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The Videogame That Finally Made Me Feel Like a Human Being

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Re: The Videogame That Finally Made Me Feel Like a Human Being

#3
"Boys got action figures, not dolls. Boys got to have watergun fights, not play dress-up. Much like their videogame counterparts, boys got to do things, and I wanted to do things too"

Find the error...

If you want to do things, don't buy stuff, do things. If you feel you need to buy stuff to do things, you have already lost.

Re: The Videogame That Finally Made Me Feel Like a Human Being

#6
post #4

ugh, that was a painful read. Even text adventures were more emotionally charged than most games today, and i didnt have to wait 2014 to feel like a human being. you just had to play computer games and not console games.

Painful how? It sounds like the author was genuinely moved by the game. It has to be a good thing that a AAA console title can have that effect, even if it only took 30-odd years for us to get there.

Re: The Videogame That Finally Made Me Feel Like a Human Being

#7
I honestly hate when stats are distorted. The "almost half of gamers are female" stat is true, but the majority of female gamers favor puzzles and extremely casual games. AAA title customers are still strongly dominated by male audiences and thus, the market will cater towards that demographic. There's really nothing wrong with this. It's about as sexist as the male section in my local Macy's being 1/10 the total size of the store.

Re: The Videogame That Finally Made Me Feel Like a Human Being

#8
The best video game with a strong female protagonist that I've played is NOLF. Criminally underrated and almost never noted these days, even in feminist discourse.

Anyway, this is apparently a DLC pack to a ludicrously well received game called The Last of Us, which honestly I had not heard of before. I can't help but think the reviewer is overly dramatic here, though.

Finally, I want to address this:

Although women make up nearly half of all gamers, only a fraction of videogame characters are female, and fewer still are playable.

This is a fallacy as it only takes up the raw total percentage and completely ignores some critically important details: gender distribution by genres. That makes a huge difference.

For instance, women make up very high numbers for things like casual games, World of Warcraft, The Sims and others.

On the other hand, a lot of major AAA titles like Grand Theft Auto, Devil May Cry and Mass Effect enjoy only small female audiences (14-22%).

That's why there's not much of an incentive. Don't just grab the whole percentage and throw it around like a gospel of injustice when you're going to voluntarily ignore the complexity and fragmentation of the market.

Re: The Videogame That Finally Made Me Feel Like a Human Being

#9
post #7

I honestly hate when stats are distorted. The "almost half of gamers are female" stat is true, but the majority of female gamers favor puzzles and extremely casual games. AAA title customers are still strongly dominated by male audiences and thus, the market will cater towards that demographic. There's really nothing wrong with this. It's about as sexist as the male section in my local Macy's being 1/10 the total siz…

You're making some broad assumptions here. The fact that 'AAA' titles are dominated males is because the 'AAA' titles are made by males for males with no compelling reason for many female gamers to play them.

Re: The Videogame That Finally Made Me Feel Like a Human Being

#10
post #7

I honestly hate when stats are distorted. The "almost half of gamers are female" stat is true, but the majority of female gamers favor puzzles and extremely casual games. AAA title customers are still strongly dominated by male audiences and thus, the market will cater towards that demographic. There's really nothing wrong with this. It's about as sexist as the male section in my local Macy's being 1/10 the total siz…

I read a blog post today that has a different perspective on this issue: http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2014/02/women-play-where-were-welco...
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