Saralah's excellent Athena's Legacy blog has a post discussing hardcore gamer forums' reactions to a Killer Betties interview with Scott Brown, project lead for upcoming MMO Auto Assault.
Discouting for a moment the fact that opinions expressed in any internet forum count for shite, it's saddening to read some of the blatant hostility these posters feel for women gamers and developers.
I think the general hostility can be summed up in one post I read:
"Why do games need to be demarcated along gender lines at all? It isnt enough that the game is diffiicult to make fun that now they (the devs) need to start pandering to gender issues? Lets take it all the way and ask if the game is going to give any solace to Blacks or Latinos that their concerns will be dealt with....Christ, where does it stop?"
Beyond the racism of what he's saying, he's also missing the entire point of the questions in the interview. No one's saying that women in games should automatically have smaller breasts, but that gamers should simply have the option when creating women in a game, of using body types that might not be so...chesty. If you can make a character fat, skinny, short, tall, muscular, thin, it's a fair question to ask if women can vary in their bust size.
I also think many of these posters don't think of girl gamers as just girl gamers. They see them as an outside force trying to take away games and PC them. And not only is this wrong, but they take it a step further and believe that this PCing of games will lead to a degredation in quality of the games.
And the question about blacks and hispanics in games...why not? Why not ask if there should be a better representation of black characters in games? Does it hurt to ask?
Never has there been so much resistance to smaller boobs.
Posted by: Mike | 02/23/2005 at 02:17 PM
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Posted by: kuwang | 09/19/2006 at 01:53 AM