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

Why am I babbling about books? Because I’m trying to explain, as best I can, why I haven’t done much gaming this month. Or, at least, not much that I can bring new content to you with. There was some more Kinect – my parents are better at the bowling game than I am – and some other little bits and pieces like a quick foray onto Team Fortress 2 to craft weapons and hats.

So, my apologies for the brevity of this post! What I did play was Portal 2, on the ‘Play Day’ that marked the one year anniversary of its release. I thought it’d be a good thing to write about, so I did a Google and it turned out we (BadRep) are the second result when you search for “Portal 2 feminist”.

Look! There we are! Second in the results!

I also had a gander at that top link and presented my counter-argument over on my own blog here, which some of you who follow us on Twitter might have already seen.

I didn’t want to simply regurgitate what I’ve already written elsewhere all over BR, which is why this is such a short post, but if I may, I’ll show you what I’m excited for in the upcoming Gaming Future.

• Portal 2: Aperture Perpetual Testing Initiative – May 8th
• Diablo III – Finally being released(!) and I’m looking forward to playing as some of those kick-ass looking fem-versions (apart from those stupid heels, ugh, seriously?!) – May 15th (UK)
• Max Payne 3 – More for the technology than the (totally original – hurhur) damsel-in-distress storyline – May 15th

Later on, there’s also Borderlands 2 which I’m looking forward to, and Crysis 3 but I have to finish Crysis 2 first – oops! I’ll also endeavour to play something a bit less, er… shooty and more casual, for those of you out there who don’t really do the FPS thing. Hopefully I’ll get some new tech over the summer to help on that front.

I’ll also be writing up some interesting posts about humour and gender in games, and I might do some ‘case study’ style posts on some of the prominent female characters out there. I’ll do my best to bring you more exciting tales next month!

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]!