Dear Deep Silver,

I have just seen the parody ad for the collector’s edition of Dead Island: Riptide. While violence against women and graphic dismemberment are fairly cheap, extremely tasteless and far too easy targets for “shock value”, I’m impressed by your provocative attempts to further the dialogue about the sinister and ingrained misogyny of videogame culture by taking it to a disgusting extreme.

Limited Edition! Specially designed and crafted! Completely and utterly terrible!

Oh… wait, hang on, I’ve just heard from Rock, Paper, Shotgun that you’re actually serious about this. This apparently isn’t just a misguided pastiche of publicity stunts. Oh. Oh dear.

You claim that this hunk of resin will:

… make a striking conversation piece on any discerning zombie gamer’s mantel.

Well, as someone who has notched up damn near 1,000 hours of zombie killing in recent years (thanks, Steam, for keeping track of that. I was starting to worry that I was wasting my life), let’s have a conversation about it. I’ll go and brew up a steaming cup of Sityourassdown while you perch on the naughty stool and think about what you’ve done.

I can hear it already, the rumbling of defensive PR managers approaching.

“But it’s a zombie game! The whole point of it is to commit heinous acts of violence against the undead in self defence! A zombie torso with its limbs severed is a trophy that represents your prowess!”

Before I address this, in the interests of full disclosure, I have to say that I am not a qualified physician. However, from my forays into the study of human and zombie biology, I can confirm that the healthy, warm-tanned skintone, obvious freshness of the blood, the lack of any sort of necrosis or decomposition of the flesh indicates that this torso was certainly not a zombie at the time of her dismemberment.

Exposure of the lower ribs suggest traumatic chest injury; however, it’s not clear whether this occurred before or after the time of death. My working hypothesis is that her death had something to do with either decapitation or the loss of all her blood. Even without formal medical training, I am fairly confident in positing that there is no coming back from complete removal of the head.

There isn’t even any artistic merit in what you’ve created, which is almost as offensive as the glorification of horrific violence against women. You have the gumption to describe it as:

…Dead Island’s grotesque take on an iconic Roman marble torso sculpture.

No. Stop. Please. The skies are filled with the anguished cries of Classics and Art History students, joined by the despairing sobs of everybody with a functioning pair of eyes. There are several salient differences between your abomination and classical works of art, but I’ll set out a few of these for your convenience:

• Artistic merit. Marble sculptures are exquisite works by highly-skilled craftspeople demonstrating the depth of their abilities. Weeks of work go into a marble sculpture, creating something dynamic and evocative from a chunk of something cold and unyielding drawn from the earth. These are not pieces that can be “designed” in an afternoon by a gaggle of fratboy marketers over their weekly office keg.
• Anatomy. Sculptors who work with marble show an intimate and thorough knowledge and understanding of human anatomy. Every muscle, every curve, every millimetre of skin is honed to a perfect representation of the human form. What you have done is plonked two tennis balls on a solid block of resin, doodled in a crude cleavage with a Sharpie, then splashed raspberry sauce all over it and called it a day. Which brings me neatly onto my next point…
• Overt sexualisation and glamourisation of violence against women. Classical torso sculptures are not without limbs due to some horrible run-in with a horde of undead and a crazed survivor with a katana. If any Classics types would like to weigh in on this, I’d be interested to learn. However, I’m pretty sure that the motivations of those classical sculptors was not “Hurr, violence is EPIC. You know what else is epic? TITS! Yeah! But you know what’s not epic? Any part of a woman that isn’t tits or crotch. Let’s put, yeah, some tits and a crotch in a string bikini, and like, cut everything else off. Gamers will eat that up. Oh man, I’m jizzing my pants already. Tits and extreme violence. We’re geniuses.” (Again, classics students, if there’s any evidence of the great Graeco-Roman sculptors having had this discussion, I will withdraw this point. Let me know.)

In summary: what the hell? After the first Dead Island game failed to quite live up to its own teaser trailer, do you just feel like you need to continue along this trajectory of disappointment? Were you hoping to hit rock bottom with today’s sick display in the hope that thereafter, the only way would be up? If that’s the case, I’d be tempted to applaud your shamelessness, had it not been such a swing and a miss.

Now, I’m a feminist, but I also don’t believe that every catastrophic misunderstanding of how to exploit the “desirability” of anything that vaguely resembles a woman’s body (usually one that conforms to narrow standards of Western beauty) is born of true misogyny.

I believe it’s quite possible that you “just didn’t think” of the implications and repercussions of showing a violently dismembered female torso and selling it as an ornament. For those of us – women and some men – who actually live in bodies like the one messily represented in your collector’s edition, it isn’t possible to “just not think” about the possibilities and the realities of violence.

Women are disproportionately more likely to be the victims of domestic violence or sexual abuse, both by people they know and by strangers. We are taught from childhood that our bodies are weaker, that if we don’t want to be attacked we have to dress demurely, to know our limits, to keep our mouths shut and to do as we’re told.

We live in a victim-blaming world that constantly promotes the idea that the only way to not be a victim is to not provoke those strong and burly menfolks, who cannot be held to account if they attack you because you were obviously “asking for it” if and when it happens. Although this line of reasoning was born of institutionalised misogyny, it doesn’t exactly paint men in the most flattering of lights either.

The discussion is thankfully broadening, so this is not an issue I’ll go deeper into here. But Deep Silver, consider yourselves called out. There’s a wealth of resources, information, blogs, zines, articles, and opinion pieces out there. You have no excuse for not educating yourselves about why what you have done is damaging and irresponsible.

Everybody fucks up sometimes when it comes to the way they think about or treat people less privileged than they are. What really proves whether or not they’re capable of meeting the criteria for being a decent human being, or a company with any integrity, is how they handle and learn from their fuckups. My advice? Apologise. Be humble. Be grateful to people who have called you out on this. Make the choice to educate yourselves. And for the love of all things zombie, don’t do it again.

I do, however, have one thing to be grateful to you for about this. Should I find myself romancing a fellow gamer in future, and we go back to their house, this statuette will be an immediate and unmistakable red flag that this person has questionable taste in games, décor and attitudes towards women. This information will be a clear indicator that this isn’t somebody I should be spending time with.

Perhaps your statue could replace the endless whining about “the friendzone” as the hallmark of somebody utterly clueless about human relationships and endlessly disrespectful to women. Then I would laud you for your achievement, because that shit is getting very, very tiresome.

Yours sincerely,

Mia Vee

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!

Dear Esther's artwork is deeply beautiful and will make you feel things

Dear Esther

Dear Esther was released through the Steam platform on February 14th this year as a standalone offering via The Chinese Room. This is not, however, the first incarnation of the innovative story-led first person; it began life four years ago as a mod for Half Life 2, and for its independent release it was supported by The Indie Fund, who recouped their investment within five and a half hours of the game going on sale (selling over 16,000 copies in the first 24 hours). Now, that’s pretty impressive for an extremely minimalist game in a market full of guns, cars, swords and big bad monsters!

It’s £6.99 here in the UK, which means it’ll be floating somewhere around the $10/10€ mark for other regions, but bear in mind it only has full audio support in English. As it was plastered all around Steam and was something new, interesting and completely different, I thought I’d give it a go – if nothing else I’d have a new release to tell you all about for once! My first attempted playthrough ended rather swiftly, late at night, after the game decided it didn’t want to listen to my keyboard commands.

Never fear, I came back to it the next day after I’d had some sleep and my computer had been given a chance to think about what it had done. It worked fine the second time around. You start off by a lighthouse on an island somewhere in the Hebrides; the (male) voiceover begins to read excerpts from a letter (or letters), addressed to “Esther”.

As you walk around the island, trying to find your way, he reads different excerpts at different points in the game. I’d go into much more detail, but as I finished the whole sequence in just over an hour, I wouldn’t want to spoil things for anyone yet to play it by discussing my theories. Instead, I’ll tell you about the atmosphere and the artwork, both of which are superb. You’re alone on a bleak island, battered by wind with no person or animal in sight save the odd seagull, and it is a sadly beautiful world.

I found myself a little unnerved walking around, especially when I spotted a shadowy figure in the distance who, when I approached, disappeared (this happens twice). I think, in retrospect, that I was mostly spooked because I’d watched The Woman in Black the day before and was still half-expecting some ghoulish face to pop up and scream at me.

However, personally, I found Dear Esther a little underwhelming considering the hype it was garnering; I understand every compliment given to it, but equally those amazing, clever, innovative bits are altogether a bit too brief, especially at £6.99 – about 10 minutes per £1 in my case. The art is great, the story is great (if a little too easily guessed), the concept is great and it is a brilliant injection of something different into the market. It just would’ve been better if the ‘value for money’ factor was improved.

Apologies for the lack of feminist critique, but the only thing that it could be faulted on there is the age-old “Why is it always a bloke protagonist?”. Esther, obviously, is hugely important to the entire game so although she is absent, she is constantly present as she is who you’re talking to – she is the one you love. Still, indie game + male protagonist = not all that innovative after all.

It’s a good game if you want to have some feelings, think a bit and look at pretty Scottish scenery while under no obligation to chase, fight or challenge anything. My only advice would be to make sure you definitely don’t want to use that £7 on something that might last you a bit longer.

Other Bits & Bobs

Apart from the above, I haven’t been up to much with the sole exception being Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection on PSP. Yep, I dusted off the ol’ PSP and have been button bashing during my lunch breaks on my Saturday shifts. I’ve also discovered I’ve lost all my wicked-sick skills and keep getting K.O.’d by rubbish opponents. It’s fun for portable fight-based gaming and there’s a bowling minigame too. It features the standard Arcade and Story modes as well as the potential to PvP online. As it’s a) old and b) PSP (now replaced by the Vita) it is pretty cheap to buy – best bet is probably eBay though – and presents a standard bit of amusement, providing you can ignore the panty-flashing from almost every single female fighter.

Next Month

On March 9th I will have a copy of Mass Effect 3 in my hands, so you can expect a review on that once I’ve powered through it, and hopefully I’ll be able to say it’s improved on some of the downfalls of the last game (which I explored many moons ago, elsewhere in the interwerlds). I will find other fun things to play and gabble about for you though, as I know not everyone cares about ME3.

Mostly.

Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy were the issues.  I don’t want to sound like a broken record but boobs on display in a high risk profession such as being a Gotham City criminal is not exactly clever – is it?  Harley was very nice to see as a significant part of the story that is out to scupper your plans, but her being called some less-than-charming things by the Joker’s own thugs was tedious to say the least, and when you actually fight Harley herself she is defeated ridiculously easily – in a cutscene no less.  Disappointing.

“Please don’t punch me in the chest, Batman. It’d be terribly inconvenient and I might have to reconsider my outfit!”

Ivy, when you first meet her, is lounging about in her cell – apparently the only female inmate – not wearing prison issues but her own clothes displaying her sizeable bust.  Later, in her boss fight, for some reason she decides to float about attacking you in what – as our ed described to me in an email – “appears to be a giant laughing vulva-plant which flaps open periodically to reveal she still isn’t wearing a great deal…”.  Super.

I’m pretty sure she gets referred to as some less-than-charming things too by henchmen.

Fast forward to Arkham City, which I got in another sale (but it still cost me £20), and now you can play as Catwoman too!  However, she appears to have fallen foul of Rule 1 of Sensible Female Armour: her suit is only ever zipped up to just below her breasts, allowing for ample cleavage.  When you fight thugs as Catwoman, you get called a ‘bitch’ but for some reason, if you’re Batman, you don’t get called a prick, a wanker, a bastard or even a knobend.  Really, people?

The assassins of Rā’s al Ghūl’s order are all for some reason scantily clad sex icons – as is his daughter – and the concept art is mainly essentially the sort of softcore you might find in lads’ mags.  In fact the vast majority of the concept art involving any female character is pretty oversexualised and repugnant.  We get to meet Ivy again, too, but it seems she still hasn’t bothered to find any clothes since the laughing vulva-plant incident.  And Harley is wearing even more revealing kit than last time.

Great graphics, but do we really need to see that much breast?

Now, even if we leave aside all of this sexist nonsense, Arkham City is somewhat disappointing anyway.  I finished the storyline in less than a day; the ending snuck up on me and was rubbish.  I won’t say what happens, but… just… what?!  That’s even before I get to the complaint I have with the huge continuity hole left at the end.  I was so disheartened by it that I did a Ragequit of Disappoints and haven’t gone back on it since.  Even though I still have lots of side quests and puzzles to solve, I just haven’t found the heart to go back to it.

Arkham Asylum was worth the £5 but City was definitely not worth the £20 – let alone the standard retail price in the range of up to £39.99!  The first game offered something new and interesting with a gorgeous noir feel much akin to Nolan’s reimagining of Gotham on film, if not grittier.  The second game whizzed past all too quickly, with no real indication that one should slow down, do side quests, do the puzzles and so on, lest you face the atrocious storyline ending.

Benefits of the second game, however, do exist; the world is larger, you get more gadgets and there are no area transitions between outdoor locations.  Plus you do get to play as Catwoman, even if she is just eye candy to be abused by burly henchmen. (Are there really no female crims in Gotham?)

Both games do fall down woefully at the Treating Female Characters with Respect hurdle.  Would it truly be so hard to think logically about the design of these people?  Does Batman walk around without his Kevlar body armour, flexing his pectorals, with a big “SHOOT HERE” target on his chest?  No.  No, he does not.  So why should Catwoman, or Ivy, or Harley?  Basic boob-sense would say maybe a comfy sports bra would be better than leather basques and flimsy shirts with only one button done up.  At least then the breast tissue wouldn’t detach during all this acrobatic criminality.

Also, Catwoman has anti-gravity boobs.

It’s not unusual to display female avatars on boxes of computer games. What is unusual here, and what wins the Found Feminism for Mass Effect 3, is that the avatar is a fully clothed human who is not posing provocatively.

Isn’t she amazing? I want to be her…

… hey, advertising works!

But more importantly, someone in the marketing department decided that this would work. They looked at some genuine facts about who plays games, and why, and decided to use this image rather than, say, an exotic blue alien lady – and yes, I know there’s an entire species of exotic blue alien ladies in the gameworld, but they aren’t selling the game on that fact. They are selling the game on the fact that you can play as this woman.

This remarkably serious and capable-looking woman.

Which rather shoots a laser in the ass of half-baked theories about women and gaming. Such as “women don’t play computer games” – we do, and some of us are really serious about it. Yes, that means we buy the stuff, we are half the target market, and we’d like games that allow us to explore the full range of our imaginations.

The world of computer games is by no means a perfect gender equality paradise. The vast majority of female avatars are still beautiful and often have implausible breasts, even allowing for zero-G environments. But Found Feminism is about hi-fiving the positive, and this shows that the gaming universe is slowly, slowly starting to change its attitudes.

For an added bonus, here’s a chirpy list of ten good female avatars (including Shepard herself).

Got a Found Feminism hi-five you’d like us to shout about? Drop Sarah C a line via [email protected].

Game: Mass Effect

About a hundred years behind the rest of the entire internet, I’m playing Mass Effect 2, and I’m enjoying it so, so much. I want to book a week off work just to complete it, and game all day long.

You play Commander Shepard, who can be a man or woman, and it’s amazingly refreshing to be able to play a female war hero (either way, you’re pretty famous, after saving the galaxy in Mass Effect 1). It’s great to be able to play this female character who inspires so much respect in her colleagues, military and civilian – everywhere she goes, even big scary warlike aliens are afraid of her. My Shepard’s a not-very-physically-intimidating blonde, so it’s kind of fun.

I love the team-building aspects of the game, too. You have to persuade people to join you, and keep them happy and loyal throughout the game. You can play as a good guy or a bad guy, and some of the choices the game gives you (allow genocide to continue for the good of the galaxy?) are brilliant to play through. As writer and fellow Garrus fangirl Jennifer Williams said in her review:

Bioware seem to specialise in making the sort of games where you have to put the controller down for a bit and have a really good think about the consequences of your actions.

Several articles have been written on how feminist-friendly the game can be, some on this blog, so I won’t go into too much detail here except to add my name to the many reviewers recommending it. Even if you don’t play many games, you should try this one. I’m running it on my laptop; you can check here whether you can run it on your computer…

Mass Effect 3, out next summer, looks like it’ll be even better. They’re promising to use a female Shepard in the marketing drive, and although there were lesbian options² available for Shepard to romance in Mass Effect 1 and 2, in 3 male Shepard will be able to romance some of the guys, too. I’m not sure why these things weren’t done before, but I feel like Bioware is at least a company that listens to what its fans want. I’ll be checking out their Dragon Age II next (another game highly recommended by geeks and feminists!) while I wait impatiently for ME3…

Comic: Paul Cornell’s Demon Knights #1

I didn’t buy many of the comics that came out of the DC52, but I did have to pick up Paul Cornell’s Demon Knights, because I’ve enjoyed his Doctor Who episodes and his Captain Britain comics before.

As much as many DC52 comics have been a disappointment, (Harley Quinn loses half her costume! Catwoman wants to show you ALL HER BRAS. ALL OF THEM. Amanda Waller becomes skinny! Disabled character Oracle walks, becomes Batgirl! DC comics manage to become even less diverse!) I still have to say, this one looks promising.

Demon Knights is set in the Middle Ages, and Paul cites Dragon Age II and ‘the medieval Magnificent Seven’ as points of inspiration. Much like my old favourite Secret Six, (sadly, sadly, outrageously cancelled for the DC52,) it seems as though it will star protagonists who range from reluctant antiheroes who’d rather be at the pub, to absolute bastards who are just along for the fun of it, saving the day and arguing and falling in and out of bed with each other while they do it. My favourite kind of heroes.

Promisingly for the fans of this blog, it also looks as though not only will four of the seven ‘knights’ be of the female persuasion, but the main baddie, the Questing Queen, is also very much a lady.

Well, I say four ladies… Sir Ystin, a knight who self-introduces as ‘sir’, may turn out to be more nuanced than that. Earlier versions of the character, the Shining Knight, have been both a cissexual man, and a young girl disguised as a man in pursuit of her true love, Sir Gawain, but neither of those seem to fit here. Hints dropped by Paul, and Ystin’s insistence on the title ‘sir’ in this volume, however, despite the other characters’ doubt, makes me wonder whether we’re actually seeing the first gender variant character of the DC52…

It’s hard to judge an entirely new comic on just twenty pages, but this issue made me laugh, and made me want to know a lot more about all seven of the main characters, which is pretty much what I want in a first issue.

It’s also extremely quotable:

We find the source of the problem, and we throw dragons at it.

Blog: The Mary Sue

The Mary Sue is really awesome. It’s like BoingBoing for fangirls. They always have the news first. Trailers, casting decisions, I don’t know how they get there so fast.

Battlestar Galactica‘s Starbuck features on the logo above, but you get a different geeky lady character every time you refresh the site. You can read about their logo design and why they picked those characters here.

I’m enjoying the way they’ve named it after Mary Sues, as well. It feels like a challenge. That word that gets thrown at the woman in a fandom work who’s, y’know, not supposed to be there.

There’s slash references and feminism and science and fun things on Etsy and Hipster Harry Potter fanart and the gender-bent Justice League and lists like 10 Things That Could Happen If You Pretend to Be A God, 10 Couples Who Are Badass Together, and 10 Fictional Universes We’d Like to Live in Based on Food Alone…

It’s a bit addictive.

And finally, under “also awesome”:

My feminist-inclined friend Hannah, who, when recently invited to a ‘Tarts and Vicars’ party, dressed as a Bakewell Tart. Because, well, what is a ‘tart’ anyway?

• AwesomeWatch returns next month. Send Jen your own geeky picks – if she agrees with you, they might get a look-in.

1. Ed: “I may not have been entirely sober when I thought of this, but it’s too late now, we’re GOING WITH IT.”
2. I was going to let my Shepard have a lesbian romance, but, well, the Tank Girl lookalike on my team is straight as a very straight thing, and Space Batman alien Garrus has caught my eye. He was on Shepard’s team in Mass Effect 1, and their dialogue’s adorable in a kind of equals-and-comrades-under-fire kind of way. “There’s no one in the galaxy I respect more than you, Shepard.” Bless.

Yessir, that does say VIP!

That’s correct, folks!  I trundled my way down to London last Thursday to insert myself into a world of new and upcoming games, developer sessions and general geekdom.  What’s even better is that Eurogamer were kind enough to give me a press pass to do so, and now, my dear readers, you get to hear all about it!

First of all, this post right here is going to be a general look at the whole experience, and I’ll give you some insight into what else I have in store for you in later posts.  Simple as that, really!  Shall we get started?

As I had to travel down from our second city in the morning I didn’t get into the Expo until close to midday. Even so, with a little ticket with the words “Press Pass” on I still got in without issue (even if they did give me the wrong wristband).  My brother had come along for the Thursday and was already inside, so I had a task trying to locate him.  In the end I gave up and darted straight to see Rage (coincidentally, so did he) as I am a mild id Software fanboi… don’t tell anyone!

After that I went to visit Special Effect‘s World Record Attempt and did my practice run – you’ll be hearing more about this in a dedicated post – in which you have to complete a racing track using nought but your own eye movements.  These guys were there trying to raise awareness for gamers with disabilities who need modified controls to enjoy the world of gaming.  Very admirable, indeed.  I had a nice chat with one of them on the Friday and I will be urging you all to give them a shout however you can.

After a bit of milling around I headed up for my interviews with Trion Worlds on their games Rift and End of Nations.  I had a good hour between the two and some interesting responses to questions, but you’ll have to wait for the interview posts to hear more about that.

Over the course of the two days I also got round to playing quite a few of the big names like Skyrim, Mass Effect 3, Battlefield 3 and CounterStrike: Global Offensive, as well as some of the more family-suited games like Sonic Generations and Ratchet and Clank All 4 One.  You’ll get to hear what I thought of all the games I played in my round-up post, which will include a series of mini-reviews for your delectation.

Another excellent facet to the Expo was the Indie Arcade and the Retro section – in which there was Wolfenstein 3D on no less than a Jaguar – where I had great fun playing with games I hadn’t seen in years on consoles and arcades that are likely part of someone’s private gaming museum.  This and EG’s Game of the Year for the past decade wall were a genuine pleasure to see.

Also upcoming from my experience at Eurogamer there’ll be a post on what I think about the prevalence of oversexualised women as a (meagre) excuse for marketing at these events – what does this say about how marketers view gamers? – with interested snippets from an overheard conversation between two stall workers (they weren’t being all that covert about the chat, either!).

Onwards to meet your heroes of geekery!

Another piece I’ve been brewing for a while, but held off just in case I could corner someone from id Software after their Developer Session to ask them about it: Dystopian Beauties.  Ever noticed how almost all the women in the post-apocalyptic world are pretty stereotypically hot?  What happened to all the ‘normal‘ women, hmm?  Is there some sort of “Kill the Trolls” global event that occurs simultaneously with the collapse/destruction of the world?  I will be exploring the many possible explanations for this.

On the overall experience front it was pretty great for me as a first time Expo-goer, with a few snagging points: the demonstrable exclusion of female gamers in the marketing; the assumption (several times) that I was clearly “new to FPS genre” or “new to war games” (so tedious) on the basis of what I looked like and the assumptions stall reps made about a) my gender and b) my personality; the ridiculous prevalence of consoles on the playable games – I am a dedicated PC gamer and trying to play things with thumbsticks drives me up the wall; and, finally, the fact it cost me £6 for a sausage in a roll and a bottle of water.  Otherwise, the punters were all very friendly with each other and it was a good environment full of like-minded individuals that I really enjoyed.

But what’s that, you say?  A competition?  Why, yes!  Yes there is a competition!  I have gathered a few little goodies at the Expo to give away… but more on that later my eager chums!  For now, I will have to leave you with feverish eyes filled with the fire of excitement – to be continued, fellow travellers…

Chell, the character you play in Portal 2

Whether or not you agree in full with that critique, Portal is different, even down to the attitudes its game designers have towards designing the female avatar.

We can certainly look at this new arrival as a continuation of gaming house Valve Corporation‘s pleasing two feminist fingers up to traditional notions of male-centric gaming.

Speaking of traditional notions, in the Epic Fail corner we have Brink, which was also hailed as being a revolutionary, life-will-never-be-the-same-again game. Which it might well be, on some fronts, and as far as I can tell, it is a pretty cool shooty-killy game. But then, I like guns and explosions. However, woe unto those who cry “awesome”, because one of the main selling points of Brink is that the dollmaker (the widget that lets you select how your character looks) has literally millions of variants, so many that the internet has spawned tons of webpages and YouTube vids helping you through this process. And yet, none of these options are female. Cue a variety of opinions on the Internet as to whether this is actually important.

Naturally, I think it is, and if we want to chuck hard facts into the argument, let’s remember that under-representation of women is rife in almost all walks of life and serves as a discouragement to other women from participating, thus continuing the gendered ghetto. The gaming world is an interesting one because whilst men do outnumber women in terms of time spent playing computer games, around a third of game players are female.  Which is quite a lot, really. I often wonder how many more women would enjoy them if there were more games that had a more inclusive idea of gender. And, as if in answer to my musings, along comes a good example from 2006 sent in by our own Rob, Saints Row 2.

Now, a game franchise based on gangster culture is not the most likely source of this Found Feminism, and the website does not scream “we’ve totally got our gender issues sorted!” at me, but hold onto your controllers kids, because Rob has pinged me over some screen grabs from the dollmaker which make for interesting viewing.

The sliders shown to the left of the character (the second image enlarges if you click) allow you to toggle a  number of variables, including muscle, fat, age and skin tone, which effectively lets you make characters who look far from the basic stereotype hypermasculine and hyperfeminine models so common in games. Of course, you can still be Mr Abs and Ms Double G should you so wish, but the important thing is that the option to NOT do this is there.

And that’s rather the point of this Found Feminism, and one of the reasons I am a feminist. I am not up in arms because the representations of women in computer games are of beautiful sexy assassins, it’s because there is so rarely an option to be anything else. Which means that when a few games come along that push against those barriers, we should applaud the makers and encourage them to do more. And perhaps one day the promised cake of gaming gender equality will no longer be a lie.

• Found Feminism: an ongoing series of images, videos, photos, comics, posters or excerpts – anything really, which shows feminist ideas at work in the everyday world. What’s brightened your day? Share it here – send your finds to [email protected]!

March saw the eagerly anticipated release of Dragon Age II; the follow-up to Dragon Age: Origins and Awakening (along with all the extra DLC that became available during the interim period). Dragon Age, for those of you unfamiliar with the games, is a fantasy RPG in which you guide your character through quests and the main plotline, battling all manner of nasty creatures and unscrupulous types along the way. You gather a team made up of mages, warriors and rogues who may be human, elf or dwarf, and they help you defeat the forces of evil.

One of the key features of games like this is that you can build your own character: you pick the gender, the hair style, the facial features, the class (e.g. a mage), and in some instances you can even pick the voice. I, for example, have a male warrior elf with ginger hair in Origins and in Dragon Age II my character Zakarianna Hawke is a female, white-haired rogue with a facial tattoo (you can see a visual of her below left). The possibilities aren’t quite endless, but they’re still fairly comprehensive.

Other popular games that boast this feature include the Mass Effect series and the Fable series, both of which I thoroughly enjoy. I was, however, quite late to the Mass Effect party for one very key reason: I thought you had to be male. That is to say, the advertising and marketing for Mass Effect gave me no inkling that there was any other option than to be the character that features in the trailers and the stills.

Normally this doesn’t bother me (pretty much all the games I have ever played have a male protagonist) but I read an unfortunate article that suggested Commander Shepard – Mass Effect’s protagonist – was a bit of a womaniser. So I wrote it off.

I then, much later, got a little overexcited by all the sales after Christmas in which I saw Mass Effect 1 and 2 for a little over a tenner. I asked my brother what he thought of them and ended up buying the games – turns out, you can play as a female character! Plus all the womanising depends entirely on the decisions made in-game by the person directing the character (again, my take on Commander Shepard, Drakhoa Shepard, is just below left further down).

This little surprise, combined with Dragon Age II’s recent advertising prior to its release, made me wonder why games that allow you to play as male or female are only ever marketed using the preset male appearance. For illustration purposes I have collected a few trailers courtesy of YouTube:

• Dragon Age II “Destiny – Extended” Trailer
• Dragon Age II “Rise to Power” Trailer
• Mass Effect 3 “Debut” Trailer
• Mass Effect 2 “Full Cinematic” Trailer
• Mass Effect 2 “Launch” Trailer
• Fable II
• Fable III

From those trailers alone, would you have any idea that you can actually play through as a female protagonist? If you knew nothing else about these games, I doubt there’s any chance you’d be able to guess the female protagonist option from the advertising. This could be quite off-putting to gamers (not just female gamers either) as the advertising doesn’t highlight the option of choice that you get in the game; to be a character that you want to be. It certainly put me off: when confronted with the limited information and the possibility that the male protagonist was a character I wouldn’t be able to stand, I chose to look elsewhere. Even though, for me, that elsewhere was probably going back to a First Person Shooter with a male protagonist: at least most of them don’t talk, and you forget the character when you’re facing down hundreds of Replica soldiers or when a Necromorph just came bursting out of an air vent to tear you to pieces.

I’m not trying to fault these RPG games here, though they do all have some downsides – I’m just wondering why the distributors and the marketing bods decide to exclude one whole section of their demographic in one swoop. I’m sure there is some (weak) reasoning to do with demographic statistics and some blanket statements about who buys these games, but surely that’s wearing a little thin by now? I certainly got sick of seeing the preset male character’s smug face in all the Dragon Age II trailers.

Well, if we look over at Blizzard and some of their teasers for Diablo III (coming out later this year) then there are some positive developments on the horizon. They’ve begun releasing trailers relating to each ‘class’ of character for the upcoming game – all of which can be played as a male or female version – and, most importantly, they’re telling us all about it in their advertising!

• Diablo III Demon Hunter
• Diablo III Wizard

Demon Hunter and Wizard are two of the classes you will be able to play as in Diablo III; the others are Monk, Barbarian, and Witch Doctor. The latter three are automatically presented as male, but Demon Hunter and Wizard are automatically presented to us as female on Blizzard’s website for Diablo III, despite the fact all five classes can be played as either. It is interesting as well that at BlizzCon2010 the 19 minutes of gameplay footage included in the press kit featured both the female Demon Hunter and Wizard as the protagonist.

Clearly, then, not all RPG gaming advertising is male-centric, and hopefully more companies will start to follow down the path that Blizzard is taking – showing the audience the variety that is available in-game, instead of just marketing it at male gamers and assuming female gamers (should such a fabled beast exist – haha!) aren’t going to get offended at being ignored or forgotten about.

They are, as I mentioned earlier, all good games (Fable, Dragon Age, Mass Effect) so don’t let the advertising put you off playing them, but equally let’s not resign ourselves to the notion that male-centric advertising will never change. It is changing; it just happens to be very slowly.

• Rai, at the tender age of 23, has been gaming for 15 years and writing for 10 – perfect combination! Watch this space for more Gamer Diary.
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