A column/editorial thingy of mine, “I’m the Pink One: Women on Xbox Live,” went up today over at GameGal… and they even gave it some pretty pictures! The piece talks about how certain girl gamer issues pan out on XBL, as a relatively new medium for gaming with certain elements, like voice chat, that set it apart from other kinds of online play. It also goes into such important topics as discrimination, gender expectations and cupcakes. Okay, so I’m lying about the cupcakes, but wouldn’t that be nice? Thanks to the lovely people over at GameGal for their great work on the site, and for posting my column:-). Glad we could work together!
A bunch of other pieces are in the works, on top of the lesbian gamers article for Killer Betties, including a piece for Slashdot on the aesthetics of Zelda. Check back soon; it might be up. Now back to that cupcake thing…
August 15th, 2005 at 2:12 pm
I enjoyed the article. As a male (sorry, gotta say that regularly with a name like “Kelly”…), I know I worry a bit whenever I discover another FPS player is female.
Worry may not be the right word. But I truly fear doing what I normally do, which is take advantage of any visible weakness. Why do I fear this? Because female gamers are so rare, the last thing I want to do is chase them away by making the game an endless series of respawning incidents. Let me be clear: I am *not* saying female gamers are not competent. However, they are more likely to be new to the game, especially in the FPS world. I’m far from a great FPS gamer and have to take kills where I can find them. Intellectualizing, I believe a 19 year old novice male should have the ego to take repetitive deaths, but I guess I don’t think its fair to expect the same from a novice female. I sorta want to encourage her to play…But if she starts cleaning my clock, all bets are off ;)
Another comment…the whole “foul” language thing. I dislike live voice chat for exactly that reason. I don’t like people swearing at me, or even at someone else. I even play MMOGs with the profanity filter on for text chat: swearing doesn’t do anything to improve the game for me. I’ll drop out of a FPS session in no time flat if people are swearing or insulting each other…regardless of their gender.
August 15th, 2005 at 4:25 pm
>>the whole "foul" language thing. I dislike live voice chat for exactly that reason. I don't like people swearing at me, or even at someone else
this is why i dont play FPS games. Hell, why i don’t play any online games.
August 15th, 2005 at 6:46 pm
Hey, I think Kelly is a cool name for a guy, but then again I’ve always had a thing for, well, effeminate men :-). Anyways, I totally understand how you could be turned off by cursing, though there definitely is a difference between cursing at someone and just cursing; sometimes it’s kind of involuntary. I’ll admit live voice chat in general pretty much freaks me out, even if it’s necessary for team play. You can only hear so many scary things before you put down the headset and turn the tv on mute. There are plenty of normal people out there, but there are also plenty of weirdos. And I feel like Live attracts the latter… Oh well, it does make for interesting conversation.
August 17th, 2005 at 2:36 pm
I’m with Kelly. I didn’t play FPS games unless I knew people because I was tired of going on, shooting people and being told what a “Motherf*****” I was being or some such. Got worse when I had the children, since I didn’t want the words they first read to be “You che@tin’ douchebag” or some such.
August 17th, 2005 at 4:40 pm
The scary thing though, John, is that sometimes it’s the kids who say the most awful things. I was playing Halo a couple of nights ago with a boy who couldn’t have been older than 10, by the sound of his voice. One of the other players was using a brown suite, and every time this little kid killed him he went around shouting the N word. If that’s not ignorance, I don’t know what is. Fortunately (or unfortunately), if you’re like me, the whole culture that has evolved around FPS games is sort of fascinating, if disgusting. The things people will say to each other when they’re not face to face… I can understand people being jerks in chat-rooms or forums, because, essentially, it’s anonymous. But when you’re realing talking to someone… The combination of new technology and old psychology just blows my mind.