“It’s all about the joy of creation…”

… is the song that Lego use on their website to showcase their Friends series.

Not what you were expecting? Perhaps you thought Stand By Your Man or some other such cringeworthy song might be more appropriate for a series so blatantly gendered. Well, so did I, but one happy little girl at a time, the Friends range has swayed my feelings.

Let me backtrack and give it some history.

The Lego Friends series was released earlier this year.

When the toys (and adverts) were unleashed, the internet seemingly exploded with outrage. (I am,
of course, referring to my internet – the one with feminist twitter feeds, blogs about toys and sexy pictures of Neil Gaiman. Your internet might be a bit different.)

In particular I watched Feminist Frequency’s videos on the series, but I also read blogposts from dads who want their girls to work in Silicon Valley and study at MIT.

The first few toys released were a bakery, a café, a beauty shop, a house and an inventor’s
workshop. These initial toys are made up of pastel pink and purple bricks, they only feature girls and
those roles present are mainly gendered home-keeping roles.

My blood was boiling, like many other people’s, at the narrow roles I could see girls being pushed into. At my local Toys R Us there is a vast collection of Lego from the Creator series to Cars. In fact I have never seen so much in one retailer.

However, the Friends series is not placed in their giant Lego selection. It is in a (very clearly labelled) ‘Girlz’ aisle,nowhere near the Lego corner, which has so much sparkle and glitter I thought cupcakes were
going to spontaneously erupt from the walls.

Friends is not like the rest of Lego: it’s for girls, and must be segregated.

So far, so sexist.

However, I’m slowly putting the guns down. Across the various worlds of Lego, equality is growing. As someone who has an obsessive love of toys, I frequently visit their website. Every time I find
myself riled up about Lego, I go on the site and find that a far greater balance of characters is presented there than we see in the shops.

For example, they have little character bios for nearly every mini-figure. I was angry about the lack of girl characters in Spinjitzu. But Nya (pictured right) has a  token girl description which does include phrases like “she’s no damsel in distress” and “Nya is fed up with the ninjas’ boy’s club syndrome”.

Here, the minority female mini figures I have collected become role models. Still a token, but a valuable one at that, and the question remains why we don’t see more of this outside of the website.

I recently decided to explore the Friends section of the website and was pleasantly surprised and then genuinely excited about what it offers. I believe that Lego listened to the petition from Change.org (the one that got over 50,000 signatures, the one I signed) back in April 2012, and have turned something that was completely sexist into a city of steps toward empowerment.

First of all, they have toned down the overwhelming pink tones of the bricks, and gone for more brown tones, like the riding camp. There is also a greater range of sets, including a treehouse, design
studio, bedroom set with a drum kit and the Heartlake Flying Club.

This last set was definitely the swing vote for me. It has the least amount of pink; mere touches of it on the plane. Furthermore, the stereotyped role for women in a plane is Air Hostess, and Lego didn’t go there. Stephanie is the pilot of her own seaplane, looking more Amelia Earhart than Pan Am.

The Friends themselves might enjoy traditionally feminine roles, but they also have jobs, varied interests and detailed characters that allow for diverse roleplaying. The key with Lego is that it can be as many things as you can imagine. Emma’s Design Studio, for instance, has one piece which suggests this is for fashion – but with the large desk, the ruler and the laptop Emma could just as easily be an architect or an engineer.

We also shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking that enjoying balloons or sweets makes you weak. It’s more that giving girls only that which is sugary-sweet which is the issue. Although Lego still have a long way to go, I think there are at least positive conversations being had at Lego HQ.

In her second Lego video Anita Sarkeseesian says that the emphasis with the Lego Friends series is on traditional home-keeping play. She cites the adverts, comparing the Friends advert slogan “Drive to the newly built café” to the “You can build the castle” of another Lego advert featuring some classic father-son bonding.

She draws the reasonable conclusion that boys are offered a more active play experience that encourages them to use maths and motor skills.

However, if we look on the Lego website the section for Friends has the theme song I quoted at the beginning of this post, which accompanies all their videos:

“We can do it, we can dream a whole new way
We can do it, you can build with me today
It’s all about the joy of creation”

I think this new emphasis on building which is subtly surrounding you the whole time you shop is part of a change that encourages girls to gain all the skills and experiences that Lego has to offer.

They may not have it all, but the newer Lego Friends sets and marketing are a step in the right direction, and with these steps being echoed in other areas of the Lego Universe… watch this space.

• Ruth Coustick has yet to understand the concept of ‘growing up’. She spends her hard-earned cash on Playmobil pirates and building Lego versions of Samus, and wants to see the childish books and toys she loves become more diverse and inclusive. She works in digital rights and has a host of other nerdy interests like comics, board games and First World War poetry. She blogs about her life and fashion at Origami Girl.

Humble Bundle V

The Humble Bundle is a nice little concept: a collection of indie titles for you to pay what you want for and then decide how much of that fee goes to a) the developers, b) Humble Bundle themselves, or c) charity.

I got it on the first day (and, sorry, but by the time this post goes live I suspect the window will have closed) so I only got the first five games that were included.  Since then there’ve been three more titles added if you paid over the average.  These were added in light of this bundle making over $1.8 million in the first 15 hours.

Included in the Bundle were:

• Psychonauts
• Amnesia: The Dark Descent
• LIMBO
• Superbrothers: Sword & Sorcery EP
• Bastion*
• Braid*+
• Lone Survivor*+
• Super Meat Boy*+

* denotes games that were unlocked if you paid over the average; + denotes those titles added at a later stage.

Like I say, I only got the first five, but I’m not too sore as I already have Braid (not a big fan) and I’m not overly interested in the other two.  I’m not going to discuss the games themselves here because that’ll be coming in a “Playing…” post later on.

I thought it would be nice show you that sometimes, somewhere out there, someone does something good.  A lot of money has been raised for charity through this: not least through Big Names of Gaming competing to be the top contributors (Notch and HumbleBrony Bundle have been vying for the top spot: when I bought the bundle they were dueling around the $3000 mark, now they’re on $12,345.67 and £11,111.11 respectively).

Taken from Humblebundle.com at 10:40am GMT, 13/06/2012

Of course, as the popularity of indie games continues to rise, it’s nice to be able to have the choice to decide how much of your cash goes to the developers as opposed to not really knowing for sure how much just gets kept by various third parties.

Sigh, Misogyny

From that nice little snippet of camaraderie, I regret that I must now depress the tone somewhat and talk about InternetFail, and more specifically, how it’s been discussed recently with regard to the world of gaming.

At the start of June BBC News Magazine ran an article highlighting the constant, abhorrent abuse that female gamers get in online play: here.  It mostly focusses on the experiences of one Wisconsin gamer called Jenny, of the CoD ilk, and the abuse she gets daily on voice chats.  She records them and uploads them to her website, Not in the Kitchen Anymore, and I gotta say, she handles this shit pretty well but the point is she shouldn’t have to.  Especially, as the article points out, 42% of US gamers are women, and adult women outnumber teenage boys quite considerably.

There’s also a BBC World Service programme based on her experiences and those of other female gamers.  If you read the article or listen to the programme you might hear some charming young fellows claiming “freedom of speech”, but here’s a point of interest for any such time someone tries to use this smokescreen of an excuse if you call them out as misogynists (or racists, homophobes, etc… the list, depressingly, goes on).  In both American and European (incl. British) law the “freedom of speech” excuse doesn’t fly.

Why’s that?  Well, if you actually read the laws you’ll see there are exclusions to what the precious First Amendment protects: look here.  What’s that?  Obscenity?  Threats?  Defamation?  Intentional infliction of emotional distress?  They’re all excluded from protection by the First Amendment?  OHGAWDNO!  It’s like living in a world where people treat each other with respect!  How horrible.

And, Euro law?  Just for starters you can consult Article 10 and Article 14 of the European Convention of Human Rights.  Yeah.  Human rights.  But be careful out there: trying to educate these fools in the error of their ways and the legal flaws in their defence might offend them.  The fact you’ve done some learnings (that aren’t centred around how to make tasty lunchtime treats) is clearly a work of pure evil!

Although Jenny of Wisconsin might be able to deal with it, there are a lot of people out there who can’t or don’t want to.  It takes a lot of effort, seriously.  I’m an antisocial gamer – we know this – I like playing games on my own, I hate chat and I hate voice-chats even more.  I don’t want to listen to somebody’s inane drivel while I shoot stuff, regardless of the content.  I ditched the one MMO I played a long time ago because of the racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic crap that occurred on a daily basis.  Not directed at me, just there – and no one really ever objected (if you did, you got the abuse turned on you).

My solution is not one that everyone can adopt.  I just avoid the social elements, even if it’s online team-based play like TF2, and I refuse to disclose any information about myself.  Generally, I am the wallpaper: I keep quiet and ignore chat.  This is mostly because I’m a misanthrope and do not care for being social, but partly it’s also because I know that a lot of people on chat are going to be dicks.  I just don’t understand why banter has to be offensive, even if it doesn’t go near questions of gender.

Taken from Kickstarter.com at 11:30am GMT, on 13/06/2012

But back to the specific point of misogyny in the gamingverse.  I mentioned the KickStarter from Feminist Frequency in May’s “Playing…” post and the woman behind it, Anita Sarkeesian, has been yet another figurehead victim of abuse.  She put her head over that parapet, so to speak, and has had it all but shot to smithereens.  Gladly, however, this isn’t going to stop her making those videos, nor has it stopped people pledging (when I last checked, she was on $87,000+ with 68 hours left to go).  But this sort of thing does make me want to adopt a superhero persona, fly all over the world, and stand in defence of these women.

I was going to say “brave women” just ther, but that, to me, gives too much credit to these scum-sucking parasites of the internet.  It shouldn’t have to be brave just to identify as female and like games.  FFS.

At least – if we’re to take anything positive away from this – this all-too-common abuse is being given more and more of a public face.  A site that BBC article mentions is Fat,  Ugly or Slutty (because that’s pretty much all you are if you’re a female gamer, apparently) where you can upload screengrabs of sexist abuse/harrasment.  So, if you can catch the abuse you receive, or see, in a screen grab or a recording, make it known!

Obviously the simplicity has benefits as well as negative points: it’s simpler to use, so therefore more of the community can try their hand at map-making for an extremely popular title.  This is demonstrated by the fact that since the Puzzle Maker has been available, the number of Steam Workshop files for Portal 2 has shot up to nearly 100,000 (by comparison, Team Fortress 2 has close to 5k and Skyrim just over 7k)¹ despite being the newest edition to the Workshop repertoire.

My first test chamber for Portal 2

The negatives, I feel, come with the restrictions you face with what is available to you in the Puzzle Maker: e.g. you can’t add extra doors for staged testing.  Plus, try as I might to create things exactly as I imagine them in my head, it never seems to be quite right as not all the tools are available to you.  The solution here would be to learn how to use Hammer properly… but for a lot of fans that’s a bit too confusing to contemplate.

So, you may be wondering why my production of test chamber blueprints stopped mind-May… the answer is Diablo 3.  This hit internationally on May 15th and domestically (in the UK) May 18th.  After some very irritating cock-ups from various pre-order suppliers, I eventually got my hands on it for the UK release date.

I must say I’m sort of glad I didn’t get a copy until May 18th as Blizzard had some serious issues on the international release. Let me explore these. D3 is both single and multiplayer but you have to be online all the time, on Battle.net’s servers even to play on your own.  No, it doesn’t make sense to me either.  Couple that with the fact that their servers clearly weren’t ready – nor capable – of handling the volume of people trying to connect.  Again, just to play single player.

Error 37 screengrabs were plastered all over the internet as eager fans were raging at Blizzard.  That’s not to say I didn’t escape: I’ve had three instances since I got the game where I’ve been unable to play because the damned servers were having a tea break (or eating themselves, I dunno) with Error 35 taking out the game on May 20th for over 9 hours and Error 37 rearing its ugly head again nearer the end of the month (Error 35 = servers down for maintenance; Error 37 = servers are busy).

That’s the one major drawback of the game.  The interwebs have been awash with rumours of an “offline mode”, but whether Blizz decide to actually do it or not only time will tell.

Enough of that.  The game itself is great fun with brilliantly detailed graphics and fun attacks for all classes.  This is the first RPG of this type (the hack’n’slash) that I’ve actually finished – albeit only on normal difficulty – and am now going through it again to try and find better loot (so far unsuccessfully).  The fact that I haven’t got bored yet is praise in itself as I do have a tendency to just wander off despite all my intentions to play through as every class and on every difficulty.  Again, time will tell if I do end up admitting defeat.

Blizz have done OK with the female characters; yes, they start off fairly under-dressed but so do the male counterparts.  My one criticism is the fem-Demon Hunter’s boots… why would you wear heels (at all!) to fight the prime evil?  Seriously.  Oh, and the occasional armour vs. cleavage fail is a given.

In between my battling of evil I made a brief foray into the world of the mod.  The mod in question is Centralia: Part 1, which is the opening sequence of a game developed as a mod for Half Life 2: Episode 2.  I’ve written a more general review over here but I felt it worth a mention as a) it doesn’t involve shooting guns or killing things and b) yeah, OK, my brother is one of the devs.

The idea behind it is (I paraphrase) “to make creepy places fun”, so they’ve taken an extraordinary story from real life (Centralia, PA) and added some more spooky to the mix.  Even though it’s pretty short for now, it still managed to make me jump a couple of times.

A still from the beginning of Centralia

It is a genuinely interesting concept for a game and I’d quite like to see where it goes, but to do that I first have to persuade my bro to set up a KickStarter fund, then he has to get funded through it.  Blah, blah austerity etc.

Tropes Vs Women in Games: a cool thing for you to throw money at

As I’ve mentioned KickStarter, we here at BR had this drawn to our attention.  Tropes vs. Women in Video Games is the brainchild of Anita of Feminist Frequency who is hoping to make a series of films based on, well, tropes of women in video games.

“The series will highlight the larger reoccurring patterns and conventions used within the gaming industry rather than just focusing on the worst offenders.”

This looks promising, and who here wouldn’t want to get paid to play games and make films about it?  Exactly.

Next Month:

There will be Max Payne 3 – as the PC edition got delayed so it didn’t have to do battle with Diablo 3 – and probably (finally) some AC: Revelations as I now have a copy waiting for me.  I suspect there will be more but I haven’t thought that far ahead yet!

But! Before I go, an Assassin’s Creed note…

Just quickly, this has just popped up on the internet: promise of a female protagonist in an Assassin’s Creed title!  It will be a “companion game” to AC3, subtitled Liberation, but will only be on the PS Vita.  Borderhouse (follow the link) say:

What’s interesting and exciting is that the protagonist of the game will be a woman of color named Aveline.

Admittedly, yes, that is pretty interesting – and awesome – but being me I have to push the cynic buttons and raise two points. First, we’ve talked about this before, and I will keep banging on about it until it surfaces for definite: is this the “her” Juno mentioned at the end of Brotherhood?  This mysterious lady-assassin that Desmond has to find before he can defeat the Templars?  My guess is: no.  If it’s running concurrent to AC3 he can’t have found her yet as, surely, her story comes after his ends (after another three games).

Secondly, PS Vita?  Really?  An over-expensive handheld with few titles and not nearly as many users as Xbox 360/Ps3/PC?  That’s where you decide to premiere your first femprotag of the franchise?  You don’t think that’s a little bit sidelining?  I suspect the peeps over at Ubisoft are expecting only the die hards to buy it, which means they aren’t too bothered about offering up a viable femprotag for the mainstream just yet.

Or, maybe they’re testing the waters for the Elusive Female Assassin that will save the world.  Or, maybe Aveline is “her”. Prove me wrong, Ubisoft, please!

1. as of 9am, 31.05.12