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

washingtonpost.com

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

#121

Post by clay_to_n »

UUMMUU wrote: post #107

It's articles like this that make me wonder if I should just always be sorry for being born a male. There are two kinds of responses to this article. Either you agree that all men are chauvinist pigs and only out to further the male-dominated agenda or you are a sexist bigot. In all honesty if the game developers only make a male characters, that's their prerogative, calling them sexist for not making a female charac…

Your comment has no basis in this article. You're projecting a lot of hate, presumably based on your stereotypes of feminists.

This article is just a 12 year old girl wishing she could play as a girl more often.

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

#122

Post by _bfhp »

morgante wrote: post #108
acjohnson55 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's more harmful, catching some blowback or perpetuating the status quo that tells women from an early age "it's not for you"?

The answer to that question entirely depends on whether you're operating from a personal or a societal perspective.

I don't see your point. Society is made up of individuals who are affected by the status quo. The personal is political. The unconscious designer receives criticism from internet writers that he could choose to completely ignore, while millions of women get another contribution piled on top of the existing reinforcements in every medium.

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

#123

Post by _bfhp »

EGreg wrote: post #41

Aside from the point being made in the article, the language and expressions used in it suggest to me that it's gone through a fair bit of editing / authorship by an adult writer before being published. Either that or I am seriously underestimating the writing style of a 12 year old girl. I understand that every article goes through a revision process. But it started by saying "I am a 12 year old girl" and I wonder h…

Anyone would take it as an assumption that all WaPo articles are edited by WaPo editors. They are her "own words" as much as any article is the "own words" of any staffed journalist. If one is assuming malicious manipulation on the part of The Feminists and are looking for the guarentee of unfiltered words from children on the internet on topics like this, they will be disappointed.

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

#124

Post by anaximander »

I like everything about this article (especially the careful research and evidence-gathering), except for this bit at the end:

  The lack of girl characters implies that girls are not equal to boys and they don’t deserve characters that look like them.
I would ask the author (and readers) to consider more possible explanations.

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

#125

Post by imron »

Dewie wrote: post #35

I remember playing PlayStation games with a friend when I was a kid, and he always seemed to pick a woman character to play if he could. So apparently there were enough woman characters in those games for that to stand out.

Sure, video games have had female characters for ages, take for example one of my favourite arcade games - Street Fighter II - Champion Edition.

You had Chun Li to choose from if you wanted to play as a girl, or Ryu, E. Honda, Blanka, Guile, Ken, Zangief, Dhalsim, Balrog, Vega, Sagat or M.Bison if you wanted to play as a guy.

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

#126

Post by e12e »

zanny wrote: post #38
lkbm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still seen as a waste of time, I think. Just has finally been accepted as normal. And while you may have been firing up hex editors, that probably wasn't the norm. YOu are right, though, that the computer games of the nineties offered a lot more hackability than iPhone apps. ZZT was an introduction to OOP for many kids, Red Alert had rules.ini that defined the stats for each unit, and Duke3D had configuration fi…

I got into programming a decade ago with Quake 2 engine forks and Neverwinter Nights private servers. You would never have avenues into that kind of thing from the ios platform at all. It is very much like how anyone from the Windows GUI generation never touched a terminal so they do not even know what a program / file / etc really is to begin with.

It's not the GUI per se -- I'd say that a classic smalltalk-80 system (or a pc set to boot into Pharo) would be way more "hackable" than even a standard GNU/Linux install (you can look at/change the whole window system, blitter etc while it is running).

One could make a solid argument that knowing what a file/program "really is" is entirely redundant: it's all von neuman architecture after all: why make the distinction?

That said, I absolutely agree on your sentiment about the ios platform being way too locked down. Most annoyingly, it's entirely arbitrary: it could very well ship with something along the lines of hypercard/applescript or something better out of the box.

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

#127

Post by cplease »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #6
cplease wrote: 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?

I was refering to WaPo, as there weren't any comments here yet. Predictably they are not a whole lot better here though.

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

#128

Post by webehere »

_bfhp wrote: post #119
A_COMPUTER wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find the article now, but I remember a quote by Brianna Wu expressing frustration at having the characters of her game said to be "promoting anorexia" because of their wispy tall character designs (just recently she ended up changing them in the PC port of her game, in fact, after endless criticism.) The characters are exaggerated, but honestly to the point that they (intentionally) aren't realistic. Anita Sa…

I'm not sure how "not having a body that implies anorexia" is a "norm" in itself, any more than having two feet is. If female characters are created that adhere to destructive norms, the creators should expect criticism; I'm not sure why this is a bad thing, when almost everyone would criticize people for making racist caricture characters or doing blackface. I think we can agree that the "strong female character" tr…

"I've created a cool game with heaps of female characters"

"YOU MISOGYNIST! The female characters are all X".

"We've taken feedback and made some Y & Z characters as well".

"YOU MISOGYNIST! There is more to women than X, Y & Z."

"So we've made a game with male characters..."

That's the argument as I can see it. Is it fair or real? Who knows, but that's what it is!

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

#129

Post by pdkl95 »

nacs wrote: post #61
MichaelGG wrote: post #29

My daughters are 6 and 8. One of the biggest questions they have before starting any new game is "can I be a girl?" Even in Minecraft, their favorite, they try to dress up the character as much as possible. They're terribly disappointed when where are no girl characters and offhand, they only bought/play one game without a girl character (GTA V, though we skip the missions which contain the questionable for kids cont…

> Even in Minecraft Not sure if you're saying Minecraft does or does not have female characters but Minecraft has actually supported skins pretty much since the beginning (over 4+ years now) so you can be male, female or whatever you want to be really. Also recently they added a default female character skin so players without a custom skin are randomly given a male or female skin.

If you're using modded Minecraft, there are a few mods that add alternate player models. Currently, I think the preferred mod is "More Player Models"[1], which supports a variety of model parts including various fantasy creatures in addition to female version of the usual "Steve" model. It can use the regular player skins on some models, and includes an in-game editor.

Also, Notch has written[2] about the gender situation in Minecraft. He was attempting to make everything "genderless" (or "both"), which he now suggests might not have been the best decision.

[1] http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding/min...

[2] http://notch.tumblr.com/post/28188312756/gender-in-minecraft

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

#130

Post by mercer »

venomsnake wrote: post #52
ChazDazzle wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a prevalent meme on Hacker News but it's nothing more than the tech version of Old Man Yells At Cloud.

This old man seems to be unable to find the built in file explorer in iDevices with which to be able to find the savegame location and edit the number of coins he has. Enlighten me, youngster how is that accomplished without breaking the warranty of the device?

Perhaps the 'hacking' occurring nowadays is just different. A lot of young people I know play Minecraft, for example, and a large subset of them even get into complicated redstone logic circuits and whatnot, or modding.

When I look at my childhood, the vast majority of my peers had consoles and didn't 'hack' them at all. It was mostly the few 'pc gamers' that got into this. I don't think it's so different nowadays.

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