Saralah of Athena's Legacy links to an Evil Avatar post, itself linking to a Gamespot video interview with Spartan designer Sophie Blakemore. Quoth the Evil Avatar post, "In this video, Sophie is wearing a closely fitting 'I heart Mario' shirt and discusses gameplay features with a chipper English accent." Most of the comments on the article by Evil Avatar members focus not at all on the game, but on the hot-or-not-ness of the designer.
Is this an example of male troglodytism, or is it simply human nature that once sex becomes part of a conversation, it dominates the conversation (see: Hot Coffee, Michaelangelo's David, the sex lives of homosexual people)?
DEVELOPING...
It is, quite simply, because most of the people who watch that video and talk about it on internet forums are for the most part ugly, has little experience interacting with women and, thus - from what I gather - has minimum taste in women.
That this female specimen is discussed about beyond the obvious 'oh ,it's a girl, that's rare' leaves me no choice but to come to such - I would assume to many - generalizing statements.
I'd at least expect a looker.
(I have no intentions of sounding elitist or anything remotely like it, these are simply my heartfelt opinions. The exteriors of that woman does not warrant such attention! (And here I am giving her even more. Shame on me.))
Posted by: Haarball | 08/18/2005 at 02:22 PM
Well I'm sure this was 100% intentional, and I do give kudos to that development company for abusing their resources in this way.
What's next, "hot" female game designers sitting on couches hold hands with the frag dolls?
Posted by: Alice Lee | 08/18/2005 at 02:23 PM
100% intentional? Give me a break. The company may have wanted her to be a nice public face for the press, but they did not go in with the intention of people thinking that the girl was pretty without giving a second thought to what she was actually talking about.
They didn't even mention the game in the board posting, except as an afterthought.
Incidentally, the poster (much later in the thread, further into the thread than anyone interested in the game would have read) added "ha! jokes on you, i didn't mean it." I don't believe for a second that he would have posted what he did if those thoughts hadn't been in his head in the first place. This is just a way for him to try and regain the respect of female readers by pretending he was "only kidding."
Wow, that came out pretty angry. Sorry, I'll step off my soapbox now.
Posted by: Saralah | 08/18/2005 at 05:17 PM
Alright, so not to completely try and defend the male species (cause even I, a male, know that's a lost cause) but that whole posting and simply talking about whether or not the girl is hot or not...unfortuneatly is what we do. Now, I don't feel that guys are the only ones guilty of doing this, cause ya'll females know you do too. Guys just...tend to speak such things out...more often...and regularly...a little too regularly.
Now, to say that the people who watched the video and talk on the forums are ugly and have no experience talking to females is a little judging. I'm sure there are a few good looking people who agreed and or disagreed that said spokes person is hot.
I won't deny that it's likely guys thinking with the brain down south, but I also would say that once sex becomes the topic, it tends to take over...UNLESS you're a die-hard speak of games only type person...which after just glancing at the forum, (and not even bothering to make it to page 2) none appeared to be.
Posted by: Brukpoket | 08/18/2005 at 09:26 PM
What's next, "hot" female game designers sitting on couches hold hands with the frag dolls?
****
I hope so. Sounds hott.
Posted by: mumra | 08/19/2005 at 05:52 AM
ok - that really would be hott, but now for a real post:
I feel that female designers sometimes receive that "rock star" syndrome from gentlemen gamers.
I try not to stereotype too often, but I think some people would agree with me that there are some nerds who play games. So, I'm not talking about Joe Sport Average Cool Guy here. I'm talking about the guy gamers who spend hours of their lives devoted to gaming.
Hardcore, yo. The hardcore gamers are nerds by nature. We spend hours playing games, often secluded in our own little world.
So, lets say "nerdy billy" is a gamer who has tremendous passion for games. He follows games and the industry closely, playing hours of video games each and every day. He may even dream of working in the industry some day.
So, back to my main point. I'm not sure if y'all are aware of the "Rock Star" groupie syndrome. And folks, I'm not just talking about big rock stars. If you follow your local music scene, you will find some girls who love that rock star type of guy.
And I'm going to sound like a shit here, but some of these "rock stars" are really ugly. That's not to say that they may not be a fantastic musician. They may have that rocker spark though. Either way, the women or girls that go ga-ga over these rockers have an intense desire to be a "part of the scene" and be with someone that lives the rocker lifestyle.
So, I would argue that a lot of guy gamers get this "rock star" crush on girls working in the gaming industry because they think to themselves WOW. This girl is perfect! She is an intense gamer like me, and she has boobies. They are girl gamer groupies. I guarantee there are a ton of them.
I've even been known to have a crush on 1 or 5 girl gamers. One from a few years ago comes to mind because it was such your typcial crush. It lasted like until 2 days. But for me, it's the girl I get a crush on, not the gamer. I think? Well, I may have just debunked my entire argument there. hmmm.
Personally, I'm glad my wife doesn't like or understand games. Also, my wife is practically narcoleptic, so I get all the crucial tube time! I'm not saying I don't like the fact that girls or women enjoy games. I'm just glad my wife doesn't. I wouldn't want to date a girl gamer. Of course I can say that now, but I have never dated a girl who plays video games.
Besides, I get competitive with multi-player games and I know we would get in a fight. With my friends, it's ok to get in a gaming related fight. The wounds heal quickly, providing fire for the next match. I don't want to feel that fire towards my wife. And when you are competitive, it's hard to turn that off. (off topic, sorry)
Posted by: mumra | 08/19/2005 at 06:37 AM
We live in a male-dominated culture of subjugation through objectification. Thus, boobies=cash. However, I seriously doubt the idea was to put boobies on GameSpot or to promote a game through boobification.
I think the response in that thread has much more to do with an audience that has been sexually infantalized by their culture and lack of decent education as to the rights and contributions of women that they can't keep themselves from equating any "attractive" female to their collection of tentacle-rape porn.
Like Clockwork said, there's little to no discussion of the game itself. Remove mind. Insert penis.
All women deserve far more than evaluation on some sort of fuckability index. Sophie Blakemore is clearly an intelligent person who, like any game designer, has undoubtedly made critical contributions to the development of what looks to be a fairly decent title. The continued dragging of this industry through the gutter of the male sexual superiority/inferiority complex only serves one purpose: to keep women and girls away from games and out of game development. We always hear that there needs to be more women in gaming and more women game developers. Often from the same hosers that then exchange poorly photoshopped "nude" shots of Fironia Vie. Stop acting like sexual superiors and stop buying into and contributing to the product-izing of women, boys, and it'll happen.
Posted by: matt | 08/19/2005 at 12:09 PM
A non-issue. Competent article, decent video with more coverage of said game than featured game designer.
The problem is with some adolescent on an open game forum? Someone does indeed need to get out of the angry chair. The media involved did a good job of focusing on what mattered. The audience should do the same.
Posted by: ByteSketchy | 08/19/2005 at 08:34 PM
Its clear that some women don't know how to take a compliment off a 15 year old kid.
Posted by: PapaLazaro | 08/20/2005 at 09:18 AM
FEMINIST: We've noticed your gender.
GAME DEVELOPER (looks up from monitor): Huh? What?
F: We've noticed that just about all game developers are male.
GD: So?
F: Well, this obviously denotes a problem.
GD: Why?
F: WHY? WHY? You pig, don't you realize that it's absolutely VITAL for EVERY INDUSTRY to have an EQUAL NUMBER of men and women working in it?!
GD: Okay, okay. I mean, we're not deliberately excluding women; it's just that women haven't been that interested in game development...
F: You PIG! How DARE you suggest that there might be fields that interest men more than women!
GD: Okay, okay! We'll gladly accept any women developers who are willng to build up their skills to a professional level.
F: Okay. I GUESS it's a start. Of course, we won't be happy until the numbers are exactly equal.
GD: Hey, you know, some of these women entering the game development field are quite attractive. And they're interested in the same things we guy developers are!
F: YOU PIG! HOW DARE YOU NOTICE HER GENDER!
GD: What the - YOU'RE the one who said that gender was so damn important!
F: Yes. I'm free to do that. I'm a feminist.
Posted by: BadmanX | 08/20/2005 at 11:01 AM
Okay, I take personal offense to the last two posts.
To PapaLazaro: Clearly some people haven't learned that tugging on a girl's pigtails on the schoolyard is NOT a compliment.
To Badman: I have no problem that men find some women attractive. In fact, I think most women appreciate that fact, and many of them put a lot of effort to be found more attractive. There is a HUGE difference, though, between noticing that someone is good-looking, and ONLY noticing that someone is good-looking.
I am not one of those feminists screaming at the top of my lungs for gender equality in the industry, though it would be nice if the disparity wasn't quite so big. I realize that most gamers are men/boys, so they will be the ones who naturally want to go into the industry. All I want is respect for what I do, because I worked damn hard to earn it.
Posted by: Saralah | 08/20/2005 at 01:15 PM
Saralah: I was not suggesting that women shouldn't be given the respect they deserve for their accomplishments. Far from it. I was merely suggesting that when you make gender the most important element of a dialog, it's going to have some repercussions. Like when juvenile posters notice that a female game developer is attractive, and post about it in a juvenile fashion. Should they not have said what they did? Actually, I think they should be free to say what they think, and we should be free to call them morons.
But if you're saying this type of behavior should somehow be magically made to disappear, then you're basically asking young men not to be young men. Kick the world, break your foot.
Posted by: BadmanX | 08/20/2005 at 01:43 PM
As for the game itself, it looks good. It will doubtless draw comparisons to God of War, but it actually reminds me more of Age of Mythology, and the idea of playing Age of Mythology at the ground level as a single soldier with god powers sounds like Good Fun to me.
Posted by: BadmanX | 08/20/2005 at 01:46 PM
I think the only safe people in the argument are transvestites, or gender benders.
And you must have misread my comment, because i actually insulted the 'big guy' and called him a fifteen year old kid.
Posted by: PapaLazaro | 08/20/2005 at 03:36 PM
And you really shouldn't take offence to any of those comments. After all, we weren't the people that called that woman hot.
I personally think that personality shines though looks - maybe that fifteen year old kid shares those exact same views, but its hard to see her personality in an interview. If i treated women equally like men, then i wouldn't go too far in life. And my face would be rather sore. Don't you agree that women should receive some kind of special treatment from men? Flowers maybe? Box of chocolates?
Posted by: PapaLazaro | 08/20/2005 at 03:45 PM
"I think the response in that thread has much more to do with an audience that has been sexually infantalized by their culture and lack of decent education as to the rights and contributions of women that they can't keep themselves from equating any "attractive" female to their collection of tentacle-rape porn."
I actually like Matt's description the best. Although maybe, just maybe, we should keep in mind that the above is representative of only a subsection of hardcore gamers. I've known plenty of guys like that over the years, and what I've seen happen to them is that they eventually get older and grow enough brains not to think that out loud (well, most of them: there's always exceptions to that rule). Of course part of the process has to do with women who game descending on them like a pack of wolves for their asisine comments. Oh, well, nobody's perfect.
"Besides, I get competitive with multi-player games and I know we would get in a fight. With my friends, it's ok to get in a gaming related fight. The wounds heal quickly, providing fire for the next match. I don't want to feel that fire towards my wife."
Meh, I game and my husband games, though we go through periods where one of us is either not that interested in playing, or has no time whatsoever to game. Whenever we've gone head to head in fighting games and such, I do much more trash talking than he does, and we do get into fights. Eventually most couples get to a point where fights over stupid stuff are just that, and egos don't get bruised as easily anymore. Though I'll admit that competing with your better half is not for everyone. =P
"I personally think that personality shines though looks - maybe that fifteen year old kid shares those exact same views, but its hard to see her personality in an interview. If i treated women equally like men, then i wouldn't go too far in life. And my face would be rather sore. Don't you agree that women should receive some kind of special treatment from men? Flowers maybe? Box of chocolates?"
So how exactly would personality="wow, I can see a nipple!"? If a guy likes a woman's personality, what is hard about saying "man, she's cute, I think she's cool.", instead of "She would get bonus sex with me if she makes comments like "You've got god like powers" at the appropriate times."? Do they lose cool points if their comments do not impress the rest of the puerile stuck-in-adolescence crowd? Puhleeze.
As for treating women exactly like men, I see nothing wrong with that, so long as you treat both categories of persons as having dignity, evoking occasional respect, and needing occasional empathy.
BTB, Flowers and boxes of chocolate have always struck me as a "me little man, placate volcano god" response, especially since they often get trotted out when a guy messed up in some spectacularly stupid way, and would rather not admit to having been an asshole. Forget "say it with flowers": I think most women would rather get a heartfelt apology instead.
Posted by: turandot | 08/21/2005 at 12:55 PM
Where you say "So how exactly would personality="wow, I can see a nipple!"? If a guy likes a woman's personality, what is hard about saying "man, she's cute, I think she's cool.", instead of "She would get bonus sex with me if she makes comments like "You've got god like powers" at the appropriate times."? Do they lose cool points if their comments do not impress the rest of the puerile stuck-in-adolescence crowd? Puhleeze." seems like you're getting at me. I'm not the bad guy here!
Oh, and if you think flowers are to say sorry then you must have had some pretty rubbish men in your life.
Posted by: PapaLazaro | 08/22/2005 at 02:27 AM
Women have a hard time getting into the industry because of sexism--it's not very hard to understand that. This post points out that prevailing sexism and it's needed so that people can think about this and hopefully, through discourse, can change something in some small way.
I don't think that blaming feminism is productive in this case, because feminism is what has helped women initially enter these fields. Of course, there is still work that has to be done. I really feel that this is the purpose of this website, I mean, why else call it Game Girl Advance?
Posted by: Natalie | 08/22/2005 at 10:52 AM
" I really feel that this is the purpose of this website, I mean, why else call it Game Girl Advance?"
So if Nintendo ever choose to release a Game Girl, they'll have to pay $millions to acquire this website.
Posted by: PapaLazaro | 08/22/2005 at 11:13 AM
No! Why did you have to mention that!
Now I suppose men in general are going to have to suffer another tirade because Nintendo (obviously only the men, which make up the vast majority...) chose Game Boy instead of Game Girl.
And then no doubt we'll have the banning of the Master System, because it offends African Americans. (Honestly, there were complaints recently about the term 'master/slave'...)
Xbox is fine, however. The lack of reference to the Y (male) chromosome only stereotypes against men, which is allowed...
And of course, let's not forget that ALL the men in the world are responsible! One man does something wrong, we are all to blame.
Maybe I'm going a little too far here, but some of the vibes from recent posts have really given the impression that certain people think all men are bad.
A little suggestion, if I may? If you want to get in with the guys in terms of careers, you might not want to alienate them by sounding like you think they're all bad. You're turning willing allies into potential enemies. Worse still, you're being sexist - gender profiling.
Yes, women can be sexist too, you know...
Posted by: Zild | 08/22/2005 at 03:31 PM
It's not that men are bad, it's that sexism is bad. Does Matt or ClockworkGrue hate men because they choose to post about these topics? No, they don't. I, and I'm sure others, see this site as a productive way to combat sexism in the videogame industry, along with pointing out the great things about videogames. Of course it has a "feminist" bent, hence the name of the site.
Posted by: Natalie | 08/22/2005 at 04:55 PM
And for what it's worth, we are vastly in need of a resurgence of feminism before the youth-worshipping consumer society sucessfully brainwashes yet another generation of young women into believing their mind is their 2nd (or 3rd or 4th) best asset. The lack of women in the gaming industry is endemic of this much larger issue, but as ye olde saying goes: "think globally, act locally." As audience, developer or gaming media, there's plenty to be done beyond just crying foul about the lack of female representation in the industry. It's not the current ratio of men/women developers that is the heart of the matter, that is but one troubling symptom of a collective psychological disorder caused by generation upon generation of psychological and physical repression designed to keep slightly-more-than-half of the entire species subservient to the other slightly-less-than-half. The gaming industry is but one which lacks a true equality of the sexes... I happen to think, though, that it's more capable than most of changing. Though E3 does tend to shake my confidences.
Posted by: matt | 08/22/2005 at 05:41 PM
"Though E3 does tend to shake my confidences"
That's because E3 tends to reinforce the inner adolescent in us gamers, and most gamers I know (myself included) were hardly well adjusted human beings as teenagers. It took attending it twice for me to figure that out, and decide I'd rather experience it from the relative comfort of 500+ miles and a web click away ever since.
"Maybe I'm going a little too far here, but some of the vibes from recent posts have really given the impression that certain people think all men are bad."
I actually like most men, which these days includes for the most part a good deal of gamer friends, but the thing about gaming is (as I hint above) that in some ways it encourages most of us to devolve to an adolescent-like state, especially while engaged by it, which makes some of us more sensitive to certain behavior, and others prone to recklessly engaging in it for laughs.
It just so happens that the laughing always involves someone being demeaned, and that should be less than acceptable, period. I might add that it just so happens that I've yet to run across gamers on any messaging board having a discussion about the size or shape of a developer's penis.
Which is not to say I would demand for such a thing to happen, but that the fact that it's unlikely to happen, as Matt points out, is another symptom of a larger problem, and one that women get frustrated with because it sometimes looks so endemic to be inescapable. Fair enough?
Posted by: turandot | 08/23/2005 at 01:10 AM
Well, I certainly wouldn't argue with that. But the next obvious question is "What are we going to do about it?"
Or, perhaps, "What do you want US to do about it?"
Aside from reinforcing the point with the audience here - the regulars of which seem to agree with you - how do the above comments help?
I'm not saying they shouldn't have been made - far from it. But I think it would be generally more helpful that such discussions, when taking place with this kind of audience, focus on the how, not the why.
How about we take a current or recent project as an example, and discuss how things could have been done better? A new topic might be useful for getting it some more attention (and making it more relevant.)
I could offer up my current project, if we get no better ideas, as it brings up some interesting questions.
Sorry, just want to make this into a more practical discussion... I think the regular audience warrants it more than the current discussion.
Posted by: Zild | 08/23/2005 at 01:55 AM
Natalie said:
"Women have a hard time getting into the industry because of sexism--it's not very hard to understand that."
Women have a hard time getting into the industry because everyone has a hard time getting into the industry.
As someone who would be more than happy to hire females, but has received not a single female applicant who can legally work in the country -- not even an unqualified one -- I'm not sure I'm on board with your assertion.
It's hard to turn away applicants who don't exist. It's even harder to hire them.
I'm not saying there isn't sexism in the industry. There is. However, I don't believe that sexist hiring practices are the reason that there aren't more women in the industry. I've known plenty of industry people who, all qualifications being equal, would completely fall over themselves to hire women -- but have simply never had the chance.
Posted by: Malkyne | 08/23/2005 at 03:52 AM