Sorry kiddos, it was a crap news week, so you get something completely different.
…Okay, not completely different from what I normally post. The matter at hand here is I cannot get away from boobs. They are always at the heart of my subject matter. After all, I started my time here at Lusipurr.com as the Spare Pair of Tits and have since ascended to the Alpha Tits. I post them every week in my articles for many reasons: amusement, readership, to break up the serious tone left by Lane’s sterling professionalism, to compensate for my lack of journalistic integrity, et cetera. Without breasts in your video game news, you would be bored senseless. Without those sweater-cows on display, the video games you know and love would be glorified sausage festivals and you would be gobbling it up like Ethan’s cavernous ass. We love boobs and we owe them so much.
But how much do we owe boobs and their owners? Ever since the ye olde glory days of Lara Croft, boobs in gaming have received complaints from various womens’ groups. With our polygon-pumped tomb raider, the complaint was that her oversized gazongas were there just to please the men and furthered unrealistic expectations. The Dead or Alive series has been criticized for the physics applied to the girls’ breasts, appearing as though each mound had its own gravity, especially in the bikini-clad volleyball spin-offs. Today, the game coming under heavy feminist fire is the upcoming Duke Nukem Forever for its objectification of women as breathing collectable flesh-lights. Feminists the world over point to video games as one of the best sources for young men to develop a misogynistic mindset and see women as inferior, encouraging the video game industry to put men and women on even ground.
The logical solution would be one of the following: 1) Remove all female characters so there will be no boobs to develop a negative connotation with, or 2) Create more games in which the female characters are the badass protagonist rather than the object of lust.
Yet neither of these solves the problem. With the first, the feminists will cry out that now instead of objectifying women, video game developers are just ignoring women and pretending as though they have no place in the man’s world of gaming. Sure, first-person shooters are generally a boys’ club and the small proportion of women in the military is never shown. Even in Lusipurr.com favorite Team Fortress 2, the only character who we even assume is female is the Pyro, whose gender is left ambiguous. When female players do log on to games like this in an attempt to breach the testosterone-fueled front lines, they are met with heavy resistance and urging to post tits before going back to the kitchen. Even from games such as this where there are no female characters to objectify, the players of the fairer gender still put down the controller with a serious case of penis envy. Games like this also tend to lack something in the story department. Pick up any book or any good video game and you will find that even if the main storyline is centered on a great evil to be overcome, there is almost always some element of romance. As a website full of JRPG lovers, try to think of one where there is no romantic element to it. … You can not think of one, can you? Is all this to say that a game cannot have a good story without romance? Of course not, but ignoring something that is prominently featured in most other media makes it pretty probable that they are willing to ignore other story elements and leave you with a plot that will not be engaging to most people and especially not to most women (excluding the creepy yaoi fanatics).
But when the opposite path is taken, to make a female lead, we are given steaming piles of shit. Tomb Raider was a great game for its time, but it is questionable if it would have gained such popularity without the blocky polygon things we called breasts. We all remember the days spent scouring the 56K internet for a cheat code after a friend of a friend of a friend’s cousin’s friend told us that you could make her naked. More recent incarnations of Lara Croft have seen her become more muscular and less well-endowed in addition to being far less interesting and worth far less than sixty dollars per game. Attempts to revive Lara’s legacy can be seen in games like Mirror’s Edge, Bayonetta, and even Final Fantasy XIII, but each leading lady is crappier than the last. Faith Connors is as close as it comes, but with the recent news that EA did not resign for a sequel, it is unknown if we will ever see her again or get any more detail into her admittedly empty background. Bayonetta’s title character drew her popularity based solely on her simple push button receive naked style of fighting, and Lightning has been critically panned as Cloud with boobs in a game where those boobs were the one thing keeping you sane during your endless tunnel.
Speaking of Final Fantasy, let’s look at story and what happens when you throw away any other relevant plot and focus it almost entirely on love. The sequel to smash voice acting phenomenon Final Fantasy X follows Yuna after she finds a sphere that appears to show Tidus, leading her to go on a wild goose chase for her lost lover. What else happens? Does anything else happen? She finds out it is not Tidus and nothing changes and what did I just waste dozens of hours of gaming on?! The game catered to women who wanted strong female leads playing dress-up and following their heart, and we were left with the best Final Fantasy joke ever. What can I do for you?!
Shut the hell up, that’s what you can do for me! Not only did we beg for Yuna to shut up, we begged for female gamers to shut up. Instead, they continue to heave their chest forward and demand the ears of the industry and the admiration of their lowly male counterparts. My very inspiration to write this editorial is because of countless other editorials that I find on a weekly basis while searching for the news of the week. Pink controllers, women-only tournaments, gamer gurrrl sites and merchandise, an entire website devoted solely to publicly embarrassing any male gamers that message them in a manner they dislike. Worst of all is the long, drawn-out rants about the inability of male gamers to see them as equals.
If women expect to be treated as equals, then equal treatment should be expected. Playing any first person shooter with any female is excruciating; they whine about how mean everyone is being while they are learning and no one should be allowed to kill them until they learn, then once they have gotten a handle on the controls, its as if their uterus itself has burst out of their stomach to bitch slap every player that they manage to kill. If that victim is male, they are taunted for being killed by a girl; if the victim is another female, they are told that they should try harder so they can be an awesome, amazing girl gamer like them. This kind of behavior is unacceptable out of the boys and, as equals, girls should not feel allowed to get away with it either.
Boobs should not be used as a weapon. We can all agree that game developers that have made us all too accustomed using boobs in micro-bikini armor in order to get a male fan base. However, women are equally guilty of using their boobs for evil, for crying discrimination only to turn around and hypocritically discriminate against their male counterparts.
Ladies, if you make the game miserable for the boys, they will only continue to dislike women playing with them. Crying wolf because you are too sensitive to handle being the victim of a critical hit does not mean the game is discriminating against you and your jubblies, it means you are not ready to play in an environment that is equal. Successful female gamers may or may not wear the gurrrl gamer tag or play with pink controllers, but the key to their success is to play just as the boys do. Lusipurr.com fully supports boobs and while we do support sexism in addition to our mainstays of racism and general bigotry, we will treat all of our male and female readers as equals. Equally worthless, but equal nonetheless.
