See also: Male Gamers Only. This post was brought to you by A Misandrist.
My battered Nintendo DS suffered a cat-assisted death right after the new year, giving me the perfect opportunity to take advantage of the post-holiday sales and pick up a 3DS. That meant that once it had arrived, I had to pick its opening game. We all have our quirks about the electronics in our lives; one of mine is an almost ritualistic selection of what exactly gets played or read or loaded onto them first. Magical thinking at its worst, maybe, but it’s nice to imagine you’ve given your iPod or Kindle some extra good energy to carry along by inaugurating it with just the right choice of media.
So once my 3DS had suffered through the hazards of unboxing, in spite of all the shiny recent releases I could have started with—Pokémon X? the Bravely Default demo? the newest Ace Attorney?–I rattled through my box of DS games and pulled out Super Princess Peach.
It’s an odd choice, sure. Almost eight years old at this point, the game got a bit of buzz on its release for reasons both positive (Cute! Fun! Peach’s first starring role!) and negative (Too short! Too easy! She gets her powers from her emotions!) While my grumpy logical gamer mind leans toward the side of the more critical view (barring the ones whose writers made oh-so-witty “Super PMS” jokes in their reviews), I’ve still got an undeniable affection for the quirky game—but more than that, I’ve got a lifelong fondness for its star. We grew up together, after all.
***
Wind the clock back about thirty years and consider the landscape of gaming in the late 1980s. The U.S. release of the NES in 1985 marked the first sign of the console market getting back on its feet after the industry crash of 1983, while computers saw advances in graphics and sound cards that let game designers pull off some impressive feats of sight and sound. (Well, impressive for that time, anyway.) Being a young gamer then was a stroke of luck.
Being a young girl gamer at that time was a little more complicated.
To be fair, no one ever told me to my face that I shouldn’t play video games. My family even encouraged it, in a way. There’s a picture somewhere of my four-year-old self sitting with my grandfather at his computer, tapping my way through a math game called Funnels and Buckets, and not long afterwards my parents allowed me to spend afternoons button-mashing my way through Space Invaders and Steeplechase on my father’s Atari 2600. But none of the girls I knew played video or computer games, barring the occasional green-tinted trek through Oregon Trail on the school’s Apple IIes. In toy stores, the locked glass-front cases that held cartridges were always situated well away from any aisles that had a Barbie-pink glow. Advertising was certainly clear enough on the issue. (A sampling of commercials from that era provides both hilarity and a general idea of their demographics. How many girls can you spot? How many do you actually see playing a game?)
As a result, when my parents presented me with an NES as a birthday gift, my first reaction to it was mixed confusion and apprehension. Isn’t this for boys? I thought. Am I allowed to have this?
Not that I let that actually keep me from playing. It just became another activity I did by myself, like reading and working puzzles and trying to put a tutu on the family dog. And in my own way I was still lucky, because the 1980s also saw the birth of a handful of female characters that gave my muddled thoughts about gaming the shake-up they needed.
***
Part of me is tempted to lie and set the responsibility for my wake-up call at the feet of Metroid and Samus Aran. It would make for such a nice story, and dovetail neatly with the game’s legendary reveal: heavily-armed and armored bounty hunter fights aliens and space pirates through a cavernous planet, rides the final elevator to the exit, removes their helmet—ta-da, you’ve been playing a woman all along! Sexist assumptions get a Screw Attack to the face, and every kid playing gets a lightning-bolt revelation that women can be the heroes of a game too.
But Metroid came a little later for me, in the middle of a much slower change in viewpoint that was bookended by the original princesses of the Kingdom of Nintendo: Peach and Zelda.
Peach hadn’t made an impression on me in Super Mario Bros., since she only shows up for about ten seconds at the game’s end—a pretty poor reward for suffering through seven rounds of her being in another castle. Yet when I popped Super Mario Bros. 2 into the cartridge slot, I got a surprise: the game let you pick your playable character, and right there on the selection screen was Peach herself. Or Princess Toadstool, rather, renamed for western releases and forced by graphical limitations to be redheaded instead of her canonical blonde. (She wasn’t even Peach at all, really. For those not up on their gaming history, Super Mario Bros. 2 was originally a different game called Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic, redeveloped and rebranded as a Mario game after Nintendo of America decided the real sequel to Super Mario Bros. was too likely to lead to enraged controller-flinging in the U.S.)
All that aside, even though I knew nothing about Peach in terms of stats or character besides her princess status, the mere fact that she offered me the chance to play through the game as a girl felt like such a novel idea that I picked her immediately. In time I dutifully gave all the game’s other (male) characters a brief try, but always switched back to her, and soon I couldn’t make myself play through the game as anyone else or fathom why a person would choose a different character. In spite of the game manual’s assertion that she was the slowest and weakest of the potential choices, it seemed obvious to me that she was the best option. She could float. How much did strength or speed matter when you could fluff out your poofy skirts and sail over the heads of the bad guys, presumably laughing all the way?
I got to Metroid and Samus soon afterward, and though by then her surprise reveal had been spoiled by word-of-mouth rumors, the setup spurred me to begin pretending that any faceless or suitably androgynous-looking game protagonist was female. Console games in those days were thin on plot and characterization, and 8-bit graphics weren’t always the best at providing gender distinction—so why not pretend that fuzzball Lolo or the nameless protagonist of Shadowgate were really female?
At the same time, over in the world of PC gaming, Sierra On-Line’s Roberta Williams took a break from devising wall-punchingly difficult adventure game ideas and considered the idea of having a female character headline an entry of the company’s flagship King’s Quest series. Rosella of Daventry was introduced in a standard save-the-princess task at the end of King’s Quest III, and then in the opening of King’s Quest IV leapt into the protagonist’s role, agreeing without hesitation to travel to a distant land to seek a cure for her ailing father. A year later Williams gave another female character a starring role in The Colonel’s Bequest, a Clue-esque mystery with Tulane student and aspiring journalist Laura Bow. Adventure games were sophisticated enough to be a real challenge for me at that age, and it wasn’t until a couple of years later that I’d see them through to the end, but at I appreciated that both characters were subject to Sierra’s usual array of puzzles–and their traditional gamut of sadistic and creative ways to die. It felt like a pleasantly realistic sort of equality. Being a girl didn’t mean you should be any less vulnerable to death by falling chandelier or asphyxiation from spending too long trapped in a whale’s mouth.
Not for a minute do I mean to suggest that this handful of characters all popping up within the space of a few years indicates that some sort of quiet feminist push happened in the gaming industry in the 1980s. At best it was a lucky occurrence, a confluence of deliberate good intentions from some game designers and chance suggestion from others. For me at the time, though, it felt like a series of small but crucial oases in a desert. Just as no one ever told me a girl couldn’t be a gamer, no one had said that a game’s main character couldn’t be female…but to actually see it happen and to play it was a revelation.
Which brings me to Princess Zelda, and the moment when my unfocused thoughts about female characters in games began to coalesce into frustration. Zelda’d been absent enough from her first two games (imprisoned in The Legend of Zelda and in a magical slumber in The Adventure of Link) that you could almost forgive so many people for thinking that the “Zelda” of the title was the green-clad boy with the elf cap and no pants, but by 1991’s A Link to the Past she was at least able to kickstart Link via telepathic message into getting out of bed to help facilitate her jailbreak…after which she let Link go off adventuring while she spent the first half of the game hiding in a church and the second half stuck in a crystal.
By then I’d absorbed enough media to realize that the storytelling rule of “women get kidnapped, men do the rescuing” not only jarred with what I knew was possible, but with basic common sense. Though I loved A Link to the Past on the whole, it was the first time I remember being vividly angry at a game’s story for shunting the female character aside. I’d seen that a female character could carry a game, so why couldn’t that happen here? Why did Zelda hang around a wide-open church with only an old priest for a defender when she’d have been a lot safer accompanying the nice young guy with a sword? I played through the opening sequence multiple times and made my first attempts at sequence-breaking trying to avoid her scripted departure; I committed my first act of fanfiction by writing a version of story where Zelda stuck with Link the whole way through.
Following these characters from one installment to the next became a source of both happiness and frustration. Samus grew into a legendary figure in canon and picking up a tremendous following of both male and female fans in the real world, but her characterization remained light throughout ten games and twenty years, making her easy to love as an idea but hard to grasp as a person. Unfortunately, Metroid: Other M proved that trying different things gives you a whole bunch of new ways to fail, and the game’s attempt to flesh out Samus personally and emotionally was controversial at best and at worst judged to be a poorly-written, sexist mess. (The actual issues of sexism in Other M and the industry’s overall treatment of Samus herself is probably a subject for another essay.)
Rosella and Laura both managed a sequel each–the former adding a dose of rebellious princess to her characterization and joining her mother Valanice for a Disney-ish escapade, the latter leveling up from Amateur Investigator to Plucky Girl Reporter and solving a tangled murder/theft case–before the mid-90s decline of the adventure game ended their runs. Though it’s easy to see traces of them in the heroines of the games that have sprung up in the genre’s recent resurgence, the characters themselves seem consigned to relative obscurity.
Even the advancement of Nintendo’s royal ladies can only be described as “unsteady.” As spin-offs and tangential Mario series began to pop up, Peach was consistently present and more often than not playing an active role: running people off the Rainbow Road in Mario Kart; joining the adventuring party in Super Mario RPG; whacking people with her parasol in the Super Smash Bros. series. She has, the Mario Wiki tells me, “appeared in more games than any female character in video game history.” But after that first outing in SMB2 it took almost twenty years for her to be playable again in the main series, and she’s never been able to shake off her status as the ur-damsel of video games. Zelda might have been slow to start, but by the turn of the century she’d finally begun to take a stronger hand in the story and develop a central role in her setting’s mythology, becoming at various times a sage, a pirate, and the incarnation of a goddess, not to mention disguising herself (or switching genders, depending on who you ask) to become the supposedly-male Sheik, who offered advice and ocarina tunes to Link and provided the fandom with a topic of inevitable flame wars for the next two decades. Yet she’s still a kidnap victim more often than not, and her sole playable appearance in the series that bears her name is as a ghost in 2009’s Spirit Tracks. That is, if one ignores the CD-I games, which all right-thinking people do.
It all leaves me torn: glad at how much they achieved; bitter at how much more could have been done with them by now.
***
The habit that started with Peach is still a deep-set pattern in my psyche: pick the girl every time. Always a female PC inUltima games and the Elder Scrolls series; always Chun-Li in Street Fighter II and Sonya Blade in Mortal Kombat. Revan was always a woman, no matter how much the Star Wars canon said otherwise. Every chance I have to play a female character still feels like a luxury that I need to take advantage of whenever possible. For a long while I had a paranoid notion that my choice ‘counted’ in some way and would be taken away from me if I didn’t appreciate it properly. (Bioware’s reveal a few years ago that they’d been tracking players’ decisions to play a male or female Shepherd in Mass Effect gave me a moment of chilling “I knew it!” frisson.)
I could try to spin this essay here and talk about how pleased I am that the representation of women became better year by year since I first began gaming. I am pleased, and thankful–for Terra and Celes, Rosangela Blackwell and Heather Mason, Alyx Vance and April Ryan, Jade and Chell and Nilin and Clementine and every other woman and girl that my childhood self never could have imagined would show up in a video game. But how much progress has the industry really made when for each one of them, there’s a dozen other female characters that I have to struggle to love in spite of their shoddy treatment by the writers and their skeevy, fetishistic character designs? When the Grizzled White Guy is still the norm for lead characters? When trend of the faceless, voiceless, blank-slate but DEFINITELY MALE protagonist is going strong after more than thirty years?
That’s why even with their weaknesses as characters and mishandling by their parent companies and the fact that there are now other, more fully developed characters that I can (and do) love, some corner of my heart is still has keeps a space for the characters I clung to as a little girl. That’s the part that wanted Peach floating hither and thither and stomping on Koopas to be the first experience on my 3DS, and that’s the part that boots up The Dagger of Amon Ra on my new computer so I can guide Laura Bow through solving a quintuple homicide. There’s a nostalgic pleasure in it, true, but beyond that the experience calls up the emotions I felt decades ago: affection for the characters and anger on their behalf. They bring to mind those first glimpses of possibility that the medium I loved could tell stories that weren’t about men. How long it would have taken me realize that if they hadn’t been there at all? Would I really understand the importance of representation in media–not just for women, but for everyone–if I didn’t have those long-ago memories of how great it felt to suddenly see someone like me in a game? My younger self is still alive at the core of my long-standing enmity with the industry, prickling with irritation every time she sees another guys-only game, wishing she had the power to sit designers down and point to Samus pulling off her helmet and Rosella saying “yes” to an unknown voice and Peach raising her hand when you choose her. Look, that self wants to say. They put them all there for anyone to play twenty-five years ago like it was nothing, but it meant everything to me. Why can’t you do that now?
Tags: feminism, gaming, kate mccallister, video games
I think in the ’80s and early ’90s there were more women making games (though not necessarily with female characters), because the industry was so new. And then when video games became this massive corporate entity, with statistics and marketing departments, that’s really when the whole “women don’t play games, games with women as protagonists don’t sell,” and for some reason the industry clings to this even though there’s SO MUCH INFO TO THE CONTRARY. Even indies don’t have that great of gender representation, though that’s changing as more women start making games. It’s frustrating. At least more people seem to care now.
Ugh, and don’t even get me started on how that Tomb Raider reboot made me HATE LARA CROFT FOREVER.
Basically, any time men see that an industry/profession is about to become profitable, they will promptly co-opt it for themselves and boot women out.
See: programming, gaming, cooking… basically any now-male-dominated industry.
WE ARE IN A FIGHT NOW, I have been madly in love with new Lara since blowing off the face of that dude who got squashed in the gas explosion in the mountain ascent base and she said, “Go to hell,” in the COLDEST VOICE of disinterested loathing
Nope, her screaming constantly undid any badassness she may have had. Can’t even hear her name without thinking about allt the screaming MAKE IT STOPPPPPP
Disagree. Chick took on that whole game after being impaled on a piece of rebar at the very beginning, I say she can scream all she wants.
Honestly, her screams seemed in line with the punishment she was taking, it’s just that dude game protags (and dude protags in general) get to grunt manfully and walk it off when they GET SHOTGUNNED IN THE KNEE.
Basically, more hulking musclemen tearing up and yelping when they’re running through the woods and shatter their fucking toe on a goddamn rock. Less stoic, silent collapse right before the GAME OVER screen, as though your mortal gut wound is nothing worth complaining about, really.
Aw man, I loved Lara in the reboot. I absolutely believe she and Sam were lovaaaahs as well.
yep yep yep yep
What is the opposite of a fight. Because that’s what we’re in now.
Let’s see a game with shapely male jailbait making those same noises as he’s relentlessly brutalized and see how much the 35-year-old dudes at Gamestop feel then. Put some baby fat on him so you want to protect him, you know.
I imagine a lot of it has to do with the general hostility toward women in STEM programs, which is a problem in itself. Making a modern AAA game from scratch requires a lot of advanced programming, knowledge of physics and calculus, so women in that industry go through one gauntlet to get to another. Looking through the rosters of most companies I know there’s a noticeable gender parity in art departments and little of it elsewhere. Given the emphasis on multitasking (specifically programming) in a production capacity and the relative devaluing of non-visual creative aspects (dedicated staff writing positions are pretty rare, you need to know programming or design) there aren’t a lot of openings for women who haven’t gone through the STEM grinder.
There isn’t just hostility in the programs, there’s hostility in the work environments too, and women will leave a poor work environment, and word gets around, and other women won’t work for a place that has a reputation for being an awful place to work.
It’s not just AAA games with this problem either. Indies aren’t much better, even though there are way more women creators. But yes, most women indie creators are self taught. You actually don’t really NEED to know how to code if you want to make your own games. I don’t know how to code and I’ve made three so far. But even these games don’t get a lot of the same attention as indie games made by dudes. I actually run a site where I try to highlight women who are making games, and I rarely have women come to me for promotion, I have to go to them.
Link to your site?
I feel weird hyperlinking it, so it’s in my InteseDebate profile for all interested parties!
The AAA business model is based on such a warped view of gaming demographics. It’s madness. The emphasis on hype, tough guy plots and babezzz is based on the (false, by their own data) assumption that it’s only sixteen year old boys they need to care about.
As a fellow female gamer, I just teared up a little bit.
And I just realized that in my senior project, a puzzle video game for the Nintendo DS, I had two characters. A robot, and a bat. The robot was named Olivaw, an Asimov reference, and the bat was Friend Bat (both a reference to Scary Go Round and a joke about how robots are bad at names.) There is no reason for either of them to be “male,” but in my head, they were always male. Why? I don’t want to just blame the video games I played growing up, or society at large, but I made that game four years ago and this is the first time I thought about it.
I know this is completely tangential to your point but Scary Go Round! That gives me smiles.
Smiles are not tangential!
sgr 4ever, I wish I were Shelley.
my icon is Alis from Phantasy Star, another female videogame protagonist! but I only know this game exists via dudevolleyball, who used to be obsessed with it (& the first version was released on the largely forgotten Sega Master System, which helps explain its obscurity). you can get it on Sega compilations, though, & it’s actually an impressively complex story, as are the first few sequels. plus, Alis is a badass, & there are other agential female characters in the series too.
I also really enjoy the fact that the Fallout games let you be a female protagonist, & that your outfits as such aren’t the usual boob-&-crotch-only armor. but needless to say there’s still a LONG way to go in terms of representing women in videogames.
I TOTALLY RESPECT women who grew up not selecting Peach all the time in Mario Kart because we are a wild bunch of misfits and we are all different but oh my God, I was drawn to choosing Peach like I was caught in the Death Star tractor beam.
Both SMB2 and Mario Kart are testaments to my determination to pick the Princess even though it would have benefitted me greatly to pick Toad instead.
Peace was the best in Mario Kart. End of story.
And then in Mario Party when they finally introduced Daisy, I was ALL ABOUT HER.
Even if her Double Dash cry is a little unfortunate sounding.
Oh god. I just had a flashback about that noise.
My parents never let our family have a console, so most of my evolution as a female gamer came through the parallel path of PC gaming. Sim games, King’s Quest, Myst, etc. Games which either frequently featured female characters (King’s Quest VII stars not one but *two* ladies, and is unapologetically girly), or felt completely divorced from gender (Sim City 2000, woohoo). I learned about Sierra games from female friends, and it never even *occurred* to me that there might be something wrong with what I was doing. Which is not to say that there weren’t games which I knew were somehow off limits – Doom, Quake, and the other spate of 3D games featuring space marine dudes shooting monsters. But I had my own thing.
At some point, however, the sim games (except for the Sims) and the adventure games dropped away, and the manly FPS games became the sole focus of the industry. I didn’t play anything for six or seven years. What brought me back were the games which actively presented themselves as being “for me” (or at least not explicitly *not* for me): Portal with its non-violence and “oh hey, a female character!”, and being Shepard in Mass Effect. Even now, though, I see that kind of push and pull in the industry. People directly citing The Witcher as the manly, “non-faggy” savior of RPG gaming in direct opposition to Dragon Age’s inclusiveness. Year after year of brown-haired straight white dude protagonists. I like that the industry has become so much more female-friendly, but I’m constantly worried that I’m going to lose my place again.
Metroid Other M was like a huge splash of ice water to the face. Hey girls, that awesome female protagonist you grew up with? The one who stars in those awesome, meticulously designed games you love so much? Turns out she’s actually a codependent, insubordinate, spineless, baby-hungry damaged woman-child. Surprise! I finished that game and never played it again.
I had the opposite experience of growing up as a female gamer- most of my neighbors were girls around my age and they all had Nintendo, as did my female cousins. It was just that I kept going with the hobby and somewhere along the way, everyone else dropped out. I looked around in my twenties and realized that, post-college, I was one of the few women I knew who still kept up on new systems and games. However, a lot of my female friends have gotten back into it now that we are in our thirties. Still, I find the idea that women are barging unwanted into a male pastime infuriating- I’ve been here the whole time! And I’ve been playing female characters the whole time, as long as I had the option.
Aside from the sheer awesomeness of Female Shepard, the game where the ability to play as a female character meant the most to me was Halo Reach. It had almost no impact on the game, just different vocalizations and a slightly different character model, but I am so glad the option was there. You probably wouldn’t know it from the fan base and the increasingly chesty Cortana, but the expanded universe for Halo tilts pretty heavily female – about half the Spartan characters are female, the animosity between Catherine Halsey and Margaret Parangosky drives much of the plot, The Librarian guided our development, etc. My Noble Six was a woman, and she was the catalyst that saved the galaxy.
For years, years I was convinced Link was a lady. And I was so happy to have a female character that went on adventures and had a sword and rescued other ladies instead of being rescued herself. For years this went on until a really obnoxious know it all boy in my class told me Link was a dude and shattered my dreams forever.
In other words: the first time bumblebeebear was mansplained too about a video game
I loved this! I’m not much of a gamer, but I am a big comics fan, and representation is so important.
I still call bullshit on the way Bioware used that data to rationalize the male Shepard’s dominance in art and advertising. Yes, fine, the majority of Shepards are rolled male. Whatever. It’s the default setting, the path of least resistance, of fucking course there are more maleSheps. Plenty of those default Shepards were represented on the used game shelves a week after the release dates, ahem. I want to know what the numbers look like when you take into account completed games, New+ replays, hours played, levels of character customization. I’ve yet to find an active online community for Mass Effect that wasn’t a big barrel of femShep players, but you’d never know it outside of fan-controlled space. Isn’t anyone at the corporate level starting to chafe from all this backsliding?
+40000 points for namedropping Heather Mason, btw.
Cosign on wanting to see those figures on male/female Shepard play weighted for some value indicating how strongly each given player feels about Shepard’s gender. I have talked to exactly one person who’s got a firm opinion on Shepard’s gender that says “dude”. My little brother, a real bro’s bro, is firmly in the femShep camp. And I really can’t understand the other side, not when Jennifer Hale’s performance is head and shoulders above Mark Meer’s (and his isn’t bad but).
If most everyone who actually cares which Shepard is canon is on one side of this issue, and most of the other side were “eh, I only played it once, I just rolled with the default”, then I sure as shit know which face I’m slapping on the cover.
I wish they had set up the character creation menu so that it randomly put femShep first half the time.
Is it okay if I steal this idea for any future games I make, so long as I feel like crap that this didn’t naturally occur to me?
Please do! And you can consider the feeling like crap optional.
I’m sure Mark Meer would have been fine if I’d played even a second of broShep before playing over hundreds of hours of femShep. I’d have taken his work for granted, probably.
And that’s the nicest thing I can say about his performance.
Two things I will say for Mark Meer:
1) He does a ton of cosplay (as Shepard) with the women who was Samara’s face model. So that’s cool.
2) He gives a great Vorcha performance. (He is all the Vorcha.)
The data also showed that a minority of players actually completed the game. And it’s not as if they hadn’t set up ME1’s gender outlook from the beginning. There was only one face in the entirety of ME1 that didn’t look like melted pastic and that was the male model they scanned in for the default face (well, it looked less like melted plastic). The femShep face they ended up hastily tacking onto ME3 promotional material (just for that one cover variant, as I recall) was the un-scanned default.
That’s not even getting into the fact that the Mass Effect series (all of Bioware’s games, really) was reoriented to specifically compete with Call of Duty for its demographic, once EA bought them out. That changed it in a number of ways. But Bioware’s never been particularly good about gender.
Bioware has gender issues for sure, but I have to grade on a curve or I just die inside.
They’re not perfect by any means (o hai there EDI cameltoe), but BioWare is still one of the few companies out there that even tries at *all*. Actually, I’m trying to think of a major studio that actually is “good about gender”… Arguments could be made for Valve and Naughty Dog, but they’ve had their fuck-ups as well. And on the other end, you have folks like Rockstar or Ubisoft not even thinking about potentially having a female protagonist. BioWare’s let me play Shepard as a badass Asian woman and made some genuinely awesome female characters (Aveline!), so in my books they’re aaaaaall right.
Also, um, I actually like the post-CoDification BioWare games more than the pre ones? (Mass Effect 2 is a lot more fun than ME1! There, I said it!)
MASS EFFECT 2 IS THE GREATEST THERE IS NO SHAME IN THIS MAGNIFICENT TRUTH
It introduced the renegade interrupt, the Vanguard charge, and the romance-able Garrus! It is the best game.
I tried replaying ME2 as something other than the vanguard, but couldn’t bring myself to care. If I can’t knock a Krogan out of cover, then blast him with a shotgun while he’s still in the air, why would I bother?
I also love that one of the playable characters in Dragon Age: Origins was a badass old sorceress AKA Wynne. Mess with her if you must and she will threaten to not help you with mending your smelly socks the next time. (Talking about YOU, Alistair.)
That said… Bioware is responsible for so many fictional female characters that I love. Although I will never, ever approve of Liara’s new matron-sized boobs (since LOTSB).
I have literally never played DudeShep. IT’S JUST WRONG. I bought a FemShep handdrawn figure at a con last year, and the guy selling them was like, “This is the first year DudeShep has sold before FemShep” and then we kinda made fun of that person, lol.
Respect.
Elissa Steamer on THPS. ANY LIL’ SK8R GRRLS OUT THERE?
Revan is 100% a lady, this is a cause I will die for.
Exile can remain a lady, but all the nonsense about what happens to her in the comics (? Novels? Something?) is hereby stricken from the record.
Agreed on both counts.
Oh! Oh! Who has Steam/PSN/Xbox accounts they wanna share so they can have more friends?
Steam: 2700lesbianspoons
PSN: mona_boehner
I would love to game with toasties!
Steam: maladydee
PSN: either maladydee or malady-dee, (my ps3 is packed, I can’t check it till moving is over)
Oh my PSN might be mona b. (Why is it so confusing to tell, I don’t know.)
Steam: absotively
Origin: Absotively
Wii U: Absotively
Also, I’m trying to start this on the open thread, since it didn’t take off here.
Oh my PSN might be mona b. (Why is it so confusing to tell, I don't know.)
I’ve been playing since the old Atari days too. I never thought much about my game character selection until recently when I realized I actively avoid games where I can’t choose to be, or pretend to be, a female character. I don’t think I did that in the early days of consoles, but I suspect I had rewritten most games in my head such that I played a girl (even when I knew they were male, like TMNTs).
It drives me nuts to hear game companies say “girls don’t play”. I’ve played all my life dammit, and I still do! But there are games I just won’t buy, maybe they’d find a bigger market if they’d listen. I also admit to avoiding any games where I have to interact with people I don’t know. I got sick to death of the BS from male players.
Another lifelong videogamer. I started playing Pong in the 70s, moved on to Atari, and computer games on my Dad’s Vic20 and Commodore 64, and nearly failed a Grad School class because of Diablo/Diablo II (playing Rogues for the WIN!) Now I’m on to Marvel Heroes, which is Diablo with Marvel character skins, and as also a lifelong comic nerd, that game hits my sweet spot.
So I’ve never understood that “girls don’t game/play videogames” bullshit, either.
Now, tabletop RPGs is another matter, because none of my male best friend’s gamer nerd buddies would let me play D&D with them, I didn’t get to start playing pen and paper RPGs until I was 19, and, well, I’m writing them (independently) and have been running them for nearly 20 years now.
Nerd sexism sucks.
Nancy Drew computer games forever! Like literally I will be playing these for the rest of my life along with picking the lady characters in every other game. (Don’t tell anyone I still play on amateur detective, those sliding puzzles are hard.)
I didn’t come here to shill and I have nothing to do with this game, besides being a backer, but if you get a chance, check out the kickstarter for Bizenghast, based on the graphic novels by M. Alice LeGrow. Female protagonist. Great adventures. Looks beautiful.
I worked for a bit as an artist in the game industry and I can tell you that the reason that there has been this huge gap in female representation in games is because the inmates run the asylum, that is to say, the boys who grew up on First Person Shooters and women as literal trophies grew up to make more First Person Shooters with women as literal trophies, and hired dullard ad men to set up an echo chamber of their own design. Women have a hard time staying in the industry because most big companies are essentially pubescent boy clubhouses with signs that read "no girls allowed". It's fairly toxic.
Which is why all the good work in intersectionalism and representation is happening in the burgeoning, crowdsourced indie scene. All very exciting and pertinent.