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I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?

washingtonpost.com

1–10 of 148 posts

Re: I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?

#5
post #3

Wow, nice find. The dismissive contempt half of the commenters have for the 12-year-old girl who meticulously researched and wrote this article is appalling but not surprising.

Because she is a girl or because she is 12 years old?

Re: I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?

#6
post #3

Wow, nice find. The dismissive contempt half of the commenters have for the 12-year-old girl who meticulously researched and wrote this article is appalling but not surprising.

Are you referring to the WaPo comments, or HN's?

Re: I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?

#9
This is a bit tangential to the article, but the first paragraph stuck out to me.

    For a 12-year-old girl, playing games on an iPhone is pretty regular behavior. Almost all of my friends have game apps on their phones, and we’ll spend sleepovers playing side by side.
Back in my day, I was playing video games all the time, hacking them with debug cheats and GameShark. This was universally called a waste of my time by every adult I met, I had to go to great lengths to convince people I should be allowed to do it, and it's what on-ramped me to a super lucrative (and I hope useful to society) career in tech.

Yet here we've arrived at a state of affairs where most western children regularly spend inordinate amounts of time on walled-up instant-gratification video game platforms designed to vacuum money out of their parent's wallets, entirely detached from inspiring them to hack at things and go into technology. Somehow this state of affairs is perfectly normal and okay.

Yeah, I'm a bit bitter about it.

Re: I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?

#10
> Not all apps have taken this route. “The Hunger Games” lets you choose between being a girl or boy for free.

The Hunger Games app? As in, an app based on a book with a female protagonist? That's kind of like saying "Oh, hey, the Pride and Prejudice game lets you play as a girl!" It's a telling detail that could slip past if you're unfamiliar with the story.

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