Thursday, November 17, 2005

Gamer Girl Action

Video games, by and large, assume that whether you’re playing a female character or not, you’re going to want to have sex with a female character, or at least be sexually attracted to a female character (or monster).

1 comments so far. Got something to say?

Anonymous said...

Yep. One of the reasons I usually play a woman in computer roleplaying games is to see how much work they've put into making the game different and worthwhile for female characters. If you're playing a guy in an RPG, you're almost always gonna have some level of romance at this point, but if you play a woman, the experience ranges from "obligatory lesbianism" to "romance with a guy" to "possibility of romance with guy or gal" to "nothing whatsoever, because the designers figured it wasn't worth their time."

It's one of the big ways to tell how much a company has invested in its game -- how much and how well they do at having appropriate and realistic differences for the male character and female character. It's as simple as having the lecherous merchant hit on you as a woman or point out the pretty woman walking by if you're a guy -- or having the pretty woman walking by flirt with you if you're playing a guy, or make a comment about that idiotic lecherous merchant if you're playing a woman. A good company makes sure that there's good content on both sides of the gender fence. A bad company has lots of "unintentional" lesbian subtext, not because they were trying to do it, but because they just didn't bother to code different reactions from game-characters for someone playing a female character.

In my limited experience, I've run into more of the "nothing for female characters", or half-assed versions of romance-with-guy plots, than lesbian plots. Either I've got decent taste in games, or I just wasn't looking hard enough.
 

Posted by Patrick