Too many other people with the same opinions and same fears read these threads. Maybe he’s a troll, maybe not, but the fear is genuine.
It’s funny that The Sims comes up, actually. I remember, what, 10 years or so ago when Popcap were the new shit. All the publishers jumped on “casual games” as the next big thing and I was young and stupid enough to be worried about it. Oh god, I thought, everything is going to be casual games and all the games are going to be casual and oh god oh god. And then The Sims comes along and virtual pets were the thing, oh god, casual games, oh no no no. And then Social Games come along and everything is going to be Social Games…
You know what DIDN’T happen? Nobody stopped making big 16-25 male-oriented video games. Over those ten years the words “dark and gritty” got used unironically so often it stopped even being a cliche and just became part of the fabric of AAA game development. “Dark and gritty” is practically programmed into the fucking pixel shaders.
AAA games are more male-oriented now than they ever were before. Developers, critics, reviewers, just want a bit more variety back.
You know what really got screwed by the incessant masculinisation of games? Mascot Platformers. I fucking loved mascot platformers. Nobody except Nintendo makes them any more. Not dark and gritty enough.
Is there a good word for that peculiar combination of barely-controlled rage, random bolding and histrionic sarcasm? The “suspension reason” field just isn’t long enough.
Can I recommend Sly Cooper on the playstation family. Pretty good fun, hub based platformer, notable amongst other things for having a wheelchair using protagonist
miespuolinen, mies, poika, kaveri, jätkä, kaveri, kaveri, ei nainen, miehet, miehet, pojat, kaverit keikari, kaverit, kaverukset, pojat, poika, and so on.
Every now and then I suffer the delusion that trashing on the video game industry for being sexist is overblown. You see people freaking out because you can shoot women in Grand Theft Auto, and my response is “no shit”. It is an open world game, you can hunt down black people if you want and that might make you a racist, but it doesn’t make the game racist. Short of banning open world games, there will always be the “problem” that someone can be a prick if they want to. I almost convince myself that while the video game industry and players have problems, it is overblown.
Then I run into one of these fucking threads. They are banning women from playing in a tournament where sex clearly doesn’t matter. Why the bloody fuck would you do that? Then you see the herd of people, who I could only describe as misogynistic assholes, descend upon the thread to shed their tears about how being mad is being too mean to the poor sexist assholes of the world. It reminds me of people spewing tears because two gay people can married and now whenever they mention that this gives them a sad, they get called a bigot and this gives them another unfair sad.
You also get the the idiots that can’t understand how a woman’s’ league isn’t sexist. It is pretty simple how a women’s league wouldn’t be sexist. If you are an idiot declaring a women’s league sexist, it is pricks like you that make such leagues a thing that exist. The population of sexist douchebaggery is so high, that yes, they want to get away from it. If you ever feel like you are in an abused class, feel free to form your own club and play with those folks. While you remain a white dude, fuck off. You are not abused. You are just an asshole.
On 2nd of July, 2014, the IeSF’s policy about gender division, which separates the female division and the male division, has been brought into question. The IeSF has listened to the gaming community and has carefully considered their opinions. Upon hearing these concerns, the IeSF convoked an emergency session of the IeSF Board to respond.
As a result, IeSF shall have two event categories: “Open for All” events and events that are reserved for women. The events which were initially set aside as the male division will now be open to all genders, and the events which were initially set as the female division will remain as they were.
The IeSF Board addressed its reason for maintaining events for women, citing the importance of providing female gamers with ample opportunities to compete in e-Sports—currently a male-dominated industry. Female gamers make up half of the world’s gaming population, but only a small percentage of e-Sports competitors are women. The IeSF’s female-only competitions aim to bring more diversity to competitive play by improving the representation of women at these events. Without efforts to improve representation, e-Sports can’t achieve true gender equality.
In order to apply the new policy with consistency, IeSF has added an “Open for All” Tekken Tag Tournament 2 tournament, which was initially set aside for female-only competition.
So much for “I don’t see such pressure leading to any improvements”.
Usually people who play that game get themselves suspended pronto for something else. I get the impression that mods keep an eye on the gaming-related threads especially closely, cause gamers are bonkers.
Well, Judit Polgár is the top woman in chess (now, and by some statistics, ever). She is the only woman in the top 100 player rankings and was at one time the eighth best player in the world. So even though women technically can play in the full world championship, it makes for a more balanced match to have a separate woman’s championship. It isn’t clear why exactly there is this imbalance in a non-physical competition like chess – certainly the pool of women players is smaller than with men, but it isn’t just the men being afraid of cooties.
But man that was a long time ago! Surely there’s something newer?