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 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!

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.

No sooner do I finish a 9000-word paper on genderswapping and perceptions of gender-appropriate behavior in MMOGs than some asshat on Striga decides that what poor little pink Andromeda Sparks REALLY NEEDS is the strong silent type messing with her kills.

And THEN, after he whales on my targets without asking, he invites me to TEAM.

Naturally, I decline. And I send him a tell pointing out that if I’d wanted his help, I’d have asked for it.

He starts whining about how he must be getting OLD, nobody appreciates COMMON COURTESY anymore. I tell him that common courtesy would dictate asking a person before you attack their targets.

Oh, he says, but you’re a blaster* and you don’t have good defense** and you NEEDED HELP.

Not from you, buster, I says. Good DAY.

/ignore.

My friend Rosepurr once remarked that any guy who self-identifies as a “gentleman” is likely to be an insidious 1950s throwback fuckwit. The “common courtesy” remark certainly played that way to me. Spare me from socially inept jerks who pitch a fit when I don’t fall at their manly feet in gratitude for providing “help” I didn’t want in the first place.

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*An interesting finding from my content analysis for this paper is that people don’t just think defenders (healers) are girly–apparently blasters and controllers deal their damage from an unmanly distance.

**Meaning, I can’t take damage like a tank, which is true. Which is why half of my insp slots are full of heals when I solo.

So this weekend, while visiting friends in Kirksville, I woke up way earlier than I had any right to on Saturday, and everyone else was still asleep because we’d spent the night before partying until practically dawn at the Prism drag show.

So naturally, I logged onto City of Heroes. That’s basically why I took my laptop to Kirksville (I also used it to verify that yes, the south McDonald’s has wireless internet in addition to their damaged DDR machine). My primary server (Pinnacle) was having issues, so I decided to create a tanker character on Justice–most of my toons are blasters and defenders, and I wanted to see what it was like to play a tanker.

So I create a tanker. She’s kind of scantily clad, although that’s justified in the backstory–I chose “magic” as her origin and then wrote up that she was the former “personal plaything” (obscenity is disabled in chat on CoH by default; I was afraid “sex toy” in my profile might cause problems) of a currently MIA sorceress, so that it’s her status as a magical construct that grants her invulnerability and super strength:

So there she is. You get the idea. It is important to note that this character is IN NO WAY remarkable for her skankiness on CoH. All you see everywhere on CoH is people running around in costumes like that, half the time.

Anyway, I end up going to bed later than other people, too, so I log on with her again. I’m running around, enjoying my skanky bad self, pummeling the shit out of muggers to level up. And a male character shows up, and starts bumping into my avatar–repeatedly, bumping into me, not saying anything, just crashing into me over and over. I say, “Can I help you?” Snippy, but allowing for the possibility that someone isn’t too good with the controls. I walk out of the immediate area.

I’m killing more muggers. And the guy is back–he’s circling me and dodging in and out of my field of view, not attacking my targets, just getting right up in my grill. I finish off my targets and say, “Get lost.” I leave the area again.

I’m killing more muggers. The guy is back, and this time he’s brought a friend, also a male toon. They’re both doing it now, dodging around, bumping into me, circling me, etc. I finish off my muggers.

I send the first guy a private tell: “I don’t know what you want, but I have no problem reporting you for harassment.”

Bam! Both of them are SO gone. The guy sends me a tell back, the first either of them has spoken: “just joking around”

I send him a reply: “Obviously I’m not laughing. Good night.”

I should note here that these two male toons were somewhere between level 15 and level 25; you can tell because they had adjectives before their names, but only one (you get a second at level 25). My toon was level 2 or 3 at the time. So it’s not JUST a matter of two male toons harassing a female toon (in an environment where it is important to note that there is a LOT of gender-swapping). It’s also two at least somewhat experienced players hassling someone who MIGHT not be an experienced player, although in CoH, most people seem to have quite a few alts and there are lots of people with a level 50 who also have some new toons.

And the way I handled the situation–an effective way, following the failure of the general command to go away and stop bothering me–was not to say anything about the morality of their behavior per se, except to define it in the term “harrassment,” which more importantly defined their behavior as not just bad but actionable. Demonstrating competence with the game and its regulations was how I got them to stop hassling my low-level female toon. Don’t get me wrong, the whole situation seemed, to me, obviously gendered–but it’s hard to untangle that from the issues of game experience that also were in play.

I’m still kind of mad about it. And I wonder how other players would have handled it, and if in general being male or female would influence what a person did, and if having that happen when you WERE actually an inexperienced player would make you less likely to want to keep playing. I am pretty much entirely certain that the male toons who were bothering me did in fact belong to male players. I wonder if this kind of blatantly sexual harrassment is treated differently by game authorities than name-calling etc., and how common it is (not uncommon, I’m guessing).

And I really wonder how anyone can claim that gender doesn’t matter in MMOGs, as some do. Because even in a game where there seems to be a very low certainty about any female toon actually belonging to a female player, stuff like this happens.

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Coming soon: Travis discovers that the chat obscenity filter scrambles “gay.”

So far, all the people on City of Heroes who I’ve had to kick off teams for being obnoxious have been playing male characters.

Common behaviors include snottily telling other players that their characters are crap, ordering everyone around like they’re leading the team (when they’re not) and getting abusive if they aren’t immediately obeyed, randomly shouting about how they totally have another ‘toon that’s level 50 (and so you’re an idiot for not obeying their every command), charging ahead and drawing aggro on everyone, and repeating everything they say–especially the obnoxious stuff–who am I kidding, everything they say is obnoxious–50 times.

It’s funny; often even when everyone else on the team agrees that the person in question is a hopeless asshole and doesn’t want them around, few people are actually willing to boot them. I, on the other hand, am not shy about this. I actually got made leader of a team today because I am willing to kick someone off for being a jackass. Why should jackasses share my xp? It’s not like they tend, as a group, to even be efficient players–see above about drawing unnecessary aggro.

Now, in at least one case, the jackass had admitted to being an early adolescent, but frankly, I think that if you’re going to be a jackass 14-year-old or whatever, there should be consequences. Failure is feedback and all that. I do issue warnings: “Calm down and stop being rude to everyone or I’m booting you.” So far this has only ever resulted in the jackass quitting to pursue his inalienable right to jackassery elsewhere, which is fine. Probably less of a headache that way.

I do wonder if early adolescents are less likely to gender swap avatars, a fairly common practice overall in MMOGs, and I think particularly on CoH. It seems like more than half the avatars I see at any given time are female, and I know that’s not an accurate reflection of the player base–not even close. But it seems like junior high kids might be particularly sensitive to the negative attributions that might attach to gender swapping. Ugh, junior high.

Also, as Erratic kindly pointed out, there ARE female mobs in CoH, although they seem to be mainly concentrated in higher level areas–except for the female Eidolons, which you run into with the Vahzilok. I forgot about them; I often mistake Eidolons for other heroes, though, probably at least partially because some of them have boobs.

And for those readers who will be attending WisCon in May, my abstract on gender performance in CoH was accepted, so you’ll be hearing plenty more about this. Probably with slides.

ETA: This is certainly not to say that female characters do not perform all kinds of obnoxious behavior, but the constellation described in the second paragraph above seems to be a phenomenon primarily of male characters. The most common single annoying behavior I’ve encountered on teams, usually coupled with poor communication, is running ahead like an idiot and drawing too much aggro for the team to handle/getting killed and depriving the team of any useful labor (this seems to be particularly concentrated in blasters who think they can tank), and I’ve seen female characters do it, too.