A pokéwalk in the park
Mar 10th
Later this month, Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver — already out in Japan for about 6 months — will finally make their way to the west, with a North American release date of March 14 and a European release date of March 26. With them will come the Pokéwalker.
The Pokéwalker comes bundled with Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver
The Pokéwalker is essentially a pedometer which can communicate with your DS. The idea is that you “store” one of your pokémon in the Pokéwalker and then carry it with you when you’re out and about. The pedometer then measures how far you walk and how many steps you take, and makes your pokémon proportionally happier and more experienced.
I have to say, I’m in two minds over the whole idea. On the one hand, I’m definitely in favour of innovation and providing new ways for people to interact with their games, and this certainly delivers on that front. I also see the idea of encouraging people to lead more active lifestyles as being desirable, and if this manages to get people to walk more because they want to level up their pokémon then so much the better.
On the other hand, I’m a little bitter over the whole thing. I’m going to be in hospital on the European release date, having had surgery the day before. I’ll then be spending the next week in hospital followed by several weeks after that convalescing at my parents’ house, where I’ll have very limited mobility and will be spending most of my time in bed.
I’m planning for gaming to occupy a lot of my time in that period, and will probably include one of the new Pokémon games in my gaming diet. They hit just the right balance between being simple enough that I could play them while groggy, in pain, or doped on painkillers, while being complex enough that I won’t grow bored of them too quickly.
Needless to say, I won’t be using the Pokéwalker at all during this time.
Still, I consider myself on the privileged side of the line here. After a couple of months of recovery, I’ll be back to close to full mobility and will be able to use the Pokéwalker as intended. Not everyone will be able to. It’s a useless device to those with disabilities or illnesses which stop them from walking much or at all.
The naïve response to this is to say “you don’t have to use it!” and there’s certainly some truth to that. I’m sure it will be perfectly possible to play and enjoy Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver without using the Pokéwalker, and I’m planning on doing exactly that. What concerns me is the issue of game balance.
Is the game going to be balanced for use with the Pokéwalker, or without it? If the answer to this is “with” then people who can’t use the Pokéwalker — for whatever reason — are going to be left with an unbalanced game. Certainly it won’t be an unplayable one, but we’re going to have to work extra hard on levelling up our pokémon.
This is not something that’s new when it comes to the Pokémon games. Like many RPGs, they’ve always had an element of grind required for levelling up. I suspect the Pokéwalker is in response to that. Now instead of grinding, you can level up jiggypuff by going for a walk. Great! For those who have that option, anyway.
I worry that Nintendo and Game Freak might consider the problem “solved” with this addition. If people have the option of avoiding grind entirely by going out for a walk, why should they bother trying to minimise or avoid grind? In fact, if they want to make sure that there’s still a challenge even with the Pokéwalker, might they want to actually increase the grind involved instead?
I don’t know the answer to this question. I don’t know how the game developers are thinking about the issue. That’s why I remain in two minds over the whole thing.
Intersex Characters in Digital Devil Saga
Mar 9th
by guest contributor Katherine O’Kelly
Katherine O’Kelly is a gender egalitarian and science fiction novelist. She specializes in writing non-human protagonists to provide social commentary from the perspective of the “Other”. She’s particularly interested in creating media that validates male submission and female dominance.
(Contains character identity-related spoilers for the Digital Devil Saga games.)
The main party of Digital Devil Saga 1. The leads, Serph (white hair) and Sera (black hair), stand in the center.
Atlus’s Digital Devil Saga is an RPG set in a dog-eat-dog post-apocalyptic world where six rival tribes struggle to literally devour one another. Humans transform into monsters and cannibalize their foes, which they believe will allow them to reach Nirvana. The gameplay is quite challenging, a better choice for veteran gamers than those new to the RPG genre. But what pleased me most was that DDS2 has two intersex characters and I can’t think of another game that even has one.
We don’t see much of the mysterious Jenna Angel during the first game. She uses the female pronoun for herself and I assumed her androgynous features were just part of the Japanese art style. In DDS2, we learn that Angel is not only a brilliant lead scientist of the Karma Society, but she is also intersex. Refreshingly, her character doesn’t revolve around her intersex body. It’s only mentioned in passing that she donated both egg and sperm to scientific research, making her both father and mother of another major character. The qualities that do define her character are her scientific brilliance, powerful leadership, and determination to save the world on her own terms. In short, she’s treated like a real character instead of an exotic. She plays the role of antagonist in both games, but her motives are sincere and understandable. She is one of three factions who have different approaches to saving the world from destruction. In that regard, she’s just as “good” as the protagonists. She’s certainly not a two-dimensional mustache-twirler like so many other RPG villains.
Austere head scientist Jenna Angel in her white lab coat. Her demon form is a distinct duality of black and white, perhaps in reference to her intersex body or her role as antagonist with pure intentions.
The second intersex character is made, rather than born, so it would probably be more accurate to describe hir as androgyne. At the end of DDS2, the male protagonist, Serph, and the female lead, Sera, are fused into one dual-sex being by “God.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of Sera and Serph as separate characters at first. Like most Atlus games, Serph’s personality is pretty much a bland, errr, blank slate for players to insert themselves into, but he comes across as more sensitive and sympathetic than “tough guy.” Sera is more of a female stereotype–the woman who cries a lot, constantly needs rescuing, and whose demon form is pink and has frilly fins. Hmm. Not so great.
But when Serph is killed, Sera rises to the challenge of leading the party. She’s the only one in the group who can reverse demon transformation and communicate with “God.” Her role is not just that of a token being shuffled around, but an active role in deciding the fate of the world.
When these two characters fuse into one, I was already rolling my eyes, expecting the male protagonist to subsume his female counterpart and still look male. To my shock, the new dual-sex character looks more like Sera than Serph (the resulting person called “Seraph”) and is voiced by the female voice actor rather than male. I would have liked to see more of a combination of the two sexes, but if one character was to envelop the other, I was shocked and pleased to see that, for once, the woman ends up as the face of the two.
So if you’re an RPG fan who’s looking for a unique plot, strategic turn-based gameplay, and a kickass soundtrack, give this one a try. Be warned though: DDS1 ends abruptly and requires you to play DDS2 to make full sense of the story. I felt the investment of both games were well worth it, but be advised that DDS2 is out of print, and copies are a little expensive and hard to find.
Across the Divide – 3/8/10
Mar 8th
A variety of people of different skin colors, displayed around the earth.
Spike shows men everywhere “how to get their girlfriends into video games”. We think it’s pretty sexist to assume we need to play games where characters can’t die.
WoW.com highlights a World of Warcraft UI that is accessible for players who are sight-impaired.
Amy at the Metaverse Mod Squad talks about discrimination and sexism in the virtual workplace.
Tish Tosh Tesh gives us a glimpse at daily life in the male-dominated game industry.
A U.S. District Court has dismissed a case against Sony in which a visually impaired player claimed that Everquest violated the American Disabilities Act.
Some interesting numbers about casual gamers are released, the average casual gamer is a 43-year-old female.
Stanford did an avatar study that showed sexualized avatars increase rape myth acceptance in players.
Inside Social Games takes a peek at Emily’s Girl Talk, an iPhone game for “young women”.
Massively interviews the most influential women in MMO game development.
FragDolls write-up about the women to know in the game industry in 2010.
Adventures in Sex City is a sex education game that uses a “condom shield”.
Brad Gallaway writes about the lack of homosexuality in space games.
Bioware will not be fixing the SDTV “tiny text” issue, claiming it is unable to be fixed.
A Yale developed game teaches kids to avoid HIV, sex, and drugs.
The Looking for Group expo is coming to Minneapolis on June 25-27. I’m annoyed that “hot chicks walking around in elf costumes” is a selling point.
We Fly Spitfires talks about the ‘death of multicultural gaming’.
Gamers played through Zelda: Ocarina of Time with blindfolds to create a guide for their blind friend. (thanks to oliemoon for the link)
Melissa at GeekFeminism talks about sexual assault in text-based RPG gaming. (Trigger Warning)
Bad Company 2 Producer: Female Characters Not Worth the Cost
Mar 8th
No girls allowed! (Pictured: A screenshot from Bad Company 2. A soldier in brown fatigues and a helmet, holding an assault rifle, stands in the foreground. In the background, a brown battlefield with a brown building to the right and a brown tank in the far background to the left.)
Face, meet palm. On last week’s Kotaku podcast, Gordon Van Dyke, producer of recently-released Battlefield: Bad Company 2, attempted to explain why there aren’t any women in his game, but the reason isn’t anything female gamers haven’t heard before:
“When you actually put in female characters, typically you have to put in an entire new skeleton model and that entire new skeleton model adds an entire new level of animation and an entire new level of rigging. You basically double the amount of data and memory for soldiers that would need to go into your game.
“So it turns into one of those things that’s like: How much will putting something like this in give us, whether the rewards of putting something like this in [are worth it].
In short, technological limitations meant adding female characters would have cut into the engine’s ability to handle other things, such as the destructible environment, and the developers decided that destructible environments add more to the game than female characters would.
The story is rather ironic because BC2 was developed by DICE, the same studio behind Mirror’s Edge, whose producer described ME’s protagonist, Faith, as a deliberate attempt to improve the representation of women in games.
Van Dyke’s reasoning came across as a bad excuse to me, as well as others. GamingAngels.com’s Trina said, “I don’t buy Gordon Van Dyke’s reasoning since Halo & other titles have done it.” Plenty of shooters have female playable characters as well as female enemies, such as Mass Effect 1 & 2, Metal Gear Solid 4, and Left 4 Dead 1 & 2. Border House contributor Jadelyn said that “those excuses are just a way of saying women weren’t *important* enough for them to devote resources to.” Many of the problems of not having the technology or resources for female characters can be solved by planning for them in the first place, instead of considering them an extra feature that would be nice to implement but inevitably gets cut. KC quipped, “But we can’t afford teh wimminz! And those boob physics are just so hard to program!” Indeed, female characters aren’t that different from male ones, especially if they are in armor or uniforms.
But when it comes down to it, as a critic, I don’t really care whether there aren’t any female characters because the developer ran out of time or money, or there are technical limitations, or if they forgot, or if they are raging misogynists*. The result is the same: the developer has created a universe without women in it, and I’m going to criticize that.
What also bothers me is the framing of the article, which posits innovation and inclusion as mutually exclusive, that focusing on representing women in games is not as important as, if not a barrier to, innovative gameplay. For example:
Imagine the gameplay implications of Pac-Man being able to bash through a wall to escape Inky, Blinky or Clyde. It would certainly have had more profound impact on how Pac-Man played than adding a bow to Pac-Man’s “head” and calling him “Ms. Pac-Man,” right?
Wow, way to completely undercut the achievements of a feminist icon! But seriously, it’s entirely possible to innovate without doing it at the expense of women. In addition, that sentence also implies that innovation is always more important than being inclusive to women. More important to men, perhaps. But men aren’t the only gamers, and they’re not the only gamers that matter, either. At this point in the gaming world, inclusion is still a deeply important issue for many female gamers since, for the most part, we aren’t included. The idea that interesting gameplay is worth getting rid of female characters is a privileged perspective, one that doesn’t completely understand what it is like to participate in a culture that routinely excludes you, or how important and meaningful those few female characters that do exist are.
The post ends with:
Do female characters need to be put in virtual combat? Or, more to the point, are they more important than crumbling walls?
Women: less important than walls. Ouch. Happy International Women’s Day, everyone!
* I care as a consumer what the reason is, because obviously I wouldn’t buy any games from raging misogynists, but when criticizing a game, the reason doesn’t matter.
Change to xbox live code of conduct
Mar 5th
Photo of a rainbow flag with the sun shining through it.
Members of the Xbox LIVE community received an open letter today. It read as follows:
A Letter from Marc Whitten: Update to Xbox LIVE Code of Conduct
Published March 5, 2010
Dear Xbox LIVE members,
Since the beginning, Microsoft has made an investment in the security and safety of Xbox LIVE and created tools and monitoring practices to ensure it is a fun and welcoming entertainment experience for people of all races, nationalities, religions and sexual orientations. And thanks to this investment and the enthusiasm of community members like you, we’re proud to be the strongest and most diverse online community of its kind at 23 million.
The Xbox LIVE Terms of Use and Code of Conduct are designed to create a place where people can safely enjoy all of the ways to interact on our service, be it online multiplayer gaming, photo sharing, Netflix parties, or social games such as 1 vs 100, without fear of discrimination or harassment. As the service evolves and our customers provide us with feedback, these rules evolve to incorporate new features or changes in how people wish to interact.
With that in mind, I’d like to announce an update to the Xbox LIVE Terms of Use and Code of Conduct which will allow our members to more freely express their race, nationality, religion and sexual orientation in Gamertags and profiles. Under our previous policy, some of these expressions of self-identification were not allowed in Gamertags or profiles to prevent the use of these terms as insults or slurs. However we have since heard feedback from our customers that while the spirit of this approach was genuine, it inadvertently excluded a part of our Xbox LIVE community. This update also comes hand-in-hand with increased stringency and enforcement to prevent the misuse of these terms.
I truly believe that our diversity is what makes us strong: diversity in gaming and entertainment options, and diversity in the people that make up this amazing community. I look forward to seeing you on LIVE soon.
Jump in,
Marc Whitten
Gamertag – Notwen
www.twitter.com/notwen
This change comes after many customer protests to the Xbox LIVE policy. Back in February of 2009 there was a story of a user being banned for stating that she was a lesbian in her profile. While she experienced harassment at the hands of other Xbox LIVE users, she was then punished for declaring her truth and her life to the world. While this was not the first instance of a user being banned for self-identifying as LGBTQ, this instance was widely publicized. GLAAD and other blogs quickly took note of this incident and made their outrage known.
It is wonderful to see the Xbox LIVE finally allow people to include their sexual orientation in their profiles. Acceptance and understanding begins with awareness. It is wonderful to see sexual orientation handled as just another facet of a person. It should not be treated as a negative thing that needs to be hidden. It is just one descriptor of the individual, such as height or eye color. This should have been how it worked at the very beginning, but it is still good to see them acknowledge the problem and fix the policy. Admitting a mistake is not always easy.
The question now becomes, how will Xbox LIVE handle new harassment cases of self identified LGBTQ players? Perhaps this letter signals a turning point for Xbox LIVE. I am hopeful that this means they will not look look away from harassment of LGBTQ players and the use of homophobic and transphobic slurs. I look forward to seeing what this will mean for the community over time.
Violence and maturity
Mar 5th
Have you noticed the amount of violence in mainstream culture nowadays? Something that caught my attention was comic books. I remember less than a decade ago Wolverine being this guy in yellow and blue costume. I bought recently an X-Men comic book and now he’s wearing a sort of white vest and trousers. But that’s not just what has changed. Now there’s blood, no more big pow onomatopoeias. Now the backgrounds are dark. I guess they want to take a realistic route.
A screenshot of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It shows the hero jumping in our direction with his big metal claws. No more yellow costumes for the mutant. Now he wears a white vest and breaks enemies in two for the ultimate mature experience
That’s the new trend, no more colourful yellow costume for Wolverine. That’s in films and games as well. How many games now have dark background and lots of grotesque images of violence? Even the silliest of the beat ‘em ups (such as X-Men Origins: Wolverine) can have that. That wouldn’t be a problem if it didn’t come with a new ridiculous prejudice against games that don’t go that way, that are colourful and have no blood. They get the label “infantile”.
So, in this logic, the mature games have violence. Yes, my dear, they’re rated M by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) for a reason. If they’re rated E, they’re for children. If you play games rated E, you’re a wussy little girl. Culturally, violence is a manly thing, so it’s a door open for more misogyny in videogames. Oh no.
Funny thing, I don’t remember Donkey Kong Country and Sonic the Hedgehog being called infantile, nor the original Banjo-Kazooie, and they’re all rated E with some cute animals as protagonists. I don’t remember Streets of Rage, Final Fight, Golden Axe, Altered Beast and Double Dragon having lots of blood, no one called them infantile either. They’ve even made a new version of Golden Axe rated M, but that didn’t receive good reviews. So is this new version more mature than the original? Is the first Ninja Gaiden from the 80’s childish in comparison to the blood-filled newest versions?
A screenshot of Super Mario Galaxy. It shows Mario jumping his way to get purple coins. The yellow squares flip, the green ones disappear and the dark matter means instant death. You know, since this game is colourful and rated E, any child can get the 100 purple coins without dying once. It’s easy, it’s for kids!
Seriously, how does grotesque violence improve a game like X-Men Origins: Wolverine? It’s a beat ‘em up, so just press buttons and kill bad guys. I was honestly grossed out by some images when I played this game in the Xbox 360. I don’t understand why is there such a need for this, specially when the film the game is based on is rated for teens.
Violence is part of the style of some games. What would become of Grand Theft Auto, No More Heroes, Madworld, Resident Evil and Mortal Kombat without blood? But does that mean most action games that come out these days need to show violence? If Streets of Rage, Final Fight and Altered Beast were release this year, would they be bloodfests? Do we need all these violent images in order to have fun with games? There was a time Call of Duty was rated T for teen and no one cared. Please stop the prejudice against blood-free games!
Game difficulty settings
Mar 4th
Demon's Souls Storm King Battle. Pictures a player character on the lower right with a large flying manta ray type creature, The Storm King, taking up most of the picture.
Some video games are known for their brutal difficulty. Roguelike games often reward death by having the player lose all experience and items. Atlus’ recent game Demon’s Souls had death mean the player went back to the start of a level, lost all of their accumulated experience (in the form of souls), and had every enemy reappear. If the player’s character could not make it back to the location of their demise to recollect their lost souls/experience in one attempt it would be lost forever. On the other hand there are games with numerous difficulty levels. Players can choose Easy, Medium, or Hard or any variation of such in many recent games including Mass Effect, Dragon Age: Origins, Bioshock, Heavy Rain and Bayonetta. These steps in difficulty level make games accessible to a larger number of players.
Optimistic about Final Fantasy XIII
Mar 1st
Lightening wearing a white sleeveless jacket, shirt green skirt, and a gun-blade. She looks to her right.
I have been a Final Fantasy fangirl for about ten years. It’s the only game series I’ve continued to buy on its release date, although I can no longer keep up with the spin-offs and direct sequels. The latest game, Final Fantasy XIII, comes out in a little over a week. What’s got me especially excited? The protagonist is finally a woman for the first time since FFVI’s Terra in 1994. (Excluding spin-offs!)
I’ve avoided spoilers and reviews of FFXIII, I suspect the cast of FFXIII will fall into some of the archetypes we’ve seen in earlier games with a broody, emo protagonist (Cloud, Squall), whiney doofus (Tidus, Vaan), the bubbly teenage girl (like Yuffie and Rikku), and bad-ass mysterious side-kick (Auron, Paine).
Lightning, like the rest of FFXIII cast, is dressed in the typical over-the-top anime attire, but as women’s outfits go, hers does not especially scream “eye-candy.” My only criticism is that her bare legs don’t look muscular enough to me for someone with abilities, but overall I can’t wait to play her. I’ll finally get to be a protagonist who I have gender in common with. This means a lot to me because Lightning has rejuvenated my excitement about a series that was starting to seem same-old to me. Although I still enjoy the gameplay, the plots don’t amaze me like they used to. I don’t know if it’s because I started playing when I was a 15 year old and I’m now a jaded 25 year old, or if the quality of storytelling has gone downhill. But I’m optimistic that FFXIII will do something new, beginning with taking women seriously enough that epic RPGs no longer need to revolve around teenage men.
Madison Paige Does Pull Triggers
Mar 1st
Madison Paige, the female protagonist of Heavy Rain, stares off to the upper left. She is a hazel-eyed caucasian female with short, cropped brown hair. Rain droplets cover the left side of her face.
(Warnings: trigger for rape, sexual assault, and spoilers for Heavy Rain)
Heavy Rain’s Madison Paige has had some eyebrow-raising marketing use. There has been much talk of a strip scene that occurs in the game. Then there’s this past year’s videogame females in Playboy edition, which includes her.
Among the primary problems with these images is the context in which they are given. The images used for Playboy look to be the exact same ones you can encounter in game, but they are plucked out of the context of the game and placed in a magazine known for showing nude women for the pleasure of men. Therefore, I frowned at the company’s use of her image, but withheld judgment on the game itself until I could play it.
On the one hand, before starting the game, I was glad that there was the inclusion of being able to play a female character, in a roster that looks fairly typical from a media standpoint, even if it escapes the videogame demographic of younger males. On the other, I was very nervous about how she would fit into the game’s plot. Any further thoughts below this paragraph are rife with spoilers and triggers, I emphasize the latter point more than the former:
BioWare Adds Women’s Sizes to Online Store
Feb 27th
Many women gamers are in a pickle when it comes to wearing branded apparel of their favourite games. The majority of times, licensed clothing is not available in women’s sizes, and whilst men’s t-shirts can fit many women, a lot of women prefer the cut of clothing that is specifically targeted to women. I would like to purchase more gamer clothing, but men’s sizes simply don’t work for me, for the most part.
Female models (neck down to waist) wearing shirts from BioWare games.
Dragon Age and Mass Effect fans looking for women’s sizes can rejoice, as BioWare have announced that, due to popular demand, they will soon be stocking shirts sized for women in their online store. A closer look at the BioWare store indicates that only a few designs will be available in women’s sizes, which is unfortunate as I’d totally rock the Olive Dragon Age Griffon Tee if it were actually available in my size. Another thing I noticed is that women’s sized t-shirts are the same price as men’s sized t-shirts, which is nice. I’m used to having to pay more for a woman’s version of a t-shirt design offered in men’s sizes. Having said that, the price of their t-shirts are a little high, in my opinion. Sizes for women range from Small to Extra Extra Large. It’s notable that they provide women’s sizes in Extra Large and Extra Extra Large, because more often than not, when a gamer shirt does come in women’s sizes, they don’t offer a full range of sizes beyond Large.
You can pre-order your shirt at the BioWare store and they’ll start shipping on March 2.
[Via GreyWardens.com]
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