Wednesday is supposed to be gripe day, and this week my gripe is simple: I hate Build-a-Bear. Anyone who’s confused by my seemingly irrational hatred of a company that assembles adorable stuffed animals is referred to my own personal tale of stuffed-with-love, capitalist horror. Anyone who’s confused why my hatred has boiled to the bloggerly surface at this particular moment is referred to Build-a-Bearville, the new child-oriented MMO the company recently added to the already mooing cash-cow pile of child-oriented MMOs.

I’m hoping to post an actual, hopefully mildly intelligent write-up of Build-a-Bearville on Terra Nova sometime soon. In the meantime, I thought I’d vent my hatred by sharing tales of gender-bending in the oh-so-wholesome, bear-themed world.

For starters, Build-a-Bearville lets you mix up clothes and hair cuts to create a totally cute butch girl. See, she’s got the blue hair and the boy’s shorts? I’d say the game was cool for allowing gender ambiguity, but when I went to show my butch cutie off, every other avatar in the place was old-fashioned girly. Blond ponytails ruled the land of bears. The few boy avatars I ran into looked a lot like me–just without the pink Cons, or the boobs.

More fun than being butch though was being butch and flirty. The game only allows pre-scripted chat for users who haven’t bought stuffed animals–but cheapos like me can still use emoticons to express squishy emotions. Stand near someone, press the love-struck smiley, and heart float out from your avatar’s head–giving your nearby buddy a pretty good idea what you’re thinking. Me, I tried doing it to both boy and girl avatars. All of them took a a look at me, got confused, and promptly excited the room. I guess there’s no love for the gender ambiguous in Bearville…

I’m a sucker for water. I’m a sucker for exploration. And, of course, I’m a sucker for video games. So it’s not surprising that I think Nintendo’s new Wii title Endless Ocean looks frickin’ awesome.

Let the petty, fish-hating fools gripe about how it lacks traditional game elements or structure. So what if all you do is wander around and explore the world under the sea? That’s the point! This is a totally different way of looking at video games–not as competitions, not as narratives, not even as social environments, but as physical spaces. I think that’s so cool, I’m gonna say it again: video games as physical spaces.

We’ve talked before about games as caves–and I’ll admit the release of Endless Ocean has me itching to find someone who’ll make a similar game for underground exploration. In both cases, the draw is the same: you’ve got a fascinating physical location that cries out to be explored, but is quite dangerous in real life. In a book or a movie, we’d have to explore it “in order,” following the structure set forth by the creator. But in a game, we have free range to check out new areas and new discoveries in our own order and with our own sense of wonder.

I could also talk about the gender element of Endless Ocean–how exploration is considered a “feminine” mode of play, whereas linear games are more “masculine.” Honestly though, I think what we’ve got on our hands is more a case of ludus and paidia: structured games vs. free form play. Shameful as it is for a gamer, I’ve always been more a fan of the second. Splashing around in water, checking out fishies, exploring awesome spaces that only exist inside the game–I must be really psyched about Endless Ocean, because I’m too giddy to even talk about gender. I didn’t know that was possible!

Now that Click Me gets published at the beginning of the week, it seems Mondays at Heroine Sheik have become Shameless Self-Promotion Day. Wednesday is Gripe Day, and Friday is Cool Links Day–but only on Mondays can you see me doing a funny little dance in an attempt to tell you about my latest articles and projects without sounding like a selfish blogging bunny. Actually, I don’t know what bunnies have to do with anything; random references to furry animals is part of the funny little dance.

Anyways, to kick off Shameless Self-Promotion Day, we’ve got this week’s Click Me, “The Top 10 Reasons Why You Should be Having Cybersex.” I received an email the other day from a reader asking if there were any benefits to cybersex. Well, yeah! Thus was born a veritable list of what makes cybersex hot, handy, and just plain awesome. The next time your friends look at you like you’re surely the next “perv” on To Catch a Predator just because you get it on online, send them this link. Turn them to the dark side. It’s sexier over here.

Shameless Self-Promotion Day continues with Babeland’s Sex Positive Journalism Awards (aka the “Sexies”). It’s the first time Babeland will be handing out these awards, and the idea behind them is really inspiring. “There’s a lot of bad journalism out there,” says the Babeland blog, which includes “sensationalized and false information about sexual issues… These articles cause harm by encouraging discrimination and persecution of adults who engage in consensual sexual expression.” Amen to that!

“Sometimes, the best way to change things,” the blog continues, “is to thank those who are doing things right.” That’s why Babeland, along with the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, is looking for nominations of articles published in 2007 that are markedly sex-positive. They should “be written for a general audience,” cover sexual topics that are “normally swept under the rug,” and “celebrate sexuality as a positive force in human lives.”

If you happen to know anyone who writes anything like that–I’d say “hint hint, nudge nudge,” but that’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?–support sex-positive journalism by submitting their stuff (deadline March 23rd). Should you be in a grand, submitting-type mood, also check out the nominations for The Best of Tech Writing 2008, which will be edited this year by Clive Thompson (deadline January 31st). Tech culture, sexy gadgets: as long as it was written in 2007, it’s all fair game. Both nominations forms take a whopping thirty seconds to fill out–and, in return, I promise to love you a whole lot longer than that. Told you I was shameless…

Update: that Click Me is finally up. Check it out!

Yes, I know “cookies” isn’t an adjective. I don’t care. That’s how excited I am about cookies. Now, without further, sugar-induced ado, what’s cool in the news this week:

-Apparently spammers have discovered that humans can be convinced to do the work of robots when promised pictures of naked women. In order to get passed Captchas–those annoying images that test your bot/non-bot status by having you read garbled letters–aforementioned spammers have actual people type in the codes as part of a game of online strip tease. Who’s stripping? Busty, blond beauty “Melissa.” Read the Captcha correctly, and she’ll take off another layer of clothing. Kind of ridiculous, considering how easy it is to find pictures of fully naked women on the internet. Then again, if it weren’t for all the spamming, I’d actually want to play.

-In case you aren’t already rolling your eyes in annoyance and disgust (and you’d like to be), check out the ridiculous right-wing response to the same-sex action in Mass Effect. I could go on forever about the absurdity–the phrases “digital chip age” and “customizable sodomy” come to mind–but too much attention has already been given to this homophobic wacko. So let’s leave it at that.

-Getting passed around is Game Daily’s coverage of the Adult Entertainment Expo, in which reporters asked porn stars what they thought of video game characters and the boys who played with them. Kotaku seems impressed by this hottie who (lions and tigers and bear, oh my!) actually knows her way around a controller. Personally, I’m more entertained by Game Daily’s responses than the porn stars themselves. They practically melt when when one star says she’d cheer on her gaming man by shouting, “Go! Go! Get the high score! Do it for me!” Hilarious.

-Our buddies at The Weekly Geek direct our baking-addicted, bright-color-loving attention to these pixel cookies, which use a Play-Doh tool to get perfect little squares. As delicious as they look, eating them would mean fighting against twenty-two years of social training not to eat Play-Doh.

-Last but not least, commenter Halfassured directs our attention to a site called Rule #34–which has amassed a crazy landfill of fan art hentai. Never thought you’d see two Pokemon having graphic sex? Yeah, me neither.

Why is it we never see human faces in racing games? Think about it: cars go “vroom,” they speed off into the distance; theoretically somebody must be inside driving them. Yet, when we look through the windshields, the drivers’ seats are almost always empty. Heck, even Transformer cars get flickery, blank-faced holograms. So why do we get gypped?

If you think about Burnout games, where crashing is twice as fun as driving, it’s easy to see how human drivers could get grotesque. We’d have to start counting casualties instead of number of cars in pile-ups. Game designers must be thinking, “Who wants to see his/her avatar with his head split open on the steering wheel?”

Of course, we could argue that not seeing people in cars desensitizes us to the violence of crashes. Then again, deliberately putting people in cars to watch them crash would be even more sadistic than just smashing cars. Or maybe it would be masochistic–since one of those cars would belong to the player, who’d then have to watch himself/herself break limbs. Still, it would make me giggle to see drivers curse each other off on the road: like the way you can shove in Mario Kart: Double Dash, except with more middle finger.

P.S. Is this all sounding strangely familiar to anyone? The shots from Burnout Paradise brought the topic to mind, but I’m getting the feeling I’ve said this somewhere before… Help! I fell asleep before midnight on New Year’s Eve and now I can’t remember my own writing. I’m a twenty-two-year-old old person!

You’re going to hate me. I get that. But I’m going to say this anyway.

Unreal Tournament III represents everything that’s wrong with video games today. Just looking at the screenshots for the latest installment in the Unreal series, I’m not sure whether to laugh, cry, or pound my head into the first available wall. Come on, industry, these are the games we pour our sweat and blood into? Come on gamers, these are the titles we work ourselves up over? And we wonder why we have such an impossible time getting video games cred as an artistic medium.

Granted, in and of itself, Unreal Tournament III is not such a terrible thing. There’s room for games like it to exist in the cheerful, diverse utopia of gaming happiness. But as it stands, Unreal and its fellow hyper-masculine, engine-obsessed first-person shooters steal the gaming spotlight (probably because their shoulders are so goddamn bulky, no one else can get near them). And as a game to represent all other games, Unreal Tournament III sure doesn’t hold up.

Instead of attention to original content, we’ve got “over-the-top carnage.” Instead of creativity, we’ve got “graphics on a whole new level.” Instead of innovation, we’re stuck in a stagnant genre, with a stagnant idea of “amazing” games as the titles that can deliver the most realistic visuals of the most possible guns. And this is our idea of a “blockbuster,” a top game. While we keep making the same shiny titles over and over, there’s a whole world of possibility passing us by…