Pixiepalace

I read this fascinating article about testosterone and competition in games yesterday and it got me thinking about a lot of things. One of the biggest things that struck me as I read was the discussion of player behavior after a victory. The paper talks generally about how “if there is some way for winners to communicate, losers are subjected to degrading displays of status.” The author discusses how this kind of crowing about a victory makes the losers feel worse and tends to cause them to stop playing the game. That got me thinking about gender dynamics in competitive games like this where the players can communicate with each other. And realistically, there are very few competitive videogames these days where the players don’t have the ability to easily communicate either through text or voice based chat systems. I think that extrapolating from this article can help explain one of the big, and yet basically ignored, problems with bringing more women into “hardcore” gaming.

The language of smack talk itself is extremely problematic from a woman’s point of view. A lot of it is extremely gendered and sexual in nature, and women never come out on top when it comes to smack talk language (pun intended). Losers are told they are “pussies”, that they “play like a girl” and to “bend over and take it” or “suck it” (there are worse ones, but I don’t feel like filling my blog with them). Winners have any number of euphemisms for testicles, “stuck it to them/you” and are “The Man”. It’s pretty clear that being a girl is a bad thing in the culture of competitive videogames, at least metaphorically. So what happens when the player in question actually is a girl or a woman?

To begin with, it’s sometimes hard not to feel unwanted and unwelcome in a culture filled with this language. To be the woman who can push past that and play with the big boys anyway (again, pun intended), you almost have to be willing to be twice as good as anyone else and able to somehow reconcile being female with that skill. Some do this by talking as much smack as the guys, in their sexist language, thus sort of adopting the mantle of “one of the guys”. Others basically stay silent and just let the guys josh each other about being beaten by a girl. Some almost get apologetic about being female, as if they have so internalized the language that they themselves are ashamed of being women (thankfully, this seems to be more and more rare as more and more women gamers gain visibility).

Many women (although not all) play a different kind of social game in their everyday lives than most men do. Deborah Tannen has explained how for many men (although, again, not all), social interactions are about forming and negotiating a hierarchy where the most dominant reach the top and it’s not very desirable to be on the bottom. Women, on the other hand, strive for connections. It’s not that they don’t want to be or think they are better than the next person, it’s that it’s very important to at least keep up the facade of a level playing field. It’s why apologies are so vital to female relationships, they allow things to return to the status quo by (implicitly) acknowledging a wrong done or invoking empathetic feelings.

This comes into play for some women when they lose and are “subjected to degrading displays of status.” For some women, this almost violent dressing down is actually painful. Because of the impulse they have to avoid social conflict, it’s actually a very distressing experience to be so spoken to. In female relationships, women will often assume that such responses are somehow their own fault, and this reaction becomes so ingrained that it carries over into other experiences. Add to that the gendered language and such an experience can easily go from distressing to frightening.

And then you’ve probably lost that player, and rightly so. We’re taught as women to avoid frightening situations, not to fight back and to stick together. So no matter how much fun the game itself might be, if the community provides a frightening experience for the woman, every instinct she has is probably going to tell her not to stay and not to come back. And then we come to what happens when a woman sees such things happening to other people.

When a woman sees something like that happen to her friend, she’s likely to be distressed like her friend, although to a lesser extent. And she’s going to leave with the friend. They’ve learned this is a dangerous place to stay away from. When she sees it happen to someone else, there’s a good chance she’ll empathize and realize that it could easily happen to her. And then, again, you’ve lost her (and that time she didn’t even have to have the experience, just witness it).

We’re taught to avoid danger and that danger is everywhere. And for women, avoiding danger makes a lot of sense. Games may not pose a real, physical danger, but they can cause us to feel that way. And why would you want to feel that way if you don’t have to? This doesn’t mean that games shouldn’t be competitive. Competition is good and women like competition as much as men do. And it’s not to say that games that allow communication are bad. Communication adds a lot to a game’s appeal, as MMOs and Facebook games prove daily. It’s just to say that perhaps there’s more to attracting and retaining female players than just making more appealing games and marketing to them better. The attitudes of the gaming community itself also needs to change.

I’m a small woman. In many ways I like this. I fit in airplane seats comfortably. I can buy kids’ t-shirts, which are always cheaper. But being small isn’t always easy. One problem that isn’t serious but is very annoying is that I am unable to comfortably play the vast majority of videogames for very long. Most controllers, computer mice, headsets and even keyboards are not designed for hands and heads as small as mine. My hands are not unnaturally small, either. They are proportional to my size (which means they are larger than those of most children and you can usually buy gloves that fit me without having to look too long). And my head is normal too. I can walk into a store and buy a hat that fits without a problem. Yet electronics remain an issue.

I have become increasingly convinced that more women need to be in the business of designing and creating videogame and computer hardware. I believe this about most electronics, actually. The reason I say this is that the vast majority of these things are designed for people with large hands and large heads and in our culture men tend to be larger than women. Since the vast majority of computer engineers are still men, I’m guessing that one part of the problem is that they are designing for themselves. What’s comfortable for me is usually not comfortable at all for my husband and what is comfortable for him is often either almost unusable for me or gives me hand cramps pretty quickly.

Now, this could also be fixed by the companies that market and sell these products realizing that women (and children and even smaller men) use their products as well and might buy more of them if they were more comfortable to use. I honestly believe that more women might game if it was easier to get smaller game controllers. I’m not saying that all women are little or that game controllers are sexist or even that women are consciously not playing because the controllers are too big for them, but I do know that I’ve met more than one woman who lists among her reasons for not enjoying videogames “they make my hands hurt”. I think it’s more an issue of the people creating and selling the products not thinking about it.

The most common reason I hear for not designing videogame electronics with smaller people in mind is that the core market for the videogame industry is young men, who by and large don’t have a problem with the size things come in now but would have issues if things were designed for smaller people. I find this argument to be kind of dumb because it is based on the assumption that you can only make things in one size. Console controllers, computer peripherals (mice, keyboards, controllers, etc.) and headsets can all be unplugged and interchanged without it making any difference to the system itself or to the game. So why couldn’t there be different sized peripherals to choose from?

It is possible to find smaller PC peripherals these days, but they are still very much in the minority (in a wall of mice at Best Buy I found two mice small enough for me and both were basic “laptop mice”). They are often of lower quality as well. I have yet to find a headset that fits my head that is of a higher quality than those I had with my discman in high school. This may have something to do with the fact that I have yet to find a headset priced over $25 that fits my head. But it is possible to at least find some options. When it comes to consoles it becomes nearly impossible. To find a smaller controller you must locate a third-party company that makes one, since none of the actual companies that make the consoles make smaller controllers, and then hope that it is both still being made and available somewhere. To get me a small XBox 360 controller, my husband had to go on eBay and pay more than $50 for one because only one company ever made any and they aren’t making them any more.

It may seem like this is a specialized concern, but it really isn’t. Women make up 50% of the potential market and children’s games come out on these platforms too. If it was easier and more comfortable for women to play, it’s likely that more would. It would also make family gaming more possible, since you could play games with your kids more easily on the same console you play Halo 3 or Mass Effect on. If consoles are more versatile, that makes them more marketable. I can imagine an X-Box 360 ad showing a guy playing an FPS with his buddies, shifting to the guy playing a cartoony adventure game with his kids and wife, shifting again to show the wife playing a puzzle game via X-Box Live with online friends and lastly shifting to the couple playing an RPG together. It could be a “build your own system” package that comes with a customizable group of controllers and a game chosen from a small selection or a push from Microsoft to show off the options their awesome peripherals give you. It won’t work if the controllers are only comfortable for the guy, though.

I also know that what I’m proposing costs more, but the potential gain could be huge. If the gaming industry really wants to reach a new segment of the market, a segment with incredible buying power and the willingness to spend a lot on entertainment if they feel it’s worth it, they need to do better than pink controllers and Pop-Cap game ports. Women are a huge potential market. HUGE. But even if you start making games for women (real games for women, not pink dress-up games), it’s not going to work if women can only play them for short periods of time before getting painful hand cramps. Think about how to take the basic building blocks of the industry – the very hardware the games are played on – and make it more accessible and fun for women. And that means not only getting more women to design the hardware, but getting more women in more shapes and sizes to play with it and give feedback.

This week over at the G.I.R.L. blog, Emily “Domino” Taylor (the brilliant woman behind a lot of the crafting in Everquest II) wrote a great piece about character creation. In conversations with Michael I’ve brought up a lot how important character creation and the appearance of avatars are to a lot of women, especially those just getting into gaming. We’ve had numerous discussions about the races in World of Warcraft and how the gender portrayals of the game bug me, which in many ways baffles him (and I understand that, it’s not obvious why it would be so irritating). We rarely even bring up games like Age of Conan, which I watched the intro to the character creator of and decided I would never play. Ever.

I believe that character creation is a fundamentally important part of any game (not just MMOs) where you have a unique avatar. I also believe that many games have very poor character creators and dreadful avatar options, but these things are important and should be treated as such. As Ms. Taylor points out:

“Humans are hardwired to draw instant and unconscious conclusions about other people based on their appearances, and if the only thing I have to represent me within a game is my character’s appearance, then I want to be absolutely sure that I’m comfortable with the way it represents me. If I am not given sufficient customization options to give me a choice that I’m comfortable with, then I’ll never really feel truly comfortable playing that game — or, as in the previous example, I won’t play it at all.”

She’s specifically talking about needing to be comfortable with the impression your avatar makes on other people, but it’s just as important that your avatar is something that you’re comfortable looking at for long periods of time. You’re playing her, if you aren’t happy with how she appears, it’s not likely that you’ll play for long. In a game where there are other people (like an MMO) it does influence how you are treated as well. I’d bet that the sexy elves and humans get harassed a lot more than the stocky dwarfs and orcs in World of Warcraft. But not everyone wants to play an orc just to escape harassment, and they shouldn’t have to.

It’s not just about having options, although having options helps. It can be ok if there’s only one body type in the game or if there’s only a couple of hair color choices. The problem is when the avatar you end up with, even when you make all the best choices you can for yourself, isn’t one your comfortable with. When it comes to videogames, the biggest issue here is often sexiness. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with sex appeal, but it has limits. Women in videogames are, by and large, conventionally sexy and designed to appeal to heterosexual men. They are pretty much all pin-up worthy and often dressed like it. That can be fine, but it’s the overwhelming norm and when it’s the only option and someone isn’t comfortable presenting themselves as sexy (especially if it’s an MMO and other people will see this avatar), that becomes a real problem. In Domino’s words: “Of course, it’s good to have the option to look sexy … but to be forced to do so all the time against one’s will is an entirely different thing.”

There are a lot of different elements of an avatar, too. Yes, hair and faces are important pieces, but it doesn’t end there. Most have some kind of skin color choices (although this often presents a problem as well, since overwhelmingly the options are ten shades of Caucasian white and sometimes one or two darker skin tones). Some games have height sliders or body size sliders (which often amount to little more than “breast size” sliders). Others let you customize the outfit you wear. In all of these choices it’s important to consider the players. Yes, put in the option to make a sexy pin-up girl, but make the option to make a normal looking girl and an athletic tomboy kind of girl too. Posture is important. If I don’t want a sexy character, I’m probably going to be uncomfortable with the avatar who stands like the elf in the image above. After all, if she’s standing like that in the character creator, who knows what she’ll do once we get into the actual game?

Think about what elements get left out. It makes sense to put limits on the customization of characters. Too many body types or hair that’s too elaborate can easily become a problem when programing in armor and clothing into the game. But if you’re only going to have one body shape, consider what it will be. It’s easier for a player to sex up a small breasted avatar than to tone down one with bouncing beach balls strapped to her chest. Not all players are white and not all non-white people have the same skin tone. Not only does “black” come in a huge array of shades, but so does “Asian”, “Latino”, “Native American”, etc. So consider having more than simply ten shades of white and maybe even having some hair styles that aren’t seen on white people (or at least, not often and not without a lot of help).

“The fact remains however that the character creation options do still reflect the priorities and attitudes of the game team. At some point someone still decided, “THIS appearance option is the one we will do first, and THAT option is just not important enough that we can’t launch without it.” It may not have been maliciously intended, but it still represents what ultimate value judgments were made about what was seen as an essential feature and what wasn’t.”

If you decide to not include female avatars at all (and let’s be honest, there really aren’t many games at all – I can’t come up with any – where there are only female avatars, while games with only male avatars are pretty common), consider what that says. Not only will we notice if there aren’t any female NPCs or if they’re all stereotypes, but we’ll notice if we can’t play a girl. Fable II was hugely popular and had a huge female gamer fan base, but I have yet to meet a woman who played Fable. I’m absolutely certain they exist, but of all the many women I’ve met (me included) who played and loved Fable II, not one played or even intends to play Fable. A big reason I’ve heard given for that is that you can’t play a woman. I’m told it’s an amazing game and it was sold on the concept that you could be and do anything, but the women looking at it noticed that somehow “anything” didn’t include being female. Now, whether that was something that they just didn’t have time for or was an intentional decision I really don’t know. Fundamentally, though, it doesn’t matter. They decided that it wasn’t important enough to be necessary for the game and that tells me something about the game itself. Fable isn’t an isolated case, either (it’s just an easy example to pull out).

Character creation is hard, but avatars are so important! What the characters are going to look like is often one of the first things we are shown about a new game and how many awesome options you have for your character is frequently one of the most heavily touted benefits early on. That’s not accidental, people really care about that. It may seem like a part of the game that players will only see briefly, but what they make there is vital to their experience with the game. If I can’t make a character who feels like what I want her to, it materially damages my enjoyment of the game. I’m going to be looking at this character for a long time (assuming I stick with the game), so it needs to be something I like looking at. Remember, women aren’t heterosexual guys and thus it shouldn’t be expected that they’ll necessarily be happy with the same things. Personally, I want my characters to feel heroic in games where they are heroes, so it bothers me when they stand like teenage girls and don’t look like they have enough muscle in their arms to lift, much less swing, a sword. I’m not playing to be a sex kitten, I’m playing to be a hero and I have as much right to be a hero as the guys do. If I end up looking like a sex kitten while I’m trying to fight goblins, chances are I’m not going to play your game for very long.

Let’s play a game! Pretend you’re a girl and you’ve decided that you want to buy a handheld gaming system. You like gaming and would really like a system that’s portable and versatile (it has to have more and better gaming options than your cell phone, anyway). Luckily for you, Sony recently came out with a special campaign and product deal aimed at girls – Girlz Play Too. This is a special website to highlight a new PSP designed with girl gamers in mind! Sounds like just what you’re looking for, right? Let’s check it out!

There are several parts to the website, which is set apart from the rest of the Sony product website and not easy to find from there (because clearly the boy part of the website needs to be kept completely unaware that this girl part even existed or the industry would collapse). To start with, there are the products themselves, which is nice since you’re here to shop. The Lilac colored PSP is only available in the “Hannah Montana PSP Entertainment Pack”, meaning you get the Hannah Montana: Rock Out the Show game and a video with three episodes from the Hannah Montana show with the system and there isn’t any way to buy a purple PSP without them. But that’s such a girly game, I certainly can’t imagine there being anyone who might not want the mediocre Hannah Montana game but still want a Lilac colored PSP, can you? Ok, so the game is cool and you’re excited about the cute color of the system, but this is a fairly major purchase so you should make sure it’s worth it before you buy.

So, you like the look of the Lilac PSP, but need a little more convincing. You probably want to be able to play more than just the Hannah Montana game, right? Not much point in buying the $200 system for only one game, anyway. So what other games are available? Well, Sony is happy to tell you! The Girlz Play Too website has a section called “Games Girlz Play”. (For some reason, “girls” is perpetually spelled with a “z” – I have no idea why, but it’s a common and annoying thing in the gaming world and seems to be a misguided attempt to seem cool to girls while really being incredibly patronizing.) Unfortunately, there are apparently only six PSP games that Sony could find in their entire PSP library that are appropriate for girls: the aforementioned Hannah Montana game, Patapon 2, LocoRoco 2, Petz Dogz Family, Ponyo Fantasy Golf and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (the movie tie-in game). No other games are listed, nor is there a link anywhere to the library of PSP games suggesting that there even might be more options.

Well, it’s starting to look like this wouldn’t be such a hot $200 investment (a library of six games, and not even six super awesome games, hardly makes it worth the price). Maybe it has other cool features, right? So you click on the tab labeled “Explore the Features of the PSP “. This page is lilac colored and draws itself out as if with pencils before resolving into photographs of a girl surrounded by PSPs doing different things. Hovering over the images one at a time tells you that your PSP can “download games, movies and more” (no details are provided), “view your photos in a cool slide show” (no idea how the photos get on the PSP in the first place), “talk to friends with Skype ” and there are some video trailers of games that play when hovered over. No details are given for any of this and, considering the pages of features listed for PSPs on the regular (for boys) site, you start to wonder if your PSP is somehow less powerful than those, because even your cell phone has a better list of features than this.

Ok, so it’s not looking good for your lilac PSP. But there are two more tabs, so maybe Sony can still convince you. It seemed like a good idea, right? The next tab is “Customize Your Very Own PSP System”. That sounds cool. If you could really design your own case for the handheld system that would be awesome! There are lots of patterns and overlay images and colors to choose from and you really can make your own design. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean anything. All you can do with it is upload it to a gallery. The real PSPs all look the same (although supposedly they come with stickers to personalize them). So, no luck there.

One more tab, one more try. The last tab says “Which game character are you?” Um… ok. It’s a quiz full of questions like “you’re planning a weekend with your friends, what sounds like the most fun?” and “when you fill out your diary, you…” At the end, you are told what game character (from the six girl games) you are most like. So, the quiz is cute, but also really stereotyped (BFFs and shopping and all that) and seems to have no point other than to suggest a game you should play (out of the only six girl games that exist in the PSP library).

Hmm… well… ok… so as cute as the lilac PSP is (and it is pretty cute), and even though you’re a girl and you do play too, it just doesn’t seem like this is going to work. I mean, why spend the $200 on a PSP which has only six games you could play and so few features when you could spend less than $150 on a cute pink or blue or red or whatever color you want Nintendo DS which has tons of games that are good for girls? The lilac was nice, but there just isn’t enough there to make it worth it! Being a girl doesn’t mean you need fewer or less awesome games and features. Maybe if Sony makes or finds more good games or includes a more widely appealing game with the system it would be worth it, but right now it feels like they’ve aimed for a very specific target and still missed the mark. Oh well, no big loss for us since right now there are other options!

Power fantasies are a big deal these days. As much as videogames might come under attack from the media and activist groups, they also draw in new players from all around the world every year and many games are understood to be such fantasies. Tons of research has been done on power struggles in social interactions and communications (Deborah Tannen is the best writer I know of on this subject) and superheroes like Spider-Man and Superman are often seen as healthy male power fantasies. In short, we understand that men want to be strong and able to beat up bad guys and save the world. And if you think about it, the appeal is pretty easy to see. Why wouldn’t a guy want to be someone who’s able to be always in control, always able to protect the people he loves and unquestionably always on the side of right? So here’s the tricky question: what is a woman’s power fantasy?

The feminist answer would be “the same thing”, but the reality is always more complicated than that. Yes, women want those things too. That pretty much goes without saying. Except, sadly, it needs saying because many people don’t understand that a woman would want to protect her loved ones and be able to retain control of a situation and be always doing the right thing as well. So the question becomes, why do women want those things too? More than that, why do women need them?

Something that I forget a lot of times is that while women live lives always having to be somewhat on alert, always careful, men not only don’t have to do that, but they very often aren’t even aware that women do. Jennifer de Guzman wrote a brilliant post on her LiveJournal about this that really articulates it well:

As I wrote in my reply, I am kind of astounded that some men don’t see why physical empowerment would clearly be attractive for women. I think it’s intriguing to note that women often like the hot women who kick ass as much, if not more, than men do. Here’s what I think is behind that: As women, we are nearly constantly aware of physical threats. And those threats often are of being violated sexually. When I used to go to campus for night classes and people warned me to “be careful,” what they are saying was, essentially, “avoid getting raped.”

Now, what if, what if, as a woman, you could walk around, be sexually attractive and not have to feel threatened? What if all the rage you feel about women being victimized and brutalized could be channeled into pure, righteous ass-kicking? And, because you’re a woman, you could possibly do that ass-kicking without being seen as a testosterone Steven-Seagal-esque meathead. Ass-kicking fantasies for men are more about proving and retaining power, I think. For women, they’re about finding and asserting power when they’re not expected to have any.

That’s exactly it. That’s a really big reason why women, and even little girls, need power fantasies and superheroes of their own. But as brilliant as this post was, what made me really think about this was the reaction it elicited from Michael May over at Amazon Princess:

That makes so much sense I’m ashamed I never thought of it, at least not in those terms. I’ve been operating under the hypothesis that the attraction of Wonder Woman for women has a lot to do with confidence (and argued that that also makes her attractive to men – or at least to men like me), but Jennifer’s thoughts go deeper than that and explore at least one of the reasons why Wonder Woman can afford to be so confident. She’s gorgeous and she can damn well take care of herself.

So, yes, women do want and need superheroes. Little girls need superheroes. This isn’t to say that boys don’t need them, but why can’t we have both? If there can be three ongoing comics at the same time about Batman’s adventures in Gotham, surly there can be a little more room for real superheroines! There are so few comics highlighting superheroines (and at the rate Marvel’s going, fewer all the time) and the ones that do exist often feel like the neglected side projects that either got hastily put together while the writers focus on their real stories or are assigned to second-string artists and writers and never promoted in any way, giving them no chance to gain a real following. Even flagship characters get dropped and forgotten (how many times has Spider-Girl lost her book? when was the last time one of the DC editors even mentioned Wonder Woman’s book publicly?).

Women deserve more heroes. We deserve more games with heroes we can see ourselves in (and yes, if you read the above you’ll see that we do like them beautiful, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they all have to be naked and have DD-cup breasts, beauty is more complicated than that). We deserve more comics with kick-ass heroines. We deserve heroines with real female friendships, since women do occasionally interact with each other. I’d love – *LOVE* – to read a comic that passed the Bechdel Test, but since Birds of Prey ended I haven’t found one. I’d love to see as many little girls running around pretending to be Batgirl, Spider-Girl, Wonder Woman and Supergirl as I see little boys running around pretending to be Spider-Man, Superman, the Hulk and Batman. Maybe if more guys saw that girls could be heroes, more women would actually be safer in real life too. You never know.

I thought that there had been enough big incidents of public sexism surrounding this year’s San Diego Comic Con, but apparently it needed more. EA has a contest running to promote their upcoming game Dante’s Inferno that requires “acts of lust” against their own booth babes. Participants are asked to photograph their “acts of lust” and submit the images to EA. The prize is a “chest of booty” and “dinner and a sinful night with two hot girls”.

So, the first thing I noticed about this contest is that even though it doesn’t say women can’t enter, it’s really only designed for men (and I’ll bet all the winners are guys, even if some women do enter). So… women wouldn’t want to win their games? That’s patently untrue. And supposedly there are more women at Comic Con this year than ever before, so by not including them in this contest they are excluding a pretty big potential customer base.

Worse than making it a contest only designed for men, though, is the fact that it’s such a frightening example of misogyny gone awry. We still live in an inherently patriarchal society and women every day are forced to deal with the ramifications of the male gaze. I know that the male gaze is something that gets disputed a lot, but it really is a real thing. If you want to learn more about what it is, I recommend this great post from Gender Across Borders that explains it. To see how prevalent and scary it can be, I recommend the many, many, Holla Back blogs based in various cities around the world.

EA is not only condoning behavior that dehumanizes women, but they are encouraging and rewarding it. This is socially irresponsible and morally repugnant. I don’t bring up morals a whole lot because I think it’s kind of a dicey subject, but this one kind of pushes me over the edge. We live in a rape culture and this kind of a contest reinforces that. I know that these models likely went into this job knowing about this contest, but I also know that some of the women to take booth babe jobs really need the jobs, regardless of how degrading they are (it’s better than stripping or worse, right?) and that women are told that being objectified is good for them (when we know, scientifically, that it’s not). Saying that it’s ok because they went into it with their eyes open doesn’t make it better.

I’m disgusted by this whole thing. It’s horrifying that in 2009 this kind of thing is still happening. And with things like this going on and girls of gaming issues of Playboy and of gaming magazines and ads where the women are almost naked and posed like pin-up girls we still have the gaming industry wondering why women aren’t playing their games more. Gee… I wonder…

Seriously, the industry can do better. We deserve better. It’s hurting men as well as women and it’s things like this that make me want to stop gaming altogether (or maybe stick to just casual games with no human characters at all). If it really seems like women friendly marketing is so damn hard, try consulting with companies like Womenk!nd who specialize in not only helping marketers reach out to women, but also in tailoring their campaigns not to alienate women. The resources are out there and I’d love to see some more gaming companies using them!

Edit: Michelle from A Midwife in Training also wrote about this and she pointed out that the language on the contest includes any booth babe, not just the ones at EA’s booth. This means that even if the EA models went into this Con knowing about this contest, there are other models who did not that are still being directly affected by this. That makes this even more horrible.

EA has also issued a really pathetic response to the outcry about this contest that basically amounts to “it’s all in good fun, so why the big fuss?”

A story was posted yesterday on nola.com about a recent study published by a professor from Loyola University concerning social rules in the game City of Heroes/City of Villains. Dr. David Myers has been having a character named “Twixt” play in player vs. player zones for some time on three different servers in ways that go decidedly against how the majority of the player population plays the game. I have some real problems with the ethics of his experiment. I believe that the ethics of this paper should be the real issue, so here’s a look at some of them.

Myers states in his paper, Play and Punishment: The Sad and Curious Case of Twixt, that social rule-breaking (Garfinkeling) is easier to do in an MMO because it has “rules governing behavior” that are “objective and measurable and, most importantly, uniform” (pages 3-4). He’s correct in that MMOs have rules, but I think that he’s incorrect in two ways here. First, the rules are far from “objective and measurable and, most importantly, uniform”, they are enforced by humans inconsistently and only when reported by humans. Second, he ignored the social rules of the game, even the explicit ones, and only followed the mechanical rules. The rule the Twixt broke consistently was the first one listed in the City of Heroes Rules of Conduct: “While playing City of Heroes , you must respect the rights of others and their rights to play and enjoy the game.”

Other people’s right to enjoy the game is really what Myers was infringing on in how he played Twixt. He disrupted even structured social activities like “fight clubs”. Such activities are well within the bounds of comic book lore and set up, even if not officially by the creators of the game, as environments where heroes and villains mix freely (pages 8-9). When other players objected to his ruining their enjoyment of the game, Myers seems to not understand why they object. He simply tries to point out what happened and how it’s fair and legal. Not all objections were articulated well, but that’s the reality of MMOs. Somehow even getting kicked out of his supergroup didn’t get through to him, he laughed that the other player was upset at his behavior (page 13). One player tells him “thanks for ruining the game for me” (page 14) and, again, Myers doesn’t seem to understand this.

Part of the problem seems to be that Myers appears to only see how Twixt’s actions impact Twixt. He turns off Twixt’s communications channels because of all the hatred (page 14), not thinking about the fact that other people can’t turn off his intrusions into their experiences as easily. He does quote one forum post that explains much of the problem, but other than saying it’s interesting and less confrontational than usual, he still doesn’t seem to get it.

“Twixt seems totally unable to comprehend other players as real people, and plays his own solipsistic game deliberately making others miserable.
…
I truly believe he simply does not understand the feelings that lay behind people shouting and screaming at him in RV, and just continues to soldier on with his mission, wondering why the other Heroes aren’t helping him rid RV of the bad guys with a sincerity that can almost make you sympathise with him.” (page 15)

He also tells us, late in the paper as he’s discussing what his study found, that “the most important negative consequence of Twixt’s behavior in the eyes of other players, then, was not his failure to achieve game goals – Twixt’s opponents “failed” this test more often than he did — but his failure to garner and sustain social connections: the most repellent consequence of Twixt’s behavior was that it made him unlikable.” (pages 19-20) That his actions made Twixt unlikeable is not their “most important negative consequence… in the eyes of other players”, however, especially since Myers doesn’t seem to care that Twixt was unlikable. The most important consequence to the players involved was that he was impeding their fun. Myers doesn’t seem to be able to see past his own experience, as the forum poster observed (and as becomes evident very early in the paper). He doesn’t talk about his fellow players as if they are real people with real feelings, simply as if they are social constructs with which to play and try to elicit responses.

While it is common to view the internet as a place of anonymity, every avatar and every screen name has a person behind it (bots notwithstanding). I was horrified by Myers’ study. He adhered to absolutely no ethical standards while conducting this study and the implications of that are very scary. Ethical standards are there for a reason. They attempt to ensure that the subjects of a study are protected from undue harm. I know how I would have felt if I had encountered a player like Twixt while playing a game and the comments of his fellow players confirm that many of them felt emotional stress, possibly to a considerable degree, from what he was doing. It certainly seems like they were in no way protected from harm.

If you think about it, what Myers was doing as Twixt was akin to cyber bullying. His victims and many of the gamers now reading about this have called him a griefer, which is a gamer bully. Is it really ok for a professor of sociology to be bullying people, even if that wasn’t his original intention, just to see what happens?

Myers also published their screen and character names in his paper, another breech of ethics, which states that a subjects’ privacy must be protected. Just because they are online doesn’t make them not a part of a person’s identity. As the internet and gaming become ever more a part of our lives, our screen names and gamertags become ever more a part of our identities. They should be protected in such a study the same way a subject’s name would be.

I absolutely believe that sociologists should be studying MMOs and Virtual Worlds, they have the potential to yield all kinds of interesting information. I firmly believe, however, that the rules of ethics still need to apply. There are still real people at stake, even if the researcher never knows anything more about them than what their avatar looks like. Real people deserve to be treated ethically, even when they are participating virtually. I think Myers committed a huge breach of ethics with this study and I think that that’s the real issue that should be discussed about this paper.

- For more information on research ethics in the social sciences and humanities, check out the resources at ResearchEthics.ca

A few days ago Leigh Alexander posted this video to Sexy Videogameland that was made by Daniel Floyd with her assistance. It’s a fantastic look at some of the reasons women don’t play big blockbuster videogames. I highly recommend watching it. My thoughts follow.

The section that I want to talk about in this video is a little more than half-way through. Everything before that point is great too, but I don’t particularly feel the need to comment on it at this moment. What I do want to talk about is the section about marketing. Mr. Floyd and Ms. Alexander have managed to directly address the biggest problem with the marketing of female characters here. No matter how smart, strong, interesting and well-written a character is, it all becomes irrelevant if she is marketed as a sex object.

I wanted to specifically point this out and bring it up because one of the most common arguments you hear when the issue of how women characters are portrayed comes up is “but she’s really a great, powerful character, you’d know that if you played the game!” That’s lovely and often is very true, but the point here is that it really doesn’t matter. No matter how fantastic the character is, how empowering or how heroic, if she’s posing naked in Playboy or being featured in Play’s Girls of Gaming that makes it pretty hard to take her seriously. It’s even harder for me to look at that character and believe that female players are being invited to play her game at all.

And yes, you do need to invite women in. This does not mean that the only way to get women to play is to build a big “kiddie pool” out of Imagine games and pink controllers. I’m starting to think that such things are doing more to keep women out than to invite them in. Making “girl games” does more to label everything else as “boy games” than anything else possibly could. Think about it, if The Sims is a “girl game”, what makes it so? And what does that mean? Does it mean that only girls can play it or that girls can only play games with that label on them? If it doesn’t mean either of those things, why have the label on it at all?

But this isn’t to say that the Imagine games or The Sims shouldn’t be made. They should. They have fans, just like Halo or BioShock do. In fact, The Sims has considerably more fans than either of those games. And Bejeweled has probably even more. So why aren’t they taken seriously? And that’s the second point I wanted to talk about from the video. The video claims that casual games could be gateway drugs to bring women into… what? “Real” games? I don’t even know how to phrase that. And that’s the problem. What makes Halo any more real or valid than Bejeweled?

The gaming community has gotten very elitist. We remember things like Pac-Man with nostalgia, but we scoff at modern puzzle games in the same vein like Zuma. Why is that? What made Pac-Man any more a “real” game than Zuma? And how can we honestly say that Halo is a more valid game than Mystery Case Files – Return to Ravenhurst, which is supposedly Pop Cap Games’ most popular download, implying it has more players than Halo ever has? How can we honestly say that my husband is more of a gamer than his mother, when I’m pretty sure she puts in as many hours gaming a week as he does, except that he’s playing Fallout and she’s playing Mystery Case Files? Why doesn’t her game count? It should.

And the fact that it doesn’t might be a reason women aren’t becoming gamers too. They already are gamers and perhaps the fact that they aren’t being treated as such doesn’t make them feel like becoming any more interested in the industry than they already are. My mother loves her Nintendo DS and the games on it and was very proud of herself for being a gamer, but if you told her she wasn’t one just because she pretty much sticks to games like Professor Layton, she would probably be annoyed. Maybe girls stop gaming, or at least don’t play the types of games the industry would like to lure them to (the ones that cost $50 or more a pop), because they get told “oh, girls aren’t as good at this stuff, they’re good at puzzle games and stuff”. Well, if you don’t think I’ll be good at it and no one will want to play with me, why should I spend the money or try this again?

It’s not rocket science, but there are a lot of pieces to the puzzle. No one change is going to suddenly bring women into “real” gaming and balance the statistics of who plays. But just because you can’t fix all of it doesn’t mean you can’t help with parts of it. In the industry? Great, work from that angle to make more women-friendly games and characters marketed as if to women, not as if to the readers of Playboy. Just a regular gamer? Awesome, invite women you know to play, don’t condescend to them, treat them like they are every bit as good as any other player. And no matter what, don’t think that just because a girl is a gamer she must be looking to hook up with a gamer. It’s a hobby just like any other. Guy gamers marry and date non-gamer girls all the time. Why should girls be any different? Don’t expect her to fall for you just because you like the same games.

It’s going to take a while for things to change, but that’s just more reason to be working towards it now.

A few days ago the art director from Wizards of the Coast, Jon Schindehette, wrote a post on his blog about halflings. He posted some concept images of this core race from Dungeons and Dragons as well as information about their physiology, typical outlook and environment. This is always cool to see because it gives us, as players, some insight into what the designers are thinking about our game and it gives us bullet-pointed background information, which can be useful.

I was a little taken aback, however, by the art itself. I don’t know who the artist was (there is no signature and Schindehette does not credit it). The first thing I thought when I saw the piece above (the first one in his post) was “it’s a guy with breasts”.

You see, men and women are built very differently, and the difference is bigger than ‘women have breasts’. To start with, everyone has a center of balance. For men, it’s up in their shoulders. For women, it’s down in their hips. This dictates in large part the way we stand and the way we move (particularly the way we walk). The woman in that image does not look like her center of balance is in her hips, she looks like it’s in her shoulders.

Beyond that, she’s going to have other problems from having such tiny hips. A very athletic woman’s hips are usually around the same size around as her upper torso (where her breasts are). This is important because she has organs that need to fit there, she needs to be able to menstruate and she possibly needs to use those hips to give birth (narrow hips make that harder). I assume halflings have all of those needs as well (we’re told that they’re built like small humans, so presumably they reproduce like small humans). This woman is going to have serious problems. Oh, and she lives in a place without modern medicine.

Don’t get me wrong here, I really like seeing this art and I think a lot of it is very good (I was thrilled to see two women in great armor lower down). And I don’t want to see that muscular guy next to a waif of a girl who has no business being an adventurer, because that’s what these characters are, not just regular people. But I do want her to be female, not just a guy with breasts. Women are not just men with breasts. There can be a whole range of heroic women who look nothing like Marvel’s stick figure pin-up girls, but who are also female. Yeah, armor is going to hide a lot of that female figure, but she’s stripped down to a loin cloth. That shouldn’t be the problem here!

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that while I’m generally thrilled with a lot of the art coming out of WOTC right now, this shows me that there’s still something to be desired. Honestly, though, I’d rather this problem than the opposite (see nearly any cover from Marvel or almost any screenshot from Age of Conan).

I doubt it will come as a big surprise to anyone that superheroes and all things related to them are a common topic of conversation in my life right now. For the most part, these have been fun, light discussions about superhero lore, favorite types of characters and storylines, even a discussion about the colors of the Lantern Corps and the implications of that recent breakdown. I had two discussions yesterday, however, that got me thinking about different kinds of powers and how perhaps passive powers aren’t given enough respect. I really want to thank K., in particular, since it was the discussion with her that got me thinking about powers in this way. I’m going to start playing City of Heroes again this week with some friends and the discussion I had with her really put me into an interesting frame of mind when I was sitting down to consider what powers to take for a new character in the game.

Super powers can be categorized in many, many different kinds of ways, but one way of looking at them is as “active” or “passive”. “Active” powers are powers that act outwardly and upon something else – laser eyebeams that shoot things, flame powers that burn things, lantern rings that create things, and sonic calls that stun people and break objects are all examples of powers that act on something other than the superhero who wields them. “Passive” powers act for the user, most commonly as protective or telepathic types of powers, and do not typically forcibly affect something other than the person possessing the power – telepathy, shapechanging, force fields and invisibility are all typical “passive” powers.

The thing about powers, though, is that they are really only tools. In the hands of an idiot a flame shooter will still make fire, but what if you give it to a genius? What might she do with it? Probably more than just make fire, but whatever she does is still likely to involve flames.

Now what about a force field? The most obvious use of it is to protect. You put up a force field and nothing hits you. But what if you make it more portable, as Violet did in The Incredibles? It’s not really anything more than just a simple force field, but it’s hard to deny that surrounding a speedster with it was a clever use (combining two passive powers, by the way). But what if you wanted to do even more with it? What else can a force field do? Well, as Sue Storm illustrates in the panels here, it can easily be used to punch holes in things. She’s also been known to use her force fields to stop up the air passages of her enemies, and to block the passages to their hearts. Clever uses indeed, and not likely what the writers who originally decided to give her the power intended!

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Superspeed is a passive power, but the Flash can do any number of amazing things with it, the most common of which is creating funnel clouds that lift or push things and people around (including himself). Rogue of the X-Men has what is arguably the most passive power of all – she “borrows” other people’s powers. This allows her to do some pretty amazing things, however, and she is considered one of the most powerful members of the team because of her ability to turn the tide of a battle so effectively with her unique power. The Martian Manhunter of the Justice League is telepathic and telekinetic and this allows him to not only know if someone is telling him the truth, but also to find hidden memories they didn’t even know they had and to shapeshift into incredibly powerful creatures (dragon-like serpents are a favorite of his).

And yet, passive powers are generally not as desirable as active ones. The established characters have a pretty good spread of both (although the female characters tend to be more likely to have passive powers than the male ones). But open a superhero themed video game and try to make a character with passive powers and you will find that it’s extremely difficult. Superspeed is about the only one reliably there. Force fields, shapeshifting, any kind of telepathy (even telekinesis), all are largely unheard of in videogames.

I can definitely see how passive powers could be more difficult to program, especially since effective use of them generally involves some creativity, but they seem absent even in their uncreative forms. Force fields could be very useful, even if you can’t kill or push someone with them. Controlled shapeshifting could be a fun element as well, especially since it could give a character access to a set of powers they only have while in their other form. Personally, I’d love to see these. I’d love to see more interesting powers and more creative uses of traditional powers in general. And perhaps, when it gets right down to it, that’s why I find passive powers so interesting – because they foster creativity so very effectively.

Obviously, this isn’t the most organized of posts, but I’m still pondering these things and I doubt that I’m going to come to any satisfying conclusions any time soon. I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on powers in general and the way that videogames use them, so if you have anything to share, please comment!

Some examples of types of passive powers and characters with them:
Telepathy/Telekinesis: The Martian Manhunter, Jean Gray, Professor X, Marvel Girl
Force Fields: The Invisible Woman, Violet Incredible
Borrowing/Mimicking: Rogue, Mimic, Synch
Superspeed: The Flash, Dash Incredible
Shapechanging/Stretching: The Martian Manhunter, Elongated Man, Mr. Fantastic, Elastigirl, The Wasp
Teleportation: Misfit, Spectre, Nightcrawler
Healing Factor: Wolverine, Spider-Man, Captain Marvel