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Playin' Them The DDR
June 3, 2005
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Dear me - I'm writing about games again! But the astute will recognize it as me taking another opportunity to go on at length about baked goods, as well as surreptitiously quote Eddie Izzard. Wily move, I know. That's why they pay me the big bucks. Or rather, not at all. But that's okay.
I apologize at the mess that the E3 has wreaked upon this here comic: it literally seemed like yesterday that it was April, and I was attempting to prepare myself for the mess that was to come. Now the smoke is beginning to clear at last and the work is continuing as it did before the madness and I am beginning to make sense of the world again. It will be a while yet again before I get my shit together to make a more concentrated strike at improving the comic, but if Web Guy Josiah is out of town next week and I abstain from World of Warcraft by and large to respect our spousal gamingness (with perhaps a few hour exception, to check on my beloved guildies and see how they're faring), hopefully I shall be able to concentrate and make more headway. In the meantime, I beg your forgiveness on the matter yet again, and invite you as always to send me your guest strips and art, as I would heartily appreciate it. I thank you.
Warning: the following is a gaming-related mini-rant. If you are sick of all this, by all means skip it, and I shall not hold it against you in any way. Honest.
I just want to say: fuck you, gaming media, for creating the "grrl gamer." Understand what I mean by this. Always we have had the girl gamer - the female that games because she loves games and always has, regardless of what society would have her love - and lo and behold, at the turn of the millennium, people started to get a clue that they existed. And that there were more of them than they had previously thought.
Then gaming started to go mainstream, and we started to get gaming channels like G4 or "men's" channels like Spike dedicating themselves or part of their broadcast to gaming. Hot chicks were always thrown around in these like so much window dressing: but now it seems they've seized on a new idea. Sexing up the gamer girl.
This isn't such a surprise. Let's look back at Stevie Case, id's token female face. Do we remember the levels she designed? Do we remember her formal role in the company? No. We recall that she was John Romero's girlfriend, and posed in Playboy after she went on a diet and got a new pair of tits. Great goddammed job, Stevie.
It isn't enough now to have "unreachable" attractive women, status symbols. Now, any gamer girl needs to be a beautiful Fragdoll, pert and hot and deadly and just as unreachable. Wasn't it enough that we could game as well as anyone, that we could be respected for our skills? Now as before we need to be hot, unreachable. Gamer girls that were everywhere and not noticed have been mythologized - turned into unicorns, made into fairies. Turned into make-believe.
On MMORPGs in the early days, there was a tendency for male players to react to female avatars as if they were really women, being nicer to them and even giving them gifts. Now, it seems, there is a wide doubt on that, even to the point where male players assume that all female avatars are played by men. Female gamers? some ask in disbelief. Not many here, they say, and they are wrong. But at times I am loath to tell them so. I have before, and been called a liar, simply because they cannot believe I am a female gamer - because female gamers are suddenly by default "gamer grrls," unreachable ideals, unicorns, fairies, nymphs, myths, lies, that don't really exist. Even the most clueless of losers at E3 knew those scantily-clad booth babes lounging around probably hadn't touched a controller in their lives. Couldn't be a gamer grrl.
Yes. I should say that I'm glad that there is a growing acknowledgement that women play games, even though it is hardly reflected in the types of games that the industry puts out. But why, some I'm sure will argue, are you so mad about being mythologized? BECAUSE THAT MAKES US UNREAL TO THEM. We're a marketing tool, not a section of actual people. And we don't get games made for us because you don't make games for a myth, you don't design an FPS or an RTS with fucking Loch Nessie in mind. I'm not Sasquatch, I'm not fictional, I'm not an ideal: I'm just a female who enjoys playing games a whole hell of a lot. Don't ignore me. Don't dress a supermodel up in purported "gamer garb" and have her ramble vapidly about how Halo 2 is TOTALLY like, her favorite game. I call shenanigans on you, on the whole lot of you dumb marketing fucks. Go to hell and take your plastic little doll with you. We're not fat hags and we're not pristine bimbos. We're real people, just like anyone else, and we'd like games that didn't polarize women into crones or big-titted sex symbols. Turning us into your little toy means you can wish us away - or so you think. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. I'm a weird, wild-haired, awkward ninja who wishes she didn't fit into her jeans so snugly sometimes, and I have enough to deal with in being a gamer without you trying to make me into a goddammed unicorn. So FUCK OFF.
The end.
Ok! Over. Safe now. How you doing? Here, I'll bring a smile to your face: check out Something Awful's "Mix-Up in the Prop Department" Photoshop, and this totally random movie of Michael Jackson in gaming (just trust me) pointed out to me by alert reader (immortalized, I should mention, in Tuesday's comic) Christa "pharna," whom I owe greatly for it as it made me laugh gleefully. ANYHOW.
Due to tiredness and a horrible track record of getting sleep this week, I must here retire for the night, and promise you more hilarity coming on Tuesday, and less things of a somber nature. But yeah. Be good.
Really Real,
Annie "Blue" C
demo anata daiji na yume wo egaku
owaru made wa zutto sou koko de matteiru
[But you are painting an important dream
Until you're done, I'll be waiting here always]
- Namco, Katamari Damancy Original Soundtrack
"Lonely Rolling Star"
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