wickedqueen.net

Yes. The bottom right corner of this PS2 advertisement does actually say Because your girlfriend bores you shitless. How you managed to actually GET a girlfriend remains a mystery.

This is just another manifestation of how the general gaming culture, even as it is propagated by the people who ostensibly want to sell it to anyone who will buy, is extremely hostile to women. You hear these marketing people flapping their jaws about how they think women just don’t like SHOOTING ALIENS or something, and THAT’S why they don’t game (putting aside, for a moment, the many women who do–they’re still vastly outnumbered by men outside of casual gaming), and then they turn around and produce this shit. Gee, I wonder why women think they wouldn’t have a good time gaming. Could it be because half the market goes out of its way to suggest that all the OTHER gamers are witless misogynistic man-children?

You may recall NCSoft’s addition of female NPCs to City of Heroes–specifically, non-combatant air-headed gangster girlfriends. Do you notice a common theme here? Oh, those women! They’re boring! Because they’re stupid! Because all they talk about is clothes and stuff! Silly women! Can you believe they got the vote?

Well, to be fair, there’s a second PS2 ad suggesting that sometimes women are boring because they talk about other people’s interpersonal relationships. And in case you didn’t click through, here’s that CoH screenshot:

Pretty much the only women with whom you interact, apparently, are “girlfriends.” (Note the NPC’s designation in that screenshot.) Women exist in this world solely in relation to men (and not even in any other relationship other than “annoying pet”; what, gamers don’t have MOTHERS?), who apparently tolerate them for sex, since they’re so damn boring otherwise. All these women think about is their appearances, probably so that they can keep the poor bored guys enthralled for some more of that sex, which I’m sure is really awesome and satisfying. Naturally such boring and stupid creatures wouldn’t have any interest in the manly pursuit of GAMING.

Hey, Sony? Maybe what with getting your ass handed to you by Nintendo and all, you might want to consider some new tactics that don’t specifically alienate one of the major groups Nintendo is wooing. Or, you know, I guess witless misogynistic man-children ARE a niche.

Thanks to belleweather for the link.

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ETA: This is not to suggest that I think that clothes are stupid and/or boring. No one who has ever met me would credit it. This is, of course, the flip side of “women only talk about things that are frivolous and boring”; that is, “if women talk about something, it must therefore be frivolous and boring.” I find clothes vastly more interesting than cars or football, and you know, pretty much everyone HAS them. We won’t go into how extremely cute my outfit is today, even though this is my blog and anyone who doesn’t like it can take their PS2 and go jump in the lake.

I am sitting in the lobby area of the Z Center athletic facility, conducting interviews about Facebook use via instant messenger before my workout. It occurred to me this morning, as I was trying to figure out the logistics of all the interviews I had scheduled and my desire to go to the gym, that I didn’t actually have to go in to the office as I’d been planning–the wireless is just as good at the Z Center and either way I’d be on my laptop.

And this way I shave off about 20 minutes of walking around campus, which is kind of important because I have like six interviews scheduled today. I’ll do two interviews here at the gym, work out, mail birthday presents at the campus post office, and bus it home so that I can be there by 3:15 for my next round of interviews (I have to be back at home for them because one of them is a phone interview that I’ll be recording with Skype, and it doesn’t run well on my laptop, plus my headset is at home, plus I realized this morning while getting dressed that I need to do some laundry because I am currently wearing my second-to-last set of gym clothes).

And THEN, I just got a message from City of Heroes that Issue 9 has gone live, which means that there is some serious new content up. I just made level 45 on Monday night, so I’m excited to try out my newly beefed up ice armor,* but I also want to see how the new invention system works. I never bothered to look at it on the test server, so it’ll all be new to me. I just hope nothing is severely broken.

Also, thanks to craigslist, it looks like I’m set up for housing in California. This is a relief, although of course I haven’t even BEGUN packing. I’m having a party next week to give away stuff that I don’t want to move, and have decided that I am getting rid of my bedspread because I hate it. This is a recurring problem for me. Some of you may recall that my current bedspread was the object of a long and arduous search for a reversible pink and green comforter. Which it is, but you know, they’re kind of UGLY pink and green. Not the shades I had envisioned, and over time, they have become more and more objectionable in my eyes, especially since my friend Matt bragged to me about the awesome zebra print bedspread he found for super cheap in Australia.** And of course moving pretty much makes ALL your possessions less attractive.

Probably I should stop buying bedspreads online. The future is great, but given that I keep hating bedspreads that looked pretty good on Amazon Marketplace, it might be best to return to my old-fashioned shopping roots for the next one.

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*For the two or three readers who might possibly care: when I hit 41, I initially took Electricity Mastery as my epic power pool, since Andromeda Sparks is an electric/electric blaster. Unfortunately, it really sucked, so I respec’d to Cold Mastery instead. So far I’ve got an area of effect sleep power and this ice armor, which is pretty cool–it takes both defense AND damage resistance enhancements, and I’ve now got two of each on it, so I expect noticeably improved performance.

+This is not slighting Travis, because Travis has video blogged.

So I just found out that they’re working on a Pirates of the Caribbean MMOG–actually, I might have vaguely known this before, but I guess I forgot. Maybe I got too excited about the Firefly one. Anyway, someone mentioned it in the game design workshop today, so I looked it up: http://disney.go.com/pirates/online/

They have a short Q&A section up, which includes this exchange:

From Nicole:
The game looks great so far, but I’ve noticed one thing…an absence of female characters. When the game comes out, will you be able to play as a female pirate? I understand historically there weren’t many female pirates, but here and now, there are plenty of women with “pirattude.”

We have no problem breaking a little historical accuracy, or at least bending it a bit. (though there have been plenty of infamous female pirates in their own right!) So, to answer your question, yes, female characters will be an important and visible part of the game, both with non-player characters and female pirate avatars. You’ll also have as much variety in character creation as the guys - maybe even more!

“Maybe even more,” I suspect, means that people just can’t imagine more than three outfits or hairstyles for manly male characters. This may actually be an efficient method of managing character design, given that male players who care about aesthetics tend to play a lot female characters, according to Nick Yee’s survey data–although most of the women I know consistently bring up lousy customization options as one reason that they DON’T play male character. Note the implicit assumption in the developers’ response that only women want to play women, which you would expect anyone working on games would know better than. Anyway.

Despite Disney’s near-manic reassurance, however, guess how many of the game site’s 14 available screenshots feature female characters?

That’s right. One.

Okay, possibly two, but I practically had to take a magnifying glass to the second one to confirm that I was looking at a tiny cartoon bustier.

Women in PotC screenshots are so far VASTLY outnumbered by a) zombie pirates and b) pirate ships, each of which are featured in three screenshots apiece. Male (un-undead) pirates feature in six. Furthermore, male pirates are sometimes in groups, or facing other male pirates; female pirates stand alone, apparently. Neither of the female figures appear to be NPCs, which I find discouragingly unsurprising.

This doesn’t mean there won’t be plenty of female pirates when the game gets released–that is the beauty of MMOGs, after all. PotC is a property that is already pretty popular with women, and of course there wil in additionl be plenty of male players running around with female pirate bodies.

Nicole shouldn’t HAVE to ask a question like, “Uh… will this MMO ALLOW me to build a female character if I want to?”

The developers’ verbal response seems to acknowledge the silliness of it, and the games do HAVE female avatars, so why can’t any of them actually PROMOTE a damn game as if they really believed in/wanted female characters in it? And people wonder why they can’t get more women to buy their games.

Multiverse, maker of a free MMO-creation platform, plans to announce Friday morning that it’s struck a deal with Fox Licensing to turn the show [Firefly] into an MMORPG in the fashion of Star Wars Galaxies or Eve Online.

Yes, that’s right: a Firefly MMOG. FUCKING AWESOME.

Space piracy, here I come. …Or possibly space: the oldest profession. It’s hard to decide.

Also, the whole Multiverse thing is pretty cool if you haven’t heard about it. It’s a platform for developers to make it a lot easier, faster, and cheaper to create MMOGs, while hopefully still allowing a fair amount of control over and variety between different game systems. Right now, virtual worlds are so expensive to create that the majority of people/companies just don’t have the resources. Multiverse would open doors for indie games, which like indie music, would really broaden the options available to consumers.

So there I am, thinking that I don’t really like the villain I recently created on Virtue server* with which to play with various MMOG researcher types who are already established there, and then the Cape radio makes a joke about discrimination against “catgirls,” certainly a recognized toon type in CoX, and then I realize that I am wearing a shirt that says “Schrodinger’s cat is dead” on the front and “Schrodinger’s cat is not dead” on the back, and IT COMES TO ME.

The result of a disastrous attempt by the renowned theoretical physicist, Dr. Leopold Sparks, to extend and apply Schrodinger’s thought experiment to the development of super powers, Schrodinger’s Catgirl now roams both the Rogue Isles and Paragon City, both evil and good. So far, the professor has been unable to get either cat back into the box.

The hero version is a scrapper; the villain is a stalker. I made the villain first and really only realized that I needed to make two as I was logging her in, so I didn’t write down the avatar specs as I was making her like I did with the twins, but they are pretty close to identical. Since they’ll never be seen side-by-side, I figure small differences aren’t important. Anyway, they’re probably quantum.

I know this is a new high in geekdom, even for me. I don’t care. Nothing you can say will diminish my nerd joy in…

Schrodinger’s Catgirl.

I need a theme song.

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*She’s a dominator named F A E, which stands for “Fundamental Attribution Error,” which is what my sociological girl gang name was going to be back when I was planning to start a sociological girl gang so I’d have more opportunities to wear the red leather jacket I got at St. Vinnie’s. Which, incidentally, is really too big now, so if anyone wants to pay me like $30 for a size large totally 80s red women’s leather biker jacket, let me know. Anyway. This joke toon is probably more accessible.

Yesterday there was a big all-day social thing on City of Heroes/Villains for the departure of one of the developers. The last scheduled event was a Doom-themed costume party, so I redid Andromeda Sparks’s costume all anti-hero and slightly post-apocalyptic. I liked how it turned out, and it suits my recent mood, so while I’m going to run the third slot costume mission so that I can switch between this and her original get-up at will, I think I will play Andromeda in Tragic Anti-Hero mode on her actual server (Pinnacle) for awhile.

(Thanks to Travis for the screen shots.)

I also added a little backstory to her bio explaining how she lost the eye and the bright color of her hair while rescuing a faithless former associate from Crey Labs. If you are going to go angsty, go all the way. Maybe now I will start winning costume contests again.

Yesterday, I made level 35 on City of Heroes with my primary character, Andromeda Sparks, an electric/electric blaster on the Pinnacle server. I knew it was coming, so I was all ready with Fraps.

Sadly, you don’t get the epic power pool until level 41, but at 35, I am now more than 2/3 of the way to the level cap of 50. Exciting!

The video is about 2 1/2 minutes. You get to see some of my cool powers, too, although not Thunderous Blast. There are also dialogue bubbles, which are readable in the original on my machine–I made the embedded video as big as I could, but they’re still a little blurry here. Sorry. But level 35!

Lady gamers gets voice changer (Thanks to j00j for the link.)

The software comes with presets which turn lady voices into big deep Blessed-esque ones. You can also create your own new voice by mucking about with pitch and timbre settings, and other features include advanced tune and noise reduction.

In essence, “AV Voice Changer Software is somehow a unique product for female online game players who want to prove that playing online games is not a pastime for men only, and that their talent can make male partners goggle.”

If you want to make men goggle, visit Audio4fun.com to download a free trial.

So, let me get this straight. Female gamers “have a common concern about the long-lasting existence of ‘male chauvinism’ in the world of online games” (I like how that’s in quotes, like we imagined it or something), and so they’ll be interested in voice-altering technology that will allow them to conceal their gender even when using applications like TeamSpeak to coordinate group play.

Well, okay, maybe, although avatar gender-swapping doesn’t actually seem to be a massively popular strategy among female gamers (Yee 2003); many of them do cite male chauvinism as a problem in MMOGs, but are more likely to choose a less sexualized female avatar like a dwarf or Tauran than to play a male character. In my experience, “average” (i.e. sexualized) female avatars get treated as “female” unless they do a lot of work to explicitly contradict the gender claim made by the virtual body, so there’s little reason to expect that a woman who doesn’t play male avatars is going to feel compelled to masculinize her voice in TeamSpeak.

But the BEST part here is how the makers of this software assert that by going so far as to masculinize their voices lest male players find out that they’re GIRLS, female gamers will prove themselves! Yes! Nothing will show people that women can game like CONCEALING ALL SIGNS OF THE PRESENCE AND PARTICIPATION OF ACTUAL FEMALE GAMERS.

It’s like they’re from Bizarro World or something. How does one argue against a basic lack of any critical thinking skills?

I discovered last night that the correct spelling of “Marie Laveau” was not taken on the Pinnacle server on City of Heroes, so I created an illusion/storm controller by that name for a little evening play.*

Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen, is a lightish-skinned black woman with the “big” afro (it looks like a pretty normal afro to me):

I started a pick-up group in the interests of leveling faster. One of the first members, a male blaster, showed up at the mission door and said to me, first thing, “Nice hair.”

Then he got wiped out by some mobs that I’d just warned everyone were hanging around the mish door, but I just thought it was interesting that obviously “black” hair got a comment when I have never, in months of play, gotten a comment on the pink “wild” hair of my primary character, Andromeda Sparks:

In fact, the big and small afros are pretty much the ONLY obviously black hair available in CoH. There are dreadlocks, but they’re short and not immediately distinguishable from the “punk” style. There are several braided styles, but they’re more in the Princess Leia mode. Given the attention many players pay to asthetics, I think it is not unreasonable to assume that a lack of “black”-appearing hair leads to fewer black characters created, although of course the majority of players are probably white, too.

My general impression of CoH is that the character population is overwhelmingly white–genderswapping is rampant, but raceswapping seems uncommon. This may be partially because, as noted, non-white options are extremely limited in character creation. There’s probably also little incentive from a mechanic standpoint; that is, people are unlikely to give preferential treatment to non-white characters the way they are perceived to do so for female ones. Actually, I’m a little surprised I haven’t seen more creepy fetishization of Asian women in that direction–this may come back to the difficulty of building non-white characters.

Anyway, we’ll see how things go with Marie. Race online is understudied.

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*Some people express dismay that I keep creating new characters. I didn’t want to play Jillian without my twin, and I don’t like to play Andromeda on the laptop, which is what I use in bed. And I’ve kind of gotten into controllers playing Jillian, so I wanted to try another one.

That, my friend, is a screen capture from City of Heroes. I was dashing through King’s Row this afternoon to see a contact, and suddenly found myself looking at two NPC women in a back alley. Just as I was confirming that they were the recently added (to CoH; they were already on CoV) “Skull Girlfriends” and thus not targettable, one of them said THAT. I had a little seizure slamming the Print Screen key.

It was bad enough that gang member girlfriends were added to areas that previously had no female mobs at all, as if to HIGHLIGHT that fact–you can’t target them, and when you attack the male gang members, they scream and run away. Previously, I have only seen them standing around talking trash about the girlfriends of the opposing gang. But apparently the CoX game designers decided to give them another aspect of personality! They don’t just snipe at other women! They are also insecure about their physical appearances!

Excuse me while I vomit.