Interesting article on the NY Times site about how women are treated when playing online games and when looking at the issue of how women are depicted in games.

link

here's a longer article about the fighting game/sexual harassment stuff in the NYT article intro: http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/e...fighting-games

Anna Prosser

Oh, that clarifies the story much better! Thank you!

http://www.destructoid.com/a-respons...w-230570.phtml

That one is... less than good.

Well, if the writers who created her and control her every thought and word make her say she enjoys dress up...

Really? This author makes some fairly laughable arguments, but this has to be the worst so far.

Aris has said a lot of controversial stuff before -- his comments got him banned from commentating on twitch.tv for a pretty well known fighting game tournament. He's more extreme than most others in the fighting game community.

I definitely don't think the discrimination is as bad as the articles seem to suggest. There are quite a few successful and well respected players who aren't straight males. Ricky Ortiz (gay), Kayopolice (M->F trans), sherryjenix (female), chocoblanka (female) are a few names that I can think of off the top of my head.

The barrier of entry to the fighting game community is more of the problem, imo. It's very hard for new players to earn the respect of the veterans and it's not uncommon to take a fair amount of verbal abuse as a newcomer, even if you are extremely talented at gaming.

It would help if big name devs/publishers could have a more positive attitude towards women otherwise progress will continue to be slow. FemShep is one of the best video game characters ever created imo. But that was an accident, Bioware and EA view her as MShep with a female character model. It was a stroke of good fortune that Jennifer Hale's voice acting was so much better than the male actor's. That retarded beauty contest for ME3 shows how little BE thinks of women and how badly they failed to realise what a great character they'd made.

That first argument of hers (oversexualization of female characters) is fine and valid. At least for me, that is, because i think that games can be more than just entertainment (i.e. 'art', like movies).
The 2nd one is ****, though. There doesnt have to be a great female character in every single game, and saying that a game is sexist (which i assume is what she does; i dont think the autor of that article elaborated on what her beef is with Bastion) because of it is dumb.

Imo a lot of those complaints can at least partly be explained by the horrible, horrible standard of writing in video games.

I miss games with damsels in distress. I liked saving the princess in mario, zelda, and RE4.