The place to look is phones. Only within the last year have any decently translated otome games been brought to the english app markets. Even then I find them a bit lacking. The earliest ones has abysmal translatons and got downloaded anyway. Judging by the amount of them getting translated now, those developers are starting to find there’s a bigger market here than than expected. The market for romance sims that appeal to women and are actually coming through in channels they can find is only just starting. Really, take your average 27 year old lady, you think she’ll find a translated romance game outside of an app store? Even I, a person interested in otome games, never took the time to go search out the rare officially translated otome game for PC, or even fantranslated ones. And otome games are definitely in a different ballpark than what the average adult woman would want. You can see what the average romance-reading english-speaking woman wants by looking at Mary Balogh and all those other bestselling authors.
So no, there isn’t “plenty” of good dating sims marketed to english-speaking women available to the western market that hits an area outside of anime teenaged tropes. But I think they’re learning.
I got on a kick describing how AAA games are rarely made with women in mind, despite the fact that the data shows there’s a huge market there. They’re playing games in the phone app market because that’s who’s making games that really appeal to them now. Studios that develop for console are just starting to catch up - I don’t think I could have found a game like Enslaved: Odyssey to the West ten years ago.
The makers of Borderlands and its sequel are openly feminist. Moxxi is sexualized, but they also have a confident, assertive fat chick and none of the playable women are really that sexualized or stereotypey. (Well, I guess Gaige is kind of a combo dork/engineer/teen stereotype, but that’s not quite the same thing). At the very least, Borderland’s relationship with women is something you could actually discuss, it’s not a one-dimensional issue. Which is more than you can say for a lot of games.
That said, BL2 has a lot of gore and juvenlie humor that probably doesn’t appeal to your stereotypical non-gamer female audience. Even so, I think BL2 has a rather large following in the contingent of women who already identify as gamers, judging by the cosplay fanbase.
Its the latest in Anita Sarkeesian’s series on tropes of women in games. I haven’t watched this one yet but I’ve enjoyed her previous work and thinks she makes good points. This one talks about the casual cruelty towards women in games, often serving as a lazy tool for developers to show how bad someone (usually male) is by harming women. Such behavior in games reflect a disturbingly normalizing trend in the games industry where women are often objects to be used rather than fully fleshed out characters in charge of their own agency.
Yeah, as much as the appeal of the humor is probably on the masculine side of the spectrum, it doesn’t raise eyebrows in its representations of women nearly as much as even a more even-handed series like Mass Effect. I mean, I get it. Miranda is one of Charlie’s Angels. Samara is a dominatrix. Liara is the nerdy girl next door, only in tight leather. None of these women are pathetic hangers on in a man’s world, each being complicated and badass in their own right. But they all partake of sexual fetish tropes.
And Blizzard, for Christs’ sake. What is wrong with those people? The Queen of Blades morph has biologically grown spike heels? Diablo, taking over the soul of a young woman ends up with scapula distorted to resemble breasts? I haven’t played Word of Warcraft, but a friend who does has mentioned that the sexual dimorphism is crazy in that game too – men are gig-normous beef piles, women are tiny waifs.
Well, that’s what I said. Developers are interested in appealing to the demographics of a platform, not trying to increase the demographics of a particular platform.
More women play mobile games so developers will develop for that. More men play consoles so developers will develop for that. Until women start buying consoles, you won’t see much development there because it’s wasted money. It might be cyclical but the only ones who should have an honest stake in changing it are Microsoft and Sony. It’s not Ubisoft’s job to try to make women buy PlayStations.
I have general sympathy for her points but I think her videos are terrible. Cherry-picked examples, dismissal of any counter-examples and all the charm of a workplace sexual harassment training video. She manages to make a video about video games hideously dull. If you want me to sit through 30+ minutes of something to get your message, at least make it watchable.
I think she’d have done better to use some of that money to hire a real writer and a decent narrator but she obviously wants to be the face of her endeavor. She’s a terrible emissary for it, though.
I was actually pretty impressed with the video YogSosoth linked to. The earlier videos set up some sexist thing and then Sarkeesian would pull out examples from games that were 15-20 years old. In the newest video, all of the games are less than five years old. For as terrible as the earliest ones were, she is listening to criticism and improving the presentation.
Sorry, but no, that’s equivocation. The “gamer” subculture does not solely rely on “do you play games, yes/no” or even “do you play games on the computer machine yes/no”. There’s a whole slew of shared references, in-jokes, memes, a… well, a culture behind the word. Grandma who plays *Scrabble *with the kids, or Little Sue (age 5) who really likes to be the bank in *Monopoly *are not “gamers” in the sense people use that word.
You have to have rolled a die with strictly more or less than 6 sides, pwnd at least one d00d or spent at least one entire school/work night playing “one more turn” in your life. That’s my litmus test :).
[QUOTE=Jragon]
The makers of Borderlands and its sequel are openly feminist.
[/QUOTE]
BL2 ? The game whose developers, when describing Gaige back when she was released as the DLC class, said she was really cool because she could be “the girlfriend character” because one of her ability trees boils down to pushing a button, then watching your robot destroy everything no matter how crap you shoot or how little you understand of the game & weapon mechanics ?
Yeah, real hardcore feminists, them
[QUOTE=Jophiel]
Jane Austen Dating Sims. Try and keep up
[/QUOTE]
Okay, fair, that was a PR nightmare, but the developers openly embrace feminism in a lot of commentary. As far as the “girlfriend class” thing goes, my girlfriend at the time was actually excited by it. She wanted to play BL2 with me but sucked at it, because she didn’t grow up gaming. She was legitimately excited that they made a cute female character with easier mechanics, and liked that they were marketing it in a way to get girlfriends of gamers into gaming (she legitimately liked them calling it the “girlfriend class”). So while it wasn’t the most… uh… “purely feminist” phrasing, I can say that at least one woman exists who endorsed it, so maybe there’s something there that outstrips traditional dogma.
I came late to the franchise, so I missed this controversy. I played Gaige because hell yeah I’m going to play the girl with the robot. Also, because the new siren didn’t have the dimension walking abilities anymore. It was nice that the robot helped keep fuckers off of me while I tried to stay back and snipe – kind of hard to do in a game that is much less of cover shooter than a “they’re coming right for me!” shooter. If that’s easy mode, I don’t care. It was a blast, and made up for the fact that I couldn’t slip into another dimension to move away and heal when I got in trouble. But that they designed it as ‘girlfriend mode’ and had the sheer dumb-on to publicize it as such is a real head-slapper.
Hypothetically, what would your reaction be if somebody who hadn’t done all those arbitrary things in your litmus test identified as a gamer? Maybe somebody who preferred single-player realtime games and who didn’t have a big enough pool of real life friends with shared interests to play p&p games?
Would you, and I’m just picking examples out of the blue here, claim that they’re only using the label to get attention, ruining the hobby by taking the focus away from your pet genres, or rubbish their opinion because they clearly don’t get the oh so subtle nuances of your hobby?
I’m in no way suggesting that you have done this personally, as I don’t know you from Adam, but gamer “culture” is rapidly becoming an insular, poisonous group. Maybe it’s because we were bullied at school, but we (yes, we - I play games more or less constantly, so don’t think that I’m picking on gamers out of ignorance) can be just as horrible to those we perceive as a threat. I used to do it, and it took a lot of introspection to realise that I was being a tool.
Case in point: Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist blogger, hasn’t been able to sleep in her own house for the last few nights because some jagwad posted her home address in retaliation for her series of videos suggesting that the games industry might have some problems with its depictions of women.
What, no mention of Second Life? It’s FULL of female gamers, still with millions of fans. Second Life Gor, where I play, is about 2/3 to 3/4 female. Not sure of the ratio of men to women in Second Life in general, but to judge by all the shopping malls, it’s probably at LEAST 50/50 female and maybe majority female.
Eh, I consider video, role-playing and board games to all be separate animals although with some people overlapping the areas of interest. Not hard to imagine a MMORPG player being interested in D&D or a Civilization player playing Carcassonne. And I’d consider someone a ‘gamer’ if they only really did one of those things or even a genre of those things such as only playing strategy PC games or only playing fantasy-based RPGs. None of that is really relevant to the OP though since they’re not using “gamer” to include non-“video” games.
But I do agree that if you’re going to talk about gamer “culture” then you need to be talking about something more than “Do you play a game” because that’s not what culture is about. And when people say someone is a “gamer” they’re most likely saying that that person not only plays a game of some sort but also is part of that culture.
But, sure, a significant number of gamers are surly creatures. It’s not just towards “fake gamer girls” or whatever though (not that omnipresent surliness excuses that). Are there dinks saying that making games less sexist will ruin the genre? Sure. There’s people who say the same thing about save checkpoints and regenerating health and console-centric controls in PC games and shoehorned multiplayer and two-weapon limits and DLC and dumbed down stealth mechanics and aim assist and cover shooters and everything else under the sun. People who would practically draw blood over which is better: Call of Duty or Battlefield which is like going to war over being Lutheran or Methodist. As I said before, it’s just as poisonous and noxious inside the clubhouse as it is to get in the front door. Doesn’t excuse anything but then I’m not about to take ownership of every guy who ever picked up a game controller or handful of dice either.
I think we’ll all take the brave stance of being anti-harassment and agreeing that that’s inexcusable behavior. I don’t think it’s reflective of many people, either.
I wonder what they say when they’re going to fire it up if not “I’m going to play Second Life”. “I’m going to enter Second Life”? One shudders to think…
They’re KINDA right, it doesn’t HAVE to be a game, but most people who go there play it as a game or one sort or another. I mean, that’s one of the great things about it: you (and your friends) make up the rules.
Well, her tropes videos often deal with the history of games as a build-up to how modern developers continue to use the same tropes over and over to the detriment of women. In that context, talking about older games and using those examples is completely fine for me as it allows the viewer to see where games have come from. Knowing that Samus in the new Smash Bros. game is going to be wearing a skimpy outfit hits you harder if you know that despite her toughness, seeing her in a bikini was regarded as an objective to be striven for in the original Metroid. Otherwise, a viewer might just think think this is happening only fairly recently
Well, as a female who plays with female avatars I will admit I am scortchingly tired of all the idiots trying to get me to cyber sex with them. I can remember more times trying to do something in WoW and having clouds of dweebs around me like mosquitos or flies whispering me all sorts of crap. I swear, whenever there was a free month offer and it coincided with some high school vacation I spent more time reporting obsceneties than playing some days. I wish there had been an accomplishment point for reporting offensive idiots.
And it is true, female avatars are thin, sexy [well, maybe not halflings and dwarves but the elves!] and the more armor the less it covered it seemed. There was a great cartoon about it online at GUComics, from way back in 2005. Hell if you go back to the start of GU, there is a fairly constant trickle of stuff from the gamer viewpoint about the ills of games ranging from resource farming to sexual harassments of various types. Sexual harassment is a constant for women that game, online or in real life. I stopped going to cons and gaming because I got tired of being hit on [with my husband sitting next to me playing] and the great mass of unwashed male gamers. At least online in a MMORPG I can put the assholes on ignore. In a couple games, if they get too nasty I have the connections to get their accounts booted - and the 5 times I have done it, I had the proof in both screenies from my end and data stored serverside. Getting someone’s account booted is admittedly the nuclear option, but I really do not wish to put up with comments about my sexual predilictions and the animal kingdom, and I should not have to. I do wish some group like Anonymous would real life nuke the online lives of the jackasses attacking Anita Sarkeesian.
[URL=“http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/extension/”]
<sidetrack> Well Gaige is no good as a sniper, not really. Obviously with her robot tree you can do whatever the hell you want and you’ll be right as rain, but her second and third trees favour high ROF weapons and close range. More lead in the air means more elemental procs and more bullets ricocheting everyfuckwhere. But since her Anarchy tree wrecks accuracy and SMGs/Autorifles have bad kickback to begin with, you want to be magdumping at pointblank to someone, basically</sidetrack>
I agree that Gaige is a perfectly fine character, her lines are funny (as are most of the characters, honestly, although the Siren and the Soldier can be a bit bland) and gameplay-wise even her more passive tree is fine - I use it to level up and grind relaxingly after using more tense and twitchy builds like my beloved melee/shotgun Zer0. Sometimes you just want to lay back and watch shit explode.
But yeah, advertising the character as “it’s for girls because Gaige is good even if you can’t play” was… bad.
In their defence the statement apparently came from some marketroid rather than the core devs, and I know for a fact that the game’s lead writer is a cool, progressive dude (he also co-writes and acts in the “Hey Ash What You Playing ?” videos, and his sister voices Tiny Tina. They seem like they’re having entirely too much fun with life, IMO).
[QUOTE=Double Foolscalp]
Hypothetically, what would your reaction be if somebody who hadn’t done all those arbitrary things in your litmus test identified as a gamer? Maybe somebody who preferred single-player realtime games and who didn’t have a big enough pool of real life friends with shared interests to play p&p games?
Would you, and I’m just picking examples out of the blue here, claim that they’re only using the label to get attention, ruining the hobby by taking the focus away from your pet genres, or rubbish their opinion because they clearly don’t get the oh so subtle nuances of your hobby?
[/QUOTE]
Depends, I suppose.
I know where you’re going with this, and I acknowledge that the gamer culture can be pretty goddamn toxic. So you can lower the guns, mate :). I don’t consider “gamer” to be some sort of elite, select badge ; nor would I poo-poo “casuals” (I hate the word), and I have exactly zero contempt for people who are not gamers as I define it. Because that’d be retarded. And the whole Sarkeesian business (along with the more recent kerfluffle with the creator of Depression Quest) makes me want to shake the stupid out of people.
But again, there has to be a meaning to the word, and a common ground to be had in a community, however large. If you don’t have a clue what the hell I’m talking about, even in the vaguest of senses, then we don’t share the same interests, do we ? I don’t grok fishing or car talk, and that’s fine. You (hypothetical you) don’t grok *Minecraft or Civilization, and that’s fine.
By the same token, if you don’t grok basic gamer talk and references and emotions and experiences, then you don’t get to pretend like you’re one just because it’s a trendy clique or whatever ; and it looks darn silly when you try. Just as I’m sure I’d sound ridiculous if I tried to pass for a car tuning enthusiast.
Sudoku or Brain Age or similar iPhone apps are not exactly games as I would define them. More like… time killers. Gaming, to me, is bit more involved than that ; and the label implies a familiarity with the culture surrounding “real” games, be they video or role or tabletop. My mom is a Sudoku addict, and I’ve roped her into quite a few simple TT games like *Carcassone *and Settlers of Catan, but she’s no gamer by any stretch of the word. Mention the words “Call of Duty” or “D&D” in her presence and you’ll just draw blank stares. Hell, I doubt she even knows *Tetris *fer crying out loud. TETRIS !
That’s an add-on to the litmus test, BTW : if you’re a gamer, you **have **to be able to hum the Tetris tune :). Exceptions might be made for the young’uns.
It’s not even a question of actually playing D&D - but if you don’t even know what D&D is, nor have the roughest of notions of how it’s played, you’re simply no “gamer”. Same goes for, say, Call of Duty - I never played it online (I was a CounterStrike man myself back when my reflexes were worth a fuck) and only played a couple solo, but I can still explain what it is, talk about the defining features of the series, even key moments and scenes and characters etc… I never played Portal, but I know the cake is a lie and why and can sing Still Alive a capella. Again, these are really ubiquitous, even overused bits of gaming pop-culture. Any “real” gamer learns that crap by sheer osmosis.
And if you can’t even talk that talk, then don’t pretend like you walk my walk.
Sometimes, you do get an urge to shake non-gamers, though. Like my (in all other respects lovely) bank’s financial counsellor, who wanted to know what I did for a living. So I replied that I was a translator and worked primarily w/ video games. To which she had a kind of puzzled yet condescending look and said “What, like, the beeps and boops ? They translate those ?!”.
See ? She’s no gamer. Yet probably plays Sudoku :p.
The clear and obvious determiner of who is and is not a gamer is, as I think has already been mentioned here, the self identification test.
NO ONE who is NOT a gamer would call themselves a gamer. It’s that simple. They have no interest in claiming the moniker. Are you a gamer if you play D&D? Sure, if you think of yourself as a gamer. But you might not be, if it’s really just something that you show up to do with your friends once a week and otherwise ‘games’ don’t interest you. There is no specific act or collection of acts that identifies a “gamer”. It is a label that can only be self granted, IMHO.
