How can you even tell a boy character from a girl character? It's not like they show the genitalia.
I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?
131–140 of 148 posts
Re: I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?
#132What I fail to see is: why is the gender of the characters so important?
It doesn't seem to make any difference on the mentioned games (unlike, eg: Diablo II, where the female characters had different skillsets from the male ones).
I've never understood why so many people feel compelled to play with a character with the same gender/race/etc as themselves.
What amazes me even more, is that people are willing to pay for this.
Re: I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?
#133What I fail to see is: why is the gender of the characters so important? It doesn't seem to make any difference on the mentioned games (unlike, eg: Diablo II, where the female characters had different skillsets from the male ones). I've never understood why so many people feel compelled to play with a character with the same gender/race/etc as themselves. What amazes me even more, is that people are willing to pay fo…
I think people want to identify with the media they consume and games are different from more passive forms because of player agency. However, if the avatar in the game is supposed to be "you", but it doesn't even begin to look like you, then you don't identify as much.
I, for one, relish a game that doesn't make me play as Johnny Brownhair-Whiteguy, but I have the benefit of being a white male with brown hair. I have the benefit of being catered to by most video games. If I could less often play as someone that looked like me, I think I'd start to feel excluded.
Re: I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?
#134I 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.
I know what you mean. I once wanted to play as a pansexual elf/dwarf voyeurist who lives in a tree trunk together with minotaurs. Unfortunately my action-rpg only had two preset characters that were close to that, so I had to settle for a pansexual narcoleptic elf with a fondness for bull-riding.
Re: I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps at the initial stage of analysis this situation is not "because of bias", but don't stop thinking after just one thought. Why are boys like that? (Ignoring the exception that would seem to have been made for Lara Croft.) Why are girls like that? Do you really think it's biology, or is there perhaps some cultural reason why one group of children would be somewhat comfortable undermining their identity while a…
> Do you really think it's biology Yes. When something is virtually identical the whole world over, I think I can comfortably say biology and not culture.
What are we discussing here? Has there been an exhaustive global study of juvenile DLC purchase patterns? b^)
Statements like this, which partition people using one trait, and then confidently assert that the subsets differ dramatically in some other trait, are nearly always wrong. There will invariably be more differences within groups than between them; that is a property of human beings.
Re: I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (We severely restrict the amount of shitty girls kid's TV shows, no Barbie, no Disney products, biggest toys are LEGO, etc.) If they go to public school peer relations and student body culture will override prior teaching. When presented with the girls sitting next to them talking about the shows and toys you never exposed them to, they are met with the decision to have faith in their parents or seek to fit in with…
> If they go to public school peer relations and student body culture will override prior teaching. When presented with the girls sitting next to them talking about the shows and toys you never exposed them to, they are met with the decision to have faith in their parents or seek to fit in with the status quo. I don't think it's quite that hard. If you expect to counteract the influence simply by removing offending m…
Except from the childs perspective you are preaching ethics and equality and esoteric concepts about human rights and freedoms while they are in the now and immediately disassociated from their peer group due to dissimilar attachment to culturally normative and popular topics. It makes them resent you because they end up with few friends in a sea of those who will antagonize them for being different, even if those are the "good" friends you want them to have.
Re: I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?
#137Am I wrong for thinking it sounds really antisocial for girls to have sleepover and then play on their phones? When I have a kid I really don't want them to be exposed to mindless consumption but it sadly seems like it's not going to be possible unless they're home schooled. At the very least, they're getting a very locked down smart phone.
Not antisocial. Maybe asocial.
Re: I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (We severely restrict the amount of shitty girls kid's TV shows, no Barbie, no Disney products, biggest toys are LEGO, etc.) If they go to public school peer relations and student body culture will override prior teaching. When presented with the girls sitting next to them talking about the shows and toys you never exposed them to, they are met with the decision to have faith in their parents or seek to fit in with…
Fortunately, at the moment, we have a governess so there's not that particular issue. But I do see the pressure applied from friends that... lack taste. What can you do but try? In the future I hope to be able to afford private schools with a focus on getting students interested in things. That'll hopefully bring out like minded families. Basically, I just want to increase their saving throws vs crap.
Thats why I love home schooling and recommend it to others when possible (and a lot of the mid tier or senior engineers at many of the SV companies that frequent this site can easily have their spouses work part time or stay at home to raise their children optimally). Problem is that you often end up seeing career driven smart engineers marrying career driven smart spouses.
That isn't to say distance them from their own age group. They need tons of exposure to those their own age. But if you do that you can have them going to all the activities and clubs they are interested in in the evening while dodging the cult of personality and familiarity that is the public classroom. And if you can save your children from the brain drain, they will find myriad interests in a vibrant world for them to pursue.
Re: I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't know about that. I grew up on classic Mac OS with nary a command line in sight, and I found my way under the skin just fine. I was building compilers and writing device drivers before I ever learned how shell scripting worked. I think people who want to get inside will generally figure out how; the information is all out there for the asking. My pet theory is that there are just as many people interested in t…
Except getting into Windows isn't a thing, even today, and even for all but the most professional engineers behind huge companies with Microsofts ear. Literally the limit of Windows is registry editing and trying to reverse engineer the horrible contents of some file in system32. There are no guts to see, no knobs to tweak, because its one massive black box. Earlier OSes, even Mac OS, has to be much more open because resources were much more limited and you could not obscure the implementation behind the black box without degrading the experience too much. More performance let MS get away with that, and if not for modable game engines there would have been nothing in my childhood to tinker with.
Re: I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?
#140What I fail to see is: why is the gender of the characters so important? It doesn't seem to make any difference on the mentioned games (unlike, eg: Diablo II, where the female characters had different skillsets from the male ones). I've never understood why so many people feel compelled to play with a character with the same gender/race/etc as themselves. What amazes me even more, is that people are willing to pay fo…
I'm don't look like any of the video game characters from the games I play, regardless of gender.
An extreme diet and a lot of gym time and a set of stilts might get me somewhere near Agent 47, or binge eating and a wig might move me towards something E Honda-esque. IDGAF.
One of the MMORPGs I play as a female character coz I preferred the character model. She has green hair. In real life, I don't have enough hair left to warrant the pack of bleach and color.
It's not real. It's a video game. I'd be as happy playing as Katniss as I would Peeta, if those are the Hunger Game options.
Video games aren't the story of us. They're the story of someone else. That's the point.
I'm not a humanoid fox with a star fighter, I'm not an elf tasked with saving the world. I'm not a hired assassin or a warrior with long red hair fighting a tyrant.