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.
One thing I’ve noticed from my time in TF2 and in the Backloggery community is that there are damn near as many women gamers as there are men. It’s about time to stop treating gaming like a boy’s club.
I don’t seem to find any trouble with gender bias in TF2 so much as other games that I’ve played. Perhaps players of that game are more mature?
Wait, Deimosion and I were pitted against each other for a position on the site using TF2!
Obviously I’m wrong.
It depends on the server, but the VAST majority of the ones I’ve been on treated the women exactly the same as the men. And that’s how it should be, frankly.
I hate to say it, but having played on many, many, many TF2 servers, Biggs’ words ring all-too-true. Even on my own clan server, I see this sort of thing now and again–though, typically, not with my clan mates.
I really like girl gamers and am all for empowered females being treated equally. Always have been. But when a girl joins the clan server and immediately starts squealing and whinging every time someone kills her, it makes me want to votekick her.
And of course, the internet nerds (who have never SEEN a woman) fawn all over her and cater to this behaviour, which means a votekick is impossible.
I wish it weren’t this way. More players should be exactly like Biggs, who sets a stunning example. Get the shit kicked out of you, and give as good as you get.
Anyone who uses their gender to excuse irritating or awful behaviour does a disservice to gender equality–be they male or female.
I am not even an A-cup, so I don’t bother to wear a bra, and I am stunned at how many males stare at my nipples! It is hysterical!
Choose Happiness & Success!
Jennifer
The most amazing thing about the preceding comment is that it is not actually spam.
Sometimes, even I am amazed at what happens here.
Also, I can’t find the “Happiness & Success” button. Am I looking for it in the wrong place?
I think she has two Happiness and Success buttons, I believe guys keep staring at them.
@Jennifer of Success and Happiness:
This is Lusipurr.com, a safe haven for lolis everywhere! All lolis are welcome, nay, ENCOURAGED to make this their abode!
We have multiple layers of trouble here. The first is obviously that misogyny and patriarchal attitudes hurt both men and women, because they paradoxically treat women as objects (and not subjects in themselves) as well as goddesses. Hence, you have an Internet nerd who has never been with a woman, does not understand them, and so at the same time fears/hates them (by treating them as inherently less than him because she is female) while at the same time worshipping the “mystery” of the feminine and desiring it. It’s the very epitome of a love/hate relationship.
So, men who say, “Girls suck at games!” will be the same ones who, in Shawn’s phrasing, fawn all over them any time a girl joins. And some girls are content to exploit this for their own gain, which is NOT empowering because it reinforces the attitude that girls are damsels in need of saving.
And if the answer is for girl gamers to succeed on men’s terms, then that does nothing to subvert the existing male-centric paradigm. Most games have victory conditions that are blessedly gender-neutral, and so the sex or gender of the player isn’t taken into account.
What a truly equal and safe space for women in gaming would be is if women were not displayed in terms of stereotypes (the same is also true of male characters). How many bulging-with-muscles-and-testosterone space marines or barbarian warriors do we really need? This kind of very binary system (either a super-goddess in high heels with an overpronounced chest kicking ass, or a beefy muscleman who looks as if every day is ab day at the gym) is what is meant by a misogynistic display: there’s no realism.
Ideally, avatars should display a ranging spectrum of appearances and body types, with a spectrum of personalities and capabilities. There should be fit, large-breasted women just as much as there should be short, petite ones, heavy ones, brunettes, redheads, blondes, varying ethnicities, etc. The problem is that female characters typically fall into “boy’s fantasy” range of impossibly-proportioned, very sexy, and blonde/white.
And I place the blame more on developers than gamers; it’s a cop-out for developers to say “Well, we’re just catering to our audience.” That’s the same shit Bastalt or whatever wanted from David Gaider with DA2. Developers have a captive audience in games, and they can do better. I think there’s a significant overlap between readers of science fiction and fantasy and people that play video games, and recently, the sf community has become very race, gender and class-conscious as lots of people educated in social theory-heavy modern universities have started writing this kind of fiction, and while there was an initial misogynistic and racist backlash, people have more or less come around because interesting characters are interesting characters, and I think games can do the same thing since the audience is more or less the same.
Although there will always be a loud screechy contingent that wants white, buff supermen to save large-breasted, wide-eyed and breathy-voiced females, and views any game not specifically catering to that theme as a betrayal of all that is good in the world by giving in to humorless feminists that just want everyone to stop having fun and read Cathering MacKinnon all day, that contingent is thankfully in the minority.
So I’d issue this as a challenge to game developers: if you want more women to play your games, create interesting female characters that aren’t Lara Crofts or Bayonettas, but instead look like real women (NB: do this for male leads in your games as well). Ditch the comic-book “everyone is a gorgeous wet dream” style and create something real. And then people will start playing, and if men think that women can’t hold their own in a game, let ‘em try to keep that attitude up when they’re being fragged by a female gamer.
-I don’t really get how these women think they are going to reach “equality” by setting themselves apart and making a loud and obnoxious nuisance of themselves.
-Men give each other shit, so why is it somehow a breach of their mythical notion of “equality” if a man does the same to a woman?
-Really, it’s just another example of I DEMAND EQUALITY, NOW TREAT ME SPECIAL!
-I know that if I were a female gamer, this pack of mentally feeble sideshow exhibits would be the last people that I would want claiming to speak for me.
-Moderate voices like that of Jenifer get left out of this conversation, and suddenly the ‘female gamer’ is seen as a foaming at the mouth loon.
-The only three decent female leads I can think of in gaming are the chick from The Longest Journey, Jade from Beyond Good and Evil, and Metroid lady.
@Lane – hear hear!
@SN – And female Shepard.
@Ethos!: I don’t really classify Shepherd as being a good male lead or good female lead since s/he’s whatever the player wants.