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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.
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.
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.
Read the rest…
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.
Read the rest…
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.
Read the rest…
Because I know all of you missed it, Sunday Link Blogging is back! (Until I get too lazy to link posts and put it on hiatus again, that is.)
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.
Read the rest…
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.
If this study is accurate (I was unable to find more information on it to verify the testing methods and sample sizes) 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”.
Read the rest…
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”.
Read the rest…
August’s article, Tilt, Game 6., is a short story on life, death, and the road in between.
I grabbed my computer and stuffed my trunk full of documents and booze and books and clothes. I opened the mapbook to a random page and pointed to a random destination. There. I drive.
The landlord didn’t much care. I found someone else to take over my lease.
I told my boss I’d be gone for a while. I didn’t tell him exactly how long, though, so it could be forever, right? He probably thinks I’ll be gone a week. Anyway, it was a shit job. Fuck him, that prick.
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