entire summer to play WoW (after all the hype about it, and so many of my friends being addicted to it, how could I not?), the reality is that I have more important things to do. Firstly, I’ve been travelling almost non-stop since I vacated my apartment in July. I just got the internet set up at my home base, but I’m intending to be here only a little more than half of each week and then in September I’ll be in Miami for the entire month. My current laptop cannot handle WoW, or any MMO. I also have a slew of real life appointments I need to take care of before I go to Japan in April, the most important of which is setting up and getting a tubal ligation. And last, but certainly not least, Sarah and I have been seeking representation for Children of the Storm for about a year now and if I don’t get my ass in gear and finish this round of editing we’ll never get the sucker published.

Time issues aside, because if I was hooked on the game I know I would make time for it, there was one major aspect of the gameplay that I wasn’t fond of. It’s actually the one way in which I think FFXI outstripped WoW, although ironically it was also an aspect of FFXI that was flawed enough to be a driving factor in my losing interest in the game. I’m talking about their party system. In FFXI you simply couldn’t get far into the game without having to play nice; partying with people was just that integral. The social aspect of it also made the game a lot more fun to play; there was a constant strategizing, chatting, and camaraderie from teamwork that made me feel like I was a part of a community of like-minded people. I had to actively seek out people to party with in WoW because, experience wise, it wasn’t generally a good bargain. When I actually found people I had a good time, but my social network outside of my guild was much smaller than what I had had in FFXI. Soloing (both grinding and solo-questing) just isn’t fun for me. Ideally, I’d like to see a mixture of the FFXI large-party emphasis and the WoW solo/small-party ability so that the teamwork learning curve is steep, but not so much so that during non-peak hours it’s impossible to find enough people to get a useable party going.

Another area that I thought FFXI excelled in and WoW lost in was the multicultural aspect. In FFXI, because I speak a little Japanese, I was able to combine my meagre knowledge with the auto-translate function (brilliant idea, imho) in order to play with a broader range of players. Sure, the conversation wasn’t great, but I loved the ability to connect with these people and fight together for a common goal (getting XP). I truly believe that the fact that the servers weren’t Western-centric impacted the overall feeling of the community, as well as the overall tolerance. Sure, I encountered my fair share of bigots, but their numbers were far exceeded by those who were willing and eager to party and communicate with anyone regardless of race/gender/orientation/what-have-you.

So, I guess part of what I’m saying is that I think each MMO brings its own unique pros and cons to light. I do wish that I had been able to stick it out longer with WoW. I most certainly wish that I didn’t feel like Blizzard was exacerbating the “girl power must be sexy/sexual” trend I’ve seen in Hollywood in the past several years. But, in the end my leaving is inevitable and, at the very least, it gives me a chance to explore more MMOs on the market.

Don't be such a girl, even if you are one

tekanji

From Gender and Computing:

According to Ph.D. student Robb Willer, men have a tendency to change their opinion if they are told that their opinion ‘is feminine’. Men who were told that they had given ‘feminine’ answers to a test “changed their opinion to be more homophobic, stronger support for the Irak war and a tendency to buy gas-hungry SUVs.” (And for the ‘feminine’ readers, that’s a Sports Utility Vehicle.) Women, on the other hand, did not have the same tendency to change their opinion, neither if they were described as feminine nor masculine.

See also: Masculinithy Challenged, Men Prefer War and SUVs, media girl, and The Countess.

If this study is accurate (I was unable to find information to verify the testing methods and sample sizes beyond “undergraduate students”) then this represents yet another confirmation that the fight for equality has thus far only succeeded in allowing women to “rise” to the position of men without actually elevating “womanhood” up to be on equal ground as “manhood”.

This represents to me another reason why feminists need to step out of the male-normative frame. By “male-normative frame” I mean men and the “male sphere” being the default, characterized most visibly as the “women must work to be valid human beings” mindset used by anti-feminists/non-feminists to decry feminism. I wrote a bit about this here and here.

I think this also clearly illustrates the link between homophobia (especially male homophobia) and sexism. Male homosexuality is seen as “feminine” – when a guy starts acting in traditionally “feminine” ways (like caring about his hair and clothes, oh no!) he’s immediately thought of as “gay”. Of course, all he needs to do these days is cry out, “No, no. I’m metrosexual not retrosexual!” Because, you know, we can’t just accept that it’s “ok” and “normal” for a man (regardless of sexual orientation) to not fit into the macho mould. No, we need to have two words that not only degrade a person’s sexuality by likening it to a choice in the way someone acts, but also reaffirm the man’s “maleness” by setting him apart from gay men. We need a word that a person can use to say that he’s “cool” instead of “womanly”. It’s a compliment for a woman to be told she’s like a man, but an insult for a man to be called girly. Coincidence? I think not.

At the core, feminism is about giving people the ability to live their lives as they see fit without their very personhood coming under attack. If we’re ever to achieve that, we need to break out of the oppressive male-normative frame that we’ve been lumbering under for years. Feminism isn’t about making women into men, no matter what the Rush Limbaugh-types tell you. Forcing people to be something they don’t want to be doesn’t work; if you don’t believe me look at the feminine backlash in China after Mao’s death. Heck, look at the backlash against “feminism” that we experience today in the Western world. That says it all.

If we’re ever going to win the war against the institutions that force us to be what they want us to be, we need to fight for choice on all fronts. We need to support not only the working women, but the stay-at-home moms and dads. We need to illustrate the links of oppression – feminism can’t just be about the straight, white, rich women. The perception of feminism can’t be about them, either. What I’m saying isn’t new, or novel, but it needs to be said and spread. Are you with me?

Goodbye WoW, hello disappointment

tekanji

I cancelled my World of Warcraft account today. Truth is, I haven’t played the account since June. Mind, I got my account in May, so I logged maybe one month of play time. This is in comparison to FFXI, which chained me to my computer 12 hours a day for three months, and Puzzle Pirates, which lasted even into school time for a whopping 8 month addiction.

Was WoW just that bad of a game? Is Blizzard capable of screwing up that badly? Well, yes and no. In the “Why are you leaving?” comment (Blizzard asks, but does it read?), I explained some of my feelings:

There’s just too much unaddressed harassment in-game & on the forums. As much as I enjoy playing, it got too uncomfortable to continue. As a woman and an avid gamer, I feel that Blizzard doesn’t fulfill its own harrassment policy. Also, the hyper-sexualized female characters are a problem. Even my guy pals think it’s over the top. Blizzard already has a strong male following; it has nothing to lose and everything to gain by making the game more attractive to women and minorities.

Being that concise pained me, I assure you, but the character limit was unforgiving. I also apologize for the “guy pals” line, but it’s less characters than “guy friends”.

Now, anyone who knows computer games knows that Blizzard makes a damn good game. I’ve been a fan of theirs since Warcraft II. I own both Diablos and Warcraft III (but not the expansion). I used to play Tower Defense maps all the time before WC3 lost my interest. In terms of gameplay, WoW is one of Blizzard’s best games and it far outstripped FFXI in almost every way. So what went wrong?

Well, after listening to yet another moron bitch and moan about “teh eval femenests” (this after him cracking jokes about abusing women, mind), I realized, “This just isn’t fun anymore.” I couldn’t log on and play for more than an hour without something happening. The comments were like Barrens chat, except that I couldn’t switch zones to avoid them: they’re in general chat, in tells, in the emotes, in chat bubbles, and even in my beloved guild (though we had a policy against that). I couldn’t escape the drama or the harassment.

I mean, being on Laughing Skull is pretty much agreeing to put up with idiocy; it’s a popular PvP server. But it was also there on Shadowcouncil, an RP server with a stricter policy. And yet, it was on that very server that I would get tells like “hey sexy” or people trying to give me free stuff because my female dwarf was “hot”.

After I had seriously considered leaving, I logged on and joined my guildmates in the Scarlet Monastery. I was having a blast going through it, and I started feeling like, “I was going to leave behind all this? What was I thinking?” And then some sexist idiot started harassing a female guild member. He was silenced, but the woman had already left the guild. It wasn’t the first time it had hapened to her and she was sick of it. I could relate. I convinced her to come back to the guild, but that was the last time I played. I was sick of it, too.

Has Blizzard changed, or have I?

Well, I can remember being disappointed in WC2 for not having any female units. I can remember being excited when WC3 came out because of the Night Elves, but I was soon disappointed again because of their representation and the fact that the heroes were still overwhelmingly male (even in the Night Elf race). I remember being angry at the gender ratio, or perhaps the class type, of the original Diablo characters. And don’t get me started on the concept art; the busty Night Elf mascot for WoW says it all. Or perhaps her pole dancing does. No, it doesn’t seem that Blizzard has changed its tune. But, perhaps, that is exactly the problem. In all these years it hasn’t changed, at least not in its attitude towards its female players.

And perhaps part of it is that I’ve changed. Games like Beyond Good and Evil and Eternal Darkness have shown me that there are companies that get it. Why waste my money with the same sexist bullshit repackaged over and over again when there’s something better out there? Even FFXI did a better job of keeping the gender representation fair and balanced.

Still, when all is said and done all I’m left with is a bad taste in my mouth. Like I said, I’ve been a Blizzard fan for a long time. “This time,” I thought, “this time will be different. It’s an MMO. Blizzard has to be more fair; I mean, if FF can pull it off, Blizzard should too.” More the fool I. Oh well. As the saying goes: Live, learn, and then go get Guild Wars.