Hot Girl-On-Girl Action (in Video Games)
29-Nov-05
I followed this link from Sivacracy.
http://utopianhell.com/blog/hot-girl-on-girl-action
I completely see the point. For an industry that is purporting to attract female gamers, there sure isn’t equality in video games. I’m not just talking Rockstar, here… I thought it odd that World of Warcraft’s succubus didn’t offer an incubus counterpart, and apparently Everquest 2 has a similar problem.
In some games, you don’t even get the option to play a female character. In others, you’re given the option, but when given the chance to have sex with some other character, the character is female.
The reason? The bulk of game-playing America are homophobic, socially challenged men with very vivid fantasies about playing females who get to have sex with other females. Even when female characters are added to the game, they aren’t added with equal importance, nor are they added with the thought that maybe, just maybe, a woman might be playing that female character.
Completely accurate criticism. Vampire: Bloodlines, a game I played to (un)death, slightly moved in that direction, at least- there were men you could only use seduction (a skill) on while playing a male and women you couldn’t use seduction on when playing a female- but for the most part it followed that same trend. (The seduction skill was one of the dialog options used for a couple of purposes. It was one of the options available along with intimidation and persuasion to convince someone to give you information or other benefit, and it was also the option used to “seduce” people in bars and clubs to be able to feed on them without attracting attention.) Come to think of it, although I used the plural in the previous sentence, it should be amended: there was a man that could only be seduced by a man, and a woman that couldn’t be seduced by a woman. For the most part it followed the same traditional game roles noted in the article. The “people” I mentioned in the parenthetical line above were always women.
It was a start, but the gaming industry has a ways to go.